Would I be insane to use a Core i5 for a NAS device?

tbessie · Post by **tbessie** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 10:24 pm

Hi all...

So I'm building a NAS for storing my home media library, and I want it to run reasonably cool and quietly. With 4 3.5" drives in a fann'd hot-swap drive unit I got, plus fans in the case I chose, it's not going to be super-quiet, but it'll do.

One thing I'm looking at is what motherboard and CPU to use; most people seem to be of the opinion that a homebuilt NAS should use the cheapest hardware possible, since it's not going to be used for Blu-Ray playback or other encoding/decoding task that will use the processor a lot.

However, all the I/O going on moving memory from place to place, from disk to disk, and over the network, will take SOME processing umph, at least. I am tempted to put in a Core i5 (Lynnfield) chip on, for example, this motherboard:

http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/m ... erview.htm

Does this seem absolutely insane to you? A waste of a reasonably powerful chip/mobo? Might get too hot in there without a lot of thought put to cooling?

The case I got doesn't have a lot of space in it for cooling, especially as the PSU will be sitting right next to the CPU (and I'll only be able to fit a low-profile cooler on it, then). But since I won't be taxing the CPU TOO much, it shouldn't matter, right?

Anyway, what do y'all think of this idea? Some folks seem to think that a NAS can benefit from a reasonably powerful, multi-core CPU.

- Tim

incorrect · Post by **incorrect** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 10:37 pm

yeah that's completely insane

you could run a 4-disk nas with a sempron 140 and never see cpu usage top 10%. you might tax it a bit if you were running strong full-file-system encryption with software raid or some other extravagance, but even then a sempron is overkill.

funklizard · Post by **funklizard** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 11:39 pm

Silly.

Even a low end (by modern standards) CPU is going to spend a lot of time waiting on the I/O subsystem even during heavy disc activity. If you want to provide additional processing power for I/O operations, a dedicated hardware RAID card is going to deliver a better ROI than a powerful CPU.

theycallmebruce · Post by **theycallmebruce** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 11:48 pm

Agreed, I don't think you will get any benefit from going with that expensive CPU if it is just going to be used as a NAS. Save your money.

If you have an older but serviceable CPU/motherboard lying around with enough SATA ports, you could consider using that.

If you want new hardware, go the Sempron option as suggested. You should be able to find a CPU/mobo combination for under US$100.

tbessie · Post by **tbessie** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 12:14 am

theycallmebruce wrote:Agreed, I don't think you will get any benefit from going with that expensive CPU if it is just going to be used as a NAS. Save your money.

If you have an older but serviceable CPU/motherboard lying around with enough SATA ports, you could consider using that.

If you want new hardware, go the Sempron option as suggested. You should be able to find a CPU/mobo combination for under US$100.

How would you feel about some of the lower-end Celeron's I find on Newegg? I tend to stick to Intel hardware... dunno why, just more familiar with it.

I was thinking of the lowest price dual-core Celeron. Around $70 - granted still not cheap, but I'd have a little overhead in case I wanted to do any computing on it eventually.

- Tim

Trav1s · Post by **Trav1s** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 6:39 am

I don't see processing power as a concern for you.

With that in mind any one of the dual core celeron e1x00 or Pentium e2x00 would work well. You might even consider the Celeron 420/430 single core would work fine and only set you back $40. It is a comparable processor to the single core AMD others have mentioned. The only downside I see is the 420/430/e1x00/xe2x00 don't have the software to throttle back when not under load.

All of that being said, if you are interested in the intel world the new e3200 is quite the processor for the money but seems to be overkill in my mind.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819116265

If you are interested in the single core Conroe-L 430 I have an extra one that I will sell for a fair price

(much cheaper than the AMD sempron price) Used less than 6 months and upgraded to a dual core. This is the actual model I have.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819116039

tbessie · Post by **tbessie** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 7:55 am

Trav1s wrote:I don't see processing power as a concern for you.

With that in mind any one of the dual core celeron e1x00 or Pentium e2x00 would work well. You might even consider the Celeron 420/430 single core would work fine and only set you back $40. It is a comparable processor to the single core AMD others have mentioned. The only downside I see is the 420/430/e1x00/xe2x00 don't have the software to throttle back when not under load.

