1U - 10gbe - Low power NAS

[RandomInternetGuy]

I'm looking to build a "unicorn" nas, low power & high performance all in a short 1u . The most important part of the build is the power consumption, i prefer to buy a more efficient board, than one that uses more power but is cheaper. I am aware that 4 hdd will not saturate 10gbe but with the ssd it should help get closer.

Tasks

• SMB max 3 clients
• iScsi to my vm box (maybe)
• NFS max 3 clients
• owncloud
• fully encrypted
• no vms

Build

• Motherboard: X10SDV-2C-TLN2F (2c/4t pentium) or X10SDV-4C-TLN2F (4c/8t xeon-d)
• Ram: 16gb or 32gb
• Drives: 4x8TB WD Red + m.2 ssd 500gb (or optane?)
• PSU: comes with case 250W
• Case: M-140-ITX
• Boot drive: 2 x usb mirrored

what do you guys think? is the 2c pentium enough or do i need the 4c xeon-d? any other motherboard & cpu combo that i might have missed?

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

With SMB, clock speed is of utmost importance. So, go with the D-1521. That system also has faster RAM and a larger CPU cache. All of those factors will improve performance. Though, with just four drives, you're greatest bottleneck will be the drives. So, maybe you don't need the faster system?

What are you going to do with the m.2 SSD? Typically speaking, more RAM is more better than L2ARC or SLOG all else being equal.

Otherwise, I don't see any issues with your configuration.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[RandomInternetGuy]

Thanks for the reply,

Was going to use the ssd or optane as a l2arc drive. I saw this video from PugetSystems and it seemed promising.

Would love to have more drives but I cannot find a 2u short server case with hotswap drives.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

RAM is a magnitude or more faster than SSD - even super fast SSD. When you add L2ARC, the L2ARC index must be kept in RAM which means that RAM is unavailable for ARC. It is almost always better to max out your RAM before you add L2ARC. Both Supermicro motherboards you mentioned support 128GB of RAM. I'd fill them up before even considering L2ARC.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[Constantin]

Thanks to Matthews feedback I'm seriously considering the X10SDV-2C-7TP4F instead. It only has two cores but it's maximum speed is 20% higher than the 4C (2.2GHz vs. 2.6GHz) while also being able to throttle down to 1.7GHz. For SMB, single-thread speed is important. The 10W lower TDP is also a nice-to-have.

I'd opt for 32GB sticks, with the hope that at some point in the future the DDR4 ECC RDIMMs will become less ludicrous re: pricing.

It will be interesting to see if I could shoe-horn the X10SDV-2C-7TP4F into the Q26 case I have. I doubt it, but it's not like I hated the A76 case that preceded it. The A76 is simply ginormous, however.

Don't discount systems using the C3xxx or C2xxx atom processors if low power consumption is desired. For example, the C2750D4I that iXsystems uses in the Mini and Mini XL are low power, offer plenty of SATA ports, and can be upgraded to 10GBe via a PCIe card. The only real downside for the C2xxx series is the relatively rare type of DDR3 RAM needed, making anything beyond 32GB either difficult or expensive to purchase.

 

[RandomInternetGuy]

I looked at the boards used in the mini and Mini XL and they would be perfect, the only downside is the lack of m.2 support.

 

[Constantin]

If you're after using a NVME m.2 SLOG then you should take another look at the D-15xx series of boards. The C3xxx series can feature them but only at PCIe 3.0 x2, AFAIK. Articles like this one over at servethehome suggest that x2 interfaces blunt the SLOG improvements of Optane.

If the m.2 slot is just for hosting the OS or L2ARC, then I wouldn't worry. You can host the OS on a SATADOM just fine or an old SSD. I'm running my L2ARC off a Samsung 840 EVO, for example.