Atom C2758 vs C2750 for FreeNAS

[cyberjock]

Madd Martigan,

You do realize that iXsystems SELLS hardware and support contracts, right? So all your talk about open source not being sufficient just went out the window. When you buy iX hardware and do a support contract, if something breaks you call them up and a dev handles your case. Not sure what more you want than that since if you called Oracle/Microsoft/HP/Dell/(whatever) you'd get the same support. Maybe even poorer support since they're a huge company that doesn't send you directly to a developer like iX systems does. There are advantages to being a small nimble company vice a company that owns the market.

I'm not an employee of iX nor a customer. I do have more of a relationship with them than most people do, but I can tell you that many people I've talked to have called iX when they had a support problem and they were surprised at how quickly they were sent to a developer for a solution.

And let me let you in on a little secret. iX is relatively small, and they don't want any kind of bad publicity from someone that buys their hardware/support contracts. Especially since there's a small number of customers to begin with. So you can bet they'll take care of you.

 

[Shroom]

I just wish they had a 6-drive Mini ;)

Don't really see the point in throwing +$1000 into ZFS with only 4 drives

I been using my FreeNAS Mini for about two days now. Is too early to say but so far so good.

Hey! Could you post us some pictures of the inside of that thing? :)

 

[xcom]

I just wish they had a 6-drive Mini ;)

Don't really see the point in throwing +$1000 into ZFS with only 4 drives



Hey! Could you post us some pictures of the inside of that thing? :)

Sure. I am at work so once I get home I will.

 

[cyberjock]

Don't really see the point in throwing +$1000 into ZFS with only 4 drives

I agree with you mostly. Yes, it seems really odd to drop that kind of money for a small pool. But some people don't need 20TB+ of data to prove their worth to the world. I know a few people that go by the rule "if my data won't fit on a single hard drive I don't need it that badly". Let's face it.. most of us that have more than 4TB of data have a bunch of data for convenience and not necessity. By convenience I mean you could download the ISO from MSDN or whatever if you really needed it. But you aren't the sole owner of that data as it is not unique for you.

 

[Shroom]

I agree with you mostly. Yes, it seems really odd to drop that kind of money for a small pool. But some people don't need 20TB+ of data to prove their worth to the world. I know a few people that go by the rule "if my data won't fit on a single hard drive I don't need it that badly". Let's face it.. most of us that have more than 4TB of data have a bunch of data for convenience and not necessity. By convenience I mean you could download the ISO from MSDN or whatever if you really needed it. But you aren't the sole owner of that data as it is not unique for you.

Does a 4-disk (2 + 2) RAIDZ2 pool provide more redundancy than a 6-drive (4 + 2) pool? Both pools have an equal number of parity disk but the second pool obviously has 2 more full drives worth of storage. While it's clear that increasing a RAIDZ2 pool from 4 drives onward is much more cost effective than those first 4 drives, is there any loss in data protection?

 

[xcom]

I agree with you mostly. Yes, it seems really odd to drop that kind of money for a small pool. But some people don't need 20TB+ of data to prove their worth to the world. I know a few people that go by the rule "if my data won't fit on a single hard drive I don't need it that badly". Let's face it.. most of us that have more than 4TB of data have a bunch of data for convenience and not necessity. By convenience I mean you could download the ISO from MSDN or whatever if you really needed it. But you aren't the sole owner of that data as it is not unique for you.

+1

 

[Windreaper]

I agree with you mostly. Yes, it seems really odd to drop that kind of money for a small pool. But some people don't need 20TB+ of data to prove their worth to the world. I know a few people that go by the rule "if my data won't fit on a single hard drive I don't need it that badly". Let's face it.. most of us that have more than 4TB of data have a bunch of data for convenience and not necessity. By convenience I mean you could download the ISO from MSDN or whatever if you really needed it. But you aren't the sole owner of that data as it is not unique for you.

+1 This

While ZFS scales well I've always assumed people are more interested in the data integrity aspect. My pool is only 4TB but it's mostly documents, source code and production assets I'd rather keep intact. And the office has over 10yrs worth of game projects on less than 1TB of storage. Not everyone needs enterprise level storage capacity but everyone could do with enterprise level data integrity. From my point of view it's silly to drop 1000$+drives just to store movies ;).

 

[Shroom]

+1 This

While ZFS scales well I've always assumed people are more interested in the data integrity aspect. My pool is only 4TB but it's mostly documents, source code and production assets I'd rather keep intact. And the office has over 10yrs worth of