All of that being said, if you are interested in the intel world the new e3200 is quite the processor for the money but seems to be overkill in my mind.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819116265

If you are interested in the single core Conroe-L 430 I have an extra one that I will sell for a fair price (much cheaper than the AMD sempron price) Used less than 6 months and upgraded to a dual core. This is the actual model I have.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819116039

Isn't "SpeedStep Technology (EIST)" supposed to throttle back the chip when not under load? Those Intel models you mention (or some of them) have that. I'm not edumacated about the AMD version of that kind of thing. Does it differ considerably?

Thanks for your offer to sell me a chip. I'm always unnaturally terrified of using used or preowned equipment, so I won't jump on that (though I'd trust most folks who post here), but I thank you again anyway!

- Tim

acorn · Post by **acorn** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 8:43 am

I built a NAS which has 5 x 1TB drives using OpenSolaris and ZFS. The CPU is a Pentium dual-core E5200, and it provides plenty of horsepower. Even when reading files from the NAS at 50M bytes/s, CPU utilization doesn't often go above 20 percent.

Since the CPU is for a NAS, which will likely be always on, support for SpeedStep or other technologies that reduce idle power consumption is important. I originally built my NAS with an AMD CPU, but it turns out that OpenSolaris doesn't support AMD's clock speed management technology on the lower end AMD CPU's.

You don't mention which OS you plan to use for your NAS, but that might influence your CPU decision.

Good luck with what should be a fun project.

-Scott

tbessie · Post by **tbessie** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 3:34 pm

acorn wrote:I built a NAS which has 5 x 1TB drives using OpenSolaris and ZFS. The CPU is a Pentium dual-core E5200, and it provides plenty of horsepower. Even when reading files from the NAS at 50M bytes/s, CPU utilization doesn't often go above 20 percent.

Since the CPU is for a NAS, which will likely be always on, support for SpeedStep or other technologies that reduce idle power consumption is important. I originally built my NAS with an AMD CPU, but it turns out that OpenSolaris doesn't support AMD's clock speed management technology on the lower end AMD CPU's.

You don't mention which OS you plan to use for your NAS, but that might influence your CPU decision.

Good luck with what should be a fun project.

-Scott

Hi Scott...

Well, I was thinking at first I'd use FreeNAS or similar, but since I really doubt I'll need RAID functionality and web-based volume management (I'll just ssh in and do what I need to do), I was going to install Ubuntu or other friendly Linux and use it as a simple Samba server.

Your idea of using OpenSolaris, however, might be better.

Why would you choose OpenSolaris over a Linux variant, by the way?

Finally, here's what I choose for my hardware. More expensive than I need, but still half the price I was GOING to pay using high-end hardware. I like my Nice Things.

Motherboard: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813121357

Processor: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819116265

PSU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817610002 (recommended as quietest by SPCR, though I generally like modular PSUs better)

Case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811112220

SATA Hot-Swap Unit (the 4-drive one): http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_s ... s35nsa.asp

I'll be putting in a 320gb notebook drive as my system drive (not that that will make it THAT might quieter), though I'd thought of making one of my exising 1TB drives (I've got 4) into the system drive and putting in a 2gb in the front.

Still unsure about the drive arrangement. I like super-fast booting times, like I have on my main computer with it's Velociraptor 300, but I don't want anything that noisy in this NAS.

- Tim

Meato · Post by **Meato** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 6:25 pm

You would be extremely hard pressed spend your money better than the component choices you've made. Quiet CPU heatsink and case fans and you're good to go.

acorn · Post by **acorn** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 6:37 pm

My main reasons to choose OpenSolaris for my NAS are centered on ZFS. ZFS provides software RAID, snapshots, and integration with iSCSI, NFS and CIFS. I have been pleased with the performance and manageability of ZFS.

Linux can do most of the things that OpenSolaris can, but for me Linux disk management, volume management, RAID, SMB and iSCSI components don't feel as integrated as they are in OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris definitely has its own issues, among them a much narrower range of supported hardware. With the Oracle acquisition of Sun it's not clear where support of OpenSolaris is going.

