What to think about when picking parts for a NAS

[jde3]

I've run ZFS on as little as 512MB with a single core at 1.8gz

 

Did it run well? No not really but it ran and other than being a little sluggish was ok. The only thing that happens if you don't give it enough resources is it takes a performance hit.. ZFS does a lot of work in the background.. most of that is hidden because your CPU and ram are so much faster than your disks you never see it and ZFS operates as a rather snappy file system most of the time.. (when you stop and realize that it's doing a pass over the data for every iop it's actually insanely fast) However.. when it can't leverage the other areas of the system it starts to slow down.. this isn't too terrible.. but it's noticeable.

 

In my opinion the data integrity, ease of use, and general compatibility with the world at large (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac, Solaris etc etc ).. even if you are limited on resources... make it worth it.

[Electronics Wizardy]

On 4/26/2018 at 3:57 PM, CyberFern0 said:

So I need a powerful CPU for ZFS?

 

Jezz I was thinking that I could get by with a Pentium G4500.

Why go ryzen? Compared to intel its higher power, has worse compatitility with things like freeBSD, and slower in most files shareing tasks as those are single threaded.

 

On 4/26/2018 at 1:58 PM, Streetguru said:

ZFS's features/security uses RAM to do it's magic.

What do you mean take them out? Not needed at all unless a drive dies.

ZFS really don't need much ram, 4gb is fine. Unless your running dedup or something else crazy, the ram is just used as a read cache, so its not needed at all, and all filesystems do this.

 

 

[jde3]

59 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Why go ryzen? Compared to intel its higher power, has worse compatitility with things like freeBSD, and slower in most files shareing tasks as those are single threaded.

 

Your right on a lot of what your saying here but only thing I can think of why you might want a Ryzen chip is you might want the high core count for doing lots of VM's or a video encoding system. FreeBSD isn't incompatible with Ryzen. (there may be a sysctl flag you need to set here or there tho.. the same isn't untrue for many intel chips.) You also need a CPU firmware loader on FreeBSD currently for intel for Meltdown patches. AMD doesn't need that. (this has been included on freenas/pfsense/nas4free I'm pretty sure but not vanilla freebsd, the fix is from ports and they won't include a port in base till it's tested I think is the issue here, it also downloads code from intel from the internet and runs it.. thats sorta sketchy.. but is what it is. All the other OS's did it without you even knowing.. least FreeBSD said.. hea.. wait a minute is this wise?)

 

Regardless being as unbiased as I can.. both CPU's have issues and both are good and have uses.

[Streetguru]

2 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Compared to intel its higher power,

If you mean the atom chips maybe sure, but currently the Ryzen 8 core draws as much power as intel's 6 core chips.

And you need a refrigerator to keep the 18 core cooled if you overclock it.

[Electronics Wizardy]

15 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

If you mean the atom chips maybe sure, but currently the Ryzen 8 core draws as much power as intel's 6 core chips.

And you need a refrigerator to keep the 18 core cooled if you overclock it.

Idle power is a good amount lower on the intel chips, and if you don't run the high clocked parts there more efficent. Ryzen is efficent as it can't clock as high.

Look here https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i5_8400/16.html

 

 

[Streetguru]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Idle power is a good amount lower on the intel chips, and if you don't run the high clocked parts there more efficent. Ryzen is efficent as it can't clock as high.

Look here https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i5_8400/16.html

 

 

There's no major differences there? aside from the i7 7700K and R7 1700 being equal in power draw during prime95

[jde3]

Generally.. for decades or longer Intel was better here.. (but they were better in everything too just about since the Athalon XP/64)  That's pretty impressive if that's true because Ryzen + is supposed to be even better here.

 

Honestly this really doesn't matter much for home use though. If you want power efficiency get an ARM chip.