Nas cpu

[SuperCookie78]

i'm planing my first nas build. its going to have 4 1tb drives in raid 10. I am planing on using unRaid. what cpu should i use? i was looking at some older g34 opterons because they are super cheap on ebay (not the 16 core). or should i go with an older xeon. or a newer but still use celeron?

[Thermosman]

9 minutes ago, SuperCookie78 said:

i'm planing my first nas build. its going to have 4 1tb drives in raid 10. I am planing on using unRaid. what cpu should i use? i was looking at some older g34 opterons because they are super cheap on ebay (not the 16 core). or should i go with an older xeon. or a newer but still use celeron?

What is your budget?

[heimdali]

It depends on what you can find at what price because you´ll also need a board to put the CPU into.  It can be worthwhile trying to get board and CPU in a bundle and to seach on ebay for "miniserver".  Look at used servers because it can be cheaper to get one than buying all the parts.  Just don´t expect to be able to get things quiet in a 1U case with reasonable effort.

 

I´d try to get a Xeon and ECC RAM.  Which one probably doesn´t matter other than for power consumption.

 

[CJKDesign]

IT will all depend on your budget, we use Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 v6 in our NAS servers and they work perfect. 1u case is rather noisy though, or at least our 1u setup's are rather noisy

[heimdali]

23 minutes ago, CJKDesign said:

IT will all depend on your budget, we use Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 v6 in our NAS servers and they work perfect. 1u case is rather noisy though, or at least our 1u setup's are rather noisy

Well, you probably don´t get around water cooling if you want a 1U case to be quiet, but there isn´t room for a big radiator in a 1U case, and using water cooling for a server makes you worry about when the cooling fails.  The only way that probably works is cutting a hole into the cover of the case and putting a large fan on it so it blows air over the heatsink --- but when you do that, you can as well use a quiet CPU cooler and let it stick out the top, which likely provides more cooling.  Dynatron even makes an AIO water cooler that fits 1U cases, but I don´t know if that is quiet.

 

I ended up getting a decent case.  The used 1U servers I bought were a steal off ebay; if I was to sell the extra parts, I would have the E3-1230 V2, board and 16GB ECC RAM for free or even get some money out of it if I´d sell the heatsinks, too.  Another plus is that I could be entirely sure that CPU, board and RAM definitely work together before buying.

 

[CJKDesign]

6 minutes ago, heimdali said:

Well, you probably don´t get around water cooling if you want a 1U case to be quiet, but there isn´t room for a big radiator in a 1U case, and using water cooling for a server makes you worry about when the cooling fails.  The only way that probably works is cutting a hole into the cover of the case and putting a large fan on it so it blows air over the heatsink --- but when you do that, you can as well use a quiet CPU cooler and let it stick out the top, which likely provides more cooling.  Dynatron even makes an AIO water cooler that fits 1U cases, but I don´t know if that is quiet.

 

I ended up getting a decent case.  The used 1U servers I bought were a steal off ebay; if I was to sell the extra parts, I would have the E3-1230 V2, board and 16GB ECC RAM for free or even get some money out of it if I´d sell the heatsinks, too.  Another plus is that I do know that CPU, board and RAM definitely work together before buying.

 

Luckily noise is not much of an issue for us as its all stored at our Datacenter but I agree with what you say. There are some really good second hand options, we just have the opportunity to buy new so we went with those CPU's with 32GB ECC ram, its not the best but it performs well and does the Job, although I am sure there are some much cheaper options out there, and second hand is a good option, although personally if you are going to use it for a business purpose I would rather go for new hardware.

[NelizMastr]

What's your budget and what is the purpose of this NAS?

 

I'm assuming you're going to do more than raw storage, since RAID10 isn't the best idea if you want a lot of capacity. Performance is pretty great, though.

 

If all you do is store files, then any CPU will do. My bet would be a s1151 Celeron. You could also consider, although older, a HPE MicroServer Gen8. About $200-ish for the base Celeron model with 4GB RAM and it'll take 4 SATA drives on its onboard b120i RAID controller. Quiet and efficient little machine.

[heimdali]

Just now, CJKDesign said:

Luckily noise is not much of an issue for us as its all stored at our Datacenter but I agree with what you say. There are some really good second hand options, we just have the opportunity to buy new so we went with those CPU's with 32GB ECC ram, its not the best but it performs well and does the Job, although I am sure there are some much cheaper options out there, and second hand is a good option, although personally if you are going to use it for a business purpose I would rather go for new hardware.