If you want to do more on your NAS than just file service, Linux will support a much greater range of software - things like the Firefly DAAP server, for instance. To be fair, many packages can be built for OpenSolaris, but you won't find as many pre-packaged applications as you will for Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.

I hope this helps.

-Scott

tbessie · Post by **tbessie** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 9:26 pm

Meato wrote:You would be extremely hard pressed spend your money better than the component choices you've made. Quiet CPU heatsink and case fans and you're good to go.

Thanks! I tried to find the best compromise of power and price.
The thing that bugs me is, no matter how hard you look, you'll never find anything that SOME number of people didn't say sucked, and some for good reason.

There are always lemons out there, so I hope I don't happen to get any of 'em.

- Tim

tbessie · Post by **tbessie** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 9:34 pm

acorn wrote:My main reasons to choose OpenSolaris for my NAS are centered on ZFS. ZFS provides software RAID, snapshots, and integration with iSCSI, NFS and CIFS. I have been pleased with the performance and manageability of ZFS.

Linux can do most of the things that OpenSolaris can, but for me Linux disk management, volume management, RAID, SMB and iSCSI components don't feel as integrated as they are in OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris definitely has its own issues, among them a much narrower range of supported hardware. With the Oracle acquisition of Sun it's not clear where support of OpenSolaris is going.

If you want to do more on your NAS than just file service, Linux will support a much greater range of software - things like the Firefly DAAP server, for instance. To be fair, many packages can be built for OpenSolaris, but you won't find as many pre-packaged applications as you will for Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.

I hope this helps.

-Scott

Thanks for all your suggestions and advice! I've heard good things about ZFS, though the IT guys at my current job have lots of nasty things to say about it (i.e. it sounded a good idea at the time, but ended up messing up a lot of things). And I've talked to people who thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.

I don't really plan on doing much more than this being a file server, though I want it to be fast, and I want everything onboard to work with whatever OS I install. I'll probably install OpenSolaris first, just to see if it works well. I can always install various OS's on the system drive for comparison.

I already have a home media server... in fact, I have:

1. Old Thinkpad X40 laptop - ubuntu on it, next to my bed, for browsing and email before bed or when I wake up

2. Thinkpad T400, fully tricked out, as my main work laptop and for most everything else I do

3. Antec P182 case with everything but the kitchen sink in it, quad-core chip; keep most of my important long-term files on it, use it if I need some heavy-duty computing power (eg. multiple OS's running in VMs, heavy compile cycles, lots of encoding/transcoding jobs, etc.).

4. An OrigenAE HTPC case with Blu-Ray drive and Bluetooth keyboard, attached to my TV and amp, for entertainment; also use it as my home media server (SqueezeCenter) for several Slim Devices gadgets I've got around the house.

5. 2 small SOHO NAS boxes (1 synology, 1 qnap) which I mean to replace with this NAS I'm building.

6. Current contract job Thinkpad T60. But that doesn't really count.

If everything were on at the same time, the room would heat up 20 degrees and you'd think you were on the deck of the Enterprise... well, not quite that bad. But I have more computing power than most of my friends.

Anyway, the quad-core powerhouse is what I use mostly for transcoding, and the HTPC for viewing/ripping. Just want something to put all those movies on that's fast and can stay up for long periods of time.

- Tim

tbessie · Post by **tbessie** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 10:35 pm

By the way - do you thyink the 430W power supply I got will be enough to power, at most, 5 3.5" drives and 1 2.5" drive? I *may* attach a raid card at some point, but besides that, the onboard video will hardly be used (it will run headless most of the time).

- Tim

Wibla · Post by **Wibla** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 3:44 am

Yes, should be plenty.

In comparison im running a Prescott Celeron 3GHz, 3ware controller , 12x1TB drives and a 250GB 2.5" sata drive off a corsair 520W..

tbessie · Post by **tbessie** » Thu Sep 24, 2009 10:53 pm

Wibla wrote:Yes, should be plenty.

In comparison im running a Prescott Celeron 3GHz, 3ware controller , 12x1TB drives and a 250GB 2.5" sata drive off a corsair 520W..

