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Nas processor ideas

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georgethei

New Around Here
Hello all,
I need some advice on what processor i should choose for a nas .
My main concern is that the processor will be most of the time in idle state. So power efficiency in this state is quite important.
But i also need it to be able to cope with zfs or btrfs on an aes encrypted drive (see *1) and at the same time handle the reencryption of the decrypted data before sneding it over the internet or lan. 10-20 MB/s is vrey good.
The candidates for this nasbox are(*2)
celeron d820- can't find much about this one
celeron g550- http://tweakers.net/productreview/67505/intel-celeron-g550-boxed.html it seems to do well enough in truecrypt. Assuming truecrypt will only get 66% of cpu bandwidth 132MB/s sounds great maybe a little to much even. In idle it chomps 32-35W.
celeron g1610- in specs it's pretty much the same as the g550 only with better power consumption (can't find benchmarks)
atom d525 – 67 MB/s in 100% load so if truecrypt receives only 66% cpu that's about 40MB/s. Not too bad i think and 35 W in idle http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pinetrail-atom-d525-nc98-525-lf,2716-7.html
atom d2550 – can't find proper benchmarks
amd e350 – it manages up to 45 MB/s in truecrypt but there is somthing odd, the intel d525 is worse so it might be a bottleneck?... http://techreport.com/review/20401/amd-e-350-fusion-apu-on-the-desktop/7 ( i would go for a 450 board but the only one i can find is much more expensive than my budget ). Just found another bencmark : http://www.pctreiber.net/2011/asrock-e350m1.html/6 scroll down to truecrypt benchmark . And the e350 also has a more powerful gpu than the d525 so gpu aided acceleration would be great ( just take a look at the crypto session here : http://www.sisoftware.net/?d=qa&f=cpu_amd_brazos&l=en&a= )



*1 I will use initially 2x1TB WD10EZEX, which will be turned on for about 1h a day and spinned up about 3-4 times a day( Just so we're clear the nas is supposed to be on 24/7 but with storage turned off). I intend to use zfs mirror raid - dont know the proper name - for these two. Next year i intend to add another 1TB drive and switch to raid5 in zfs mode.I will also use 2x8gb plain usb flash , not necesarily using zfs, but they will be striped. And backed up on a daily basis to the hdd partion/zfspool. Oh, and i will also have to use samba too
*2 if you have any configuration with the above cpus please also post a truecrypt benchmark result for aes please.

I'm open to alternatives and I would especially like to hear about any arm-based diy NASes out there. I would have given raspberry pi a try but word is up that 512MB ramis not enough for zfs ( a cluster of 3 rpi would be cool but i'm not sure about the power consumption ).

BTW my budget for the controller component of the nas (cpu+ mobo+ ram) is 105EUR

Regards
 
Last edited:
You didn't mention it, but since this is a DIY NAS, will your box be doing any other tasks? For instance, video encoding or transcoding? My first unRAID build (not ZFS, but good parity redundancy) was running an i3, and it could handle it's NAS business with ease as well as downloading, transcoding, etc.

The i3-2120T is a 35W processor, but may be overkill for your needs.
 
first of all, wow, i'm surprised someone actually replied. I was beginning to think that my post was either stupid or poorly documented or a duplicate ( i did search the threads ). I hope more people will contribute their knowledge/experience/ benchmarks so that a configuration that is eastern-europe-cheap,low power and can also do on-the-fly-AES + ZFS/btrfs+ encrypted connection can be realised ( see the budget in the 1stPost).

Hmm.. that i3 has the same clock freq as the g1610 ( and g540). Well i don't think it will doing transconding for now for the moment i will keep the nas in my office ( powerbill + i can deduce vat :) ). I need about 8-10MB/s between my office and my home and i don't think it will be the case . If i do take the nas home than maybe it might be the case. But my transcoding is not my main concern .
I think i will make the jump to the g2130 ( it's about 240-260 ron, 55 -60 EUR, 55 ron more than the g1610 i was eyeing ). Just in case i will ever want to do transcoding.
Snapraid seems like a good choice also i guess.It an ure appears once every 12 TB so says the wd ezex datasheet and i PROBABLY won't manage to reach 12 TB worth of writes on that drive . But zfs will definitely be used for the usb pendrives.
As for the mobo i was looking after a mini itx ga h61nd2v but it's a ltittle to expensive now with the cpu so i will proly be gettin a cheaper microatx. Will check back in about 10h to post some data about the mobos too.
Again i'm very eager to "hear" the forum's veterans opinions on this.Actually i would like to hear everybody's opinion an especially those opinions that are accompanied by some benchmarks
 
A little mistake i made: 720p average bitrate is 8-10Mbit/s which is about 1-1.2MB/s so maybe i will do some transcoding sooner than i thought.
 
I would also go with an i3 i am running one on an ubuntu server with raid 5 and 8 gig of ram max power is 50 watts and i get transfer speeds in the 100MB/s range read and write drag and drop from my client desktop dd is much higher. After upgrading my laptop HD because it would only read and write at 85MB/s from my desktop .. the processer is hardly working and runs nice and cool. I have samba set up but i work in a linux enviroment so i just use NFS off my raid formated to EXT4.
software raid 5 reads @ 197MB/s writes 260MB/s with 3 WD Reds 1.5 TB each
iperf gives me about 750Mbits/sec but i have a few procceses running.

after writing this i relize i could have went with a cheaper procceser and mobo to just do fileserving but it runs other stuff as well and i wont build another one for a while.
I also have a segate home net drive with armarch linux on it that i used for a few years it gets transfer rates in the order of 25MB/s but now it just handles backups from the clients. not bad for a $150 Can for 1tb.
 
Hi,
Dual core ATOM cpu?
 

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