Hm, have you had used hardware fail because it was used hardware?  Buying new costs about 20 times as much, and (depending on what you´re doing) I don´t see the new stuff yielding that much difference in performance.  The chance of failure /may/ be lower, but OTOH, when you get a server that has been running for a couple years, there´s no reason to assume that it would suddenly quit because the ones that did have already been sorted out.  Thus, you can happily buy just the performance you need and then some in reserve, for 1/20 of the price, and if potential failure is an important enough factor, you can buy spare machines that either sit on a shelf until needed or are set up for automatic failover.  I would think that decreases the chances of failure more than buying new.

 

[heimdali]

9 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

What's your budget and what is the purpose of this NAS?

 

I'm assuming you're going to do more than raw storage, since RAID10 isn't the best idea if you want a lot of capacity. Performance is pretty great, though.

 

If all you do is store files, then any CPU will do. My bet would be a s1151 Celeron. You could also consider, although older, a HPE MicroServer Gen8. About $200-ish for the base Celeron model with 4GB RAM and it'll take 4 SATA drives on its onboard b120i RAID controller. Quiet and efficient little machine.

Right, it can be a very good and quiet choice.

 

The problem with those is that it is difficult to extend them, they don´t exactly fit into a rack, and I wouldn´t go for only 4GB.  When you do that, prices go up, and you can look for more versatile options.  It all depends on what you want.

 

[SuperCookie78]

1 hour ago, Thermosman said:

What is your budget?

as low as possible. i already have a haswell celeron, but i'm not sure if thats enough for unraid. i'm looking at an opteron 4122 at the moment. its $3.99 which is supercheap but mobos that aren't for auction are $200+. i'm just looking for sugestions. and i would like to know what unraid needs for a small nas

[NelizMastr]

32 minutes ago, SuperCookie78 said:

as low as possible. i already have a haswell celeron, but i'm not sure if thats enough for unraid. i'm looking at an opteron 4122 at the moment. its $3.99 which is supercheap but mobos that aren't for auction are $200+. i'm just looking for sugestions. and i would like to know what unraid needs for a small nas

Why UnRAID? You are willing to pay $59 for UnRAID but as little as possible for the hardware. Doesn't make much sense in a world of FreeNAS and Xpenology

 

Also, that opteron is only 10% faster than the entry level G1820 Celeron on the Haswell platform, yet consumes almost 3x the power with 3 times the cores. Don't bother. Look up the passmark scores and you'll be amazed how much difference 4 years of Intel IPC improvements makes compared to the ancient K10 architecture of that Opteron from 2010.

 

53 minutes ago, heimdali said:

Right, it can be a very good and quiet choice.

 

The problem with those is that it is difficult to extend them, they don´t exactly fit into a rack, and I wouldn´t go for only 4GB.  When you do that, prices go up, and you can look for more versatile options.  It all depends on what you want.

 

I highly doubt this NAS will live in a rack. Only enterprise NAS boxes do, and for basic storage, not a lot of RAM is needed. Heck, my Synology NAS has 512MB and it runs a VPN server, media server, iTunes server, download server etc. without a hitch

[heimdali]

21 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

I highly doubt this NAS will live in a rack. Only enterprise NAS boxes do, and for basic storage, not a lot of RAM is needed. Heck, my Synology NAS has 512MB and it runs a VPN server, media server, iTunes server, download server etc. without a hitch

Potentially wanting to put a server into a rack is not an unusual consideration, and you don´t need an enterprise NAS for that.  Even for basic storage, RAM is useful because it can be used as cache.  It can also be used for other things one might want to do sooner or later or not at all, so it is not an unusual consideration either.  These are merely things that can be considered and may rule out an HP microserver or not.  As I said, it all depends on what one wants.

 

[SuperCookie78]

1 hour ago, NelizMastr said:

Why UnRAID? You are willing to pay $59 for UnRAID but as little as possible for the hardware. Doesn't make much sense in a world of FreeNAS and Xpenology

 

Also, that opteron is only 10% faster than the entry level G1820 Celeron on the Haswell platform, yet consumes almost 3x the power with 3 times the cores. Don't bother. Look up the passmark scores and you'll be amazed how much difference 4 years of Intel IPC improvements makes compared to the ancient K10 architecture of that Opteron from 2010.

 

I highly doubt this NAS will live in a rack. Only enterprise NAS boxes do, and for basic storage, not a lot of RAM is needed. Heck, my Synology NAS has 512MB and it runs a VPN server, media server, iTunes server, download server etc. without a hitch

thats what i started thinking about. i think im go with the celeron. an i want unraid because i perfer the interface compared to freenas