Yeah, sounds fine then. Thanks!

- Tim

yamahaSHO · Post by **yamahaSHO** » Tue Sep 29, 2009 7:24 am

I just put together a machine for WHS using mostly parts I had, but I did end up purchasing an E3200 and a cheap $25 video card and I have been happy thus far. The whole machine consists of the following:

- P180B w/ 3 Scythe SlipStreams running full speed (1,200 RPM)
- Asus P5Q-E
- E3200 (w/ passive Minja)
- 2GB of Mushkin DDR2 667Mhz
- Enermax Liberty 500w PSU
- 320GB HDD
- Samsung DVD/RW

During boot I think it hit 106w but sits around 60ish w during average use. I have 2 x 1TB and 2x 500GB drives I will be adding very soon and will monitor power usage changes then.

So far the E3200 has been great. Given that it is a file server/media server, the CPU pretty much is throttled back to a x6 multi and like 1v of power the entire time. I'm sure I could have built a lower power setup, however, I wanted to use parts I already had as well I do not know what I want to use the server for later. With a passive Minja and Arctic Ceramiq, the processor at about 32C and pretty much never budges. When I stress it with Prime95, it goes up to 43C.

In total with the cost of the CPU and video card, I spent all of $70. The server sits in a storage room in a closed off and filtered storage room in the basement, so it doesn't have to be super quiet as my sound solution is a wall with a door

tbessie · Post by **tbessie** » Wed Sep 30, 2009 10:47 am

yamahaSHO wrote:I just put together a machine for WHS using mostly parts I had, but I did end up purchasing an E3200 and a cheap $25 video card and I have been happy thus far. The whole machine consists of the following

* snipped *

Yeah, it wouldn't make so much a difference regarding noise if I had a place to PUT the damn thing. But everything has to be in my living room (apartment, can't put in new cabling, etc.).

I'd thought of putting it in a back room and making it available via wi-fi, but that would be a real damper on network performance, even at 802.11n.

- Tim

merlin · Post by **merlin** » Wed Sep 30, 2009 12:37 pm

Personally I'd say not insane at all. But I want to do the same thing. My goal is undervolted dual core westmere on a mini-itx board in a small boxy raid case with quad sata drives + ssd boot disk. I'm also extremely interested in ZFS with Opensolaris and iSCSI. That's really the paragon of software raid setups currently. I'd love to get info from you about it later when I actually have hardware setup for this project Acorn.
Honestly the main thing to remember is that the cpu is generally cheap. A $120 or so westmere cpu with extremely low power idle is going to kick ass for being energy efficient and yet you also can have massive computing power in case you want run something on the server. Remember the more time the cpu is idle, the better in this case.

I guess maybe I'm just not cost anal enough, but I don't like having any old non-efficient hardware at all. That all gets sold off to other people who need it more.

yuu · Post by **yuu** » Wed Sep 30, 2009 1:30 pm

With westmere the nortbridge moved to cpu but shrinked to 45nm, can't undervolt it, put aside that legacy floppy usb2 and pci legacy slots comm ports are still there to haunt you platform, PCH is only 5 watts, undervolted Cpu is 5W, oncpu-chipset is 10 watts, but psu efficiency will eat any advantage.

have a look at E3200, very efficient, 0.848V in idle and it remains there, only seen above 1V under heavy load, while overclocked to 3666 at default voltage, and it happends by enabling C4e option in bios. There is the northbridge power hog. you can undervolt it to 10 watts, run it at 0.85V or 0.95V.

meehawl · Post by **meehawl** » Wed Sep 30, 2009 7:44 pm

merlin wrote:I'm also extremely interested in ZFS with Opensolaris and iSCSI.

