NAS Question

[Guest]

Do NASs benefit off of something like a Xeon, with 8 cores, or would it produce the same output as getting some cheap solution instead? I'm asking this because I want to know if it's worth it to buy a Xeon off of Amazon and make a NAS with it. 

[Enderman]

you dont need 8 cores for a nas

[Godlygamer23]

It can benefit if you have the other hardware to support it. It can be useful for Plex or Minecraft based things if you want your NAS to perform multiple duties.

[79wjd]

you dont need 8 cores for a nas

That depends on the use case. A 5960x would be great for transcoding 4k  

[Enderman]

That depends on the use case. A 5960x would be great for transcoding 4k

i dont see why a NAS would need to be transcoding anything

[79wjd]

i dont see why a NAS would need to be transcoding anything

if it's running plex; I run plex on my nas. 

[Mikensan]

Depends on what you expect out of your NAS. If you just want to share or backup files, and never go faster than 1gbps - no it barely matters. I run my NAS with a Celeron G1610 and can fully saturate the gigabit NIC. 

If you want encryption, at all, then it definitely matters. Xeons supports AES-NI which helps immensely. 

If you want to run virtual machines on the NAS, it definitely matters.

If you want 10gigabit speeds, it matters.

[KuJoe]

If you strictly want a NAS (i.e. just for storage) then any CPU will do, even an ARM based CPU is plenty. If you want to do anything intensive like video transcoding or a game server like @Godlygamer23 suggested then the more powerful the CPU (and more RAM) the better.

 

To give you an idea, my NAS (Synology DS115j) acts as my network storage, my file replication (like btsync, syncthing, OwnCloud, CrashPlan, etc...) for 3 computers, my IP camera control center (2x 1080p PoE cameras), my PXE server, a webserver (Apache + PHP + MySQL), photo album, music streaming server, and more and the CPU is only a 800MHz single core ARM CPU with 256MB of RAM (2GB swap) and the CPU only jumps to 100% when I'm using encryption (rsync mostly). Now of course I don't expect to do transcoding on this thing, but I do have a single core 1.6GHz ARM CPU in a server that can do it for low quality 480p videos.