Is the E3-1231 V3 a "worth the money" CPU for a NAS

[InspectorNinja]

Now I dont plan to use a NAS as JUST media storage, but was more looking into the CPU for the sake of having it for future upgrades to say a normal server if I wanted to host my own content and such. Cause Im always looking into cheaper equivalents if possible. And if it is a worthwhile purchase both now and to have in the future, are there any consumer mini-itx boards that would support ECC memory?

[manikyath]

well, the xeon is worth it if you're gonna be using its performance.

 

thats basicly an i7 4770 (off the top of my head thats the 4c/ht xeon) at a slightly lower clock and at reduced voltage.

(less heat, less energy usage)

 

if its just for storage, i really suggest looking into the asrock boards with embedded atoms. some of them have hardware management options that'll make your life a whole lot easier.

[InspectorNinja]

That is a good point, wondering though, cause I was going to use FreeNAS, is that the same for any plugins? Cause looking at it I could just get another G3258 (have one running my LAN PC) and a cheap H97 if all I need is a hefty amount of RAM.

[Mayaa]

It's way overkill if you are only doing file transfer tasks.

It could do work at transcoding for plex though.

[79wjd]

12 hours ago, InspectorNinja said:

That is a good point, wondering though, cause I was going to use FreeNAS, is that the same for any plugins? Cause looking at it I could just get another G3258 (have one running my LAN PC) and a cheap H97 if all I need is a hefty amount of RAM.

It depends on the plugins. Take plex for example, a pentium can handle two-ish transcoded 1080p streams, an i3 can handle about four, and a 1231v3 can handle about 8. Now if you're running other demanding plugins then all those numbers are going to go down. So it really depends on the use case. With that said, if there is going to be any important data on the server that you care about then I would want to use ECC memory, which means an h97 board won't work and you'll need to go with a c222, c224, or c226 chipset board.

 

At that point I would honestly probably go skylake just for the higher maximum memory capacity (64 vs 32gb), but keep in mind skylake would require an ssd or satadom for a boot drive as usb won't work. 

 

[dalekphalm]

15 hours ago, manikyath said:

well, the xeon is worth it if you're gonna be using its performance.

 

thats basicly an i7 4770 (off the top of my head thats the 4c/ht xeon) at a slightly lower clock and at reduced voltage.

(less heat, less energy usage)

 

if its just for storage, i really suggest looking into the asrock boards with embedded atoms. some of them have hardware management options that'll make your life a whole lot easier.

I'd love to pick up the ASRock C2750D4I (Octa-core version) for a future FreeNAS/Linux ZFS build, but the damn things are nearly $600 CAD in Canada (NCIX has them for $555, Newegg.ca for $569 regular - on sale for $509). I've never been able to find them for cheaper.

 

For $600 CAD, you can get a pretty well get a Xeon E3-1230 (Hard to find the older versions in Canada - v5 seems to be the most readily available) + a cheaper motherboard. That'd end up being quite a bit more powerful than an 8-Core Avoton Atom CPU.

[Mikensan]

If you have two parity or more drives then you'll want that faster cpu. I'm running a g1610 celeron with a single parity gets 400-5000mbytes per second, my 2 parity vdev gets 80mbps.

[dalekphalm]

6 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

If you have two parity or more drives then you'll want that faster cpu. I'm running a g1610 celeron with a single parity gets 400-5000mbytes per second, my 2 parity vdev gets 80mbps.

Do you mean your second vdev gets 80mbytes per second?

 

I'm sure that's what you meant, but there's always a lot of confusion on the forum when people write "mb" when they should have written "MB", etc.

 

Are both vdevs using identical drive models? There's a lot of variables to account for increase/decrease in performance.

[Mikensan]

3 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Do you mean your second vdev gets 80mbytes per second?

 

I'm sure that's what you meant, but there's always a lot of confusion on the forum when people write "mb" when they should have written "MB", etc.

 

Are both vdevs using identical drive models? There's a lot of variables to account for increase/decrease in performance.

Yup and I meant 500 and not 5000 lol. On my phone and fighting autocorrect. Same series/manf, different sizes. Raidz1 5x 4TB, raidz2 3x 4tb. Second vdev is just a backup of select datasets from the first vdev. Both using an IBM flavored lsi card, m1510 iirc. The little celeron is doing all it can lol.

[dalekphalm]

16 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

Yup and I meant 500 and not 5000 lol. On my phone and fighting autocorrect. Same series/manf, different sizes. Raidz1 5x 4TB, raidz2 3x 4tb. Second vdev is just a backup of select datasets from the first vdev. Both using an IBM flavored lsi card, m1510 iirc. The little celeron is doing all it can lol.

The extra parity writing plus having less total drives in the RAIDZ2 might account for SOME performance loss vs the RAIDZ1, but that's a pretty big difference. Curious. Though it makes sense that the rest of the performance loss is due to the CPU, since parity calculations can get CPU intensive.

[79wjd]

2 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

I'd love to pick up the ASRock C2750D4I (Octa-core version) for a future FreeNAS/Linux ZFS build, but the damn things are nearly $600 CAD in Canada (NCIX has them for $555, Newegg.ca for $569 regular - on sale for $509). I've never been able to find them for cheaper.

 

For $600 CAD, you can get a pretty well get a Xeon E3-1230 (Hard to find the older versions in Canada - v5 seems to be the most readily available) + a cheaper motherboard. That'd end up being quite a bit more powerful than an 8-Core Avoton Atom CPU.

The atom embedded solutions have a very niche market. For example, they're not a great choice if plex is something you want to be running as an i3 is usually better (although what's going on in the background will also play a role in this).

1 hour ago, Mikensan said:

If you have two parity or more drives then you'll want that faster cpu. I'm running a g1610 celeron with a single parity gets 400-5000mbytes per second, my 2 parity vdev gets 80mbps.

As @dalekphalm said, there's probably something else going on. The cpu shouldn't cause that much of a bottleneck.