I used the Linux "appliance" OpenFiler (basically a customised rPath build that can be ruin on bare metal or virtualised) to build a software RAID5 NAS box with iSCSI, NFS, RAID-1 CF cards on an IDE adapter for boot/system devices, RAM for /tmp, and a USB drive for logging output. No ZFS. Used a Via C7 MB/CPU combo. Not CPU-limited even during parity rebuilds with simultaneous network I/O. Runs around 40 watts. Very quiet.

merlin · Post by **merlin** » Wed Sep 30, 2009 9:20 pm

meehawl wrote:
merlin wrote:I'm also extremely interested in ZFS with Opensolaris and iSCSI.
I used the Linux "appliance" OpenFiler (basically a customised rPath build that can be ruin on bare metal or virtualised) to build a software RAID5 NAS box with iSCSI, NFS, RAID-1 CF cards on an IDE adapter for boot/system devices, RAM for /tmp, and a USB drive for logging output. No ZFS. Used a Via C7 MB/CPU combo. Not CPU-limited even during parity rebuilds with simultaneous network I/O. Runs around 40 watts. Very quiet.

Interesting, but ZFS is actually a hugely important filesystem for me. Data integrity and fast raid transfer speeds are a major reason for it

Linux can't do ZFS and FreeBSD can't do iSCSI, that leaves opensolaris as the most likely choice.

wywywywy · Post by **wywywywy** » Thu Oct 01, 2009 12:22 am

My Windows Home Server machine uses an Atom...
The Intel D945GCLF2 board to be precise.

It also does a lot more than just serving files too.
And even an Atom is an overkill!
(Except for extracting archives.)

The i5 is definitely a waste of money and energy in this case.

coreyography · Post by **coreyography** » Tue Oct 06, 2009 7:26 pm

I'm looking at a dual core CPU (I assume an i5 is a quad core, don't know actually). The reason for it is that I want to do software RAID and disk encryption. The RAID I'm not worried about too much, as others have mentioned, but the encryption might be somewhat CPU-intensive.

I don't think normal file service taxes the CPU much because it's mostly DMA from the disk controller to the network card.

I also intend to run a home mail server on it, and maybe a VM/chroot/jail for I-need-to-look-something-up-quick-on-the-Net web surfing and such. I was thinking of an Athlon 240/245 at 45 watts, but I'll check out the i5 too

meehawl · Post by **meehawl** » Wed Oct 07, 2009 7:01 pm

coreyography wrote:I want to do software RAID and disk encryption.

I plugged it earlier, and I don't actually use it very much for that, but the Via C7's hardware encryption engine (SHA, AES, Montgomery Multiplier, RNG) is capable of some impressive encryption speedups with reduced CPU usage and ridiculously low power consumption if you use the right libraries. Intel's adding hardware AES into some of the new Arrandale CPUs due out early next year.

http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/speed-up ... ia-padlock

dm-crypt (256bit AES, cbc-essiv:sha256)

VIA Padlock dm-crypt benchmark

Without VIA Padlock support:

$ hdparm -tT /dev/mapper/hdc2_crypt
/dev/mapper/hdc2_crypt:
Timing cached reads: 448 MB in 2.00 seconds = 223.47 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 22 MB in 3.07 seconds = 7.17 MB/sec

With VIA Padlock support:

$ hdparm -tT /dev/mapper/hdc2_crypt
/dev/mapper/hdc2_crypt:
Timing cached reads: 502 MB in 2.00 seconds = 250.41 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 90 MB in 3.07 seconds = 29.36 MB/sec

The native speed of the SSD in the laptop is 31.01 MB/sec, so there is almost no performance penalty when using VIA Padlock.

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coreyography · Post by **coreyography** » Wed Oct 14, 2009 6:37 pm

I actually have a couple of Via C7 ITX boards. One's currently running my firewall, the other was to be a HTPC but really didn't have the horsepower for that (one of the reasons I didn't consider Via for the box I have in mind).

The onboard encryption hardware does work well, and is well-supported in some OSes (e.g., OpenBSD). But doing anything else on them bogs them pretty quickly. And neither of my ITX boards has more than 2 SATA ports.

Would I be insane to use a Core i5 for a NAS device?

Would I be insane to use a Core i5 for a NAS device?

Re: Would I be insane to use a Core i5 for a NAS device?

OpenFiler Does iSCSI

Re: OpenFiler Does iSCSI

Via Padlock Hardware Encryption

Re: Via Padlock Hardware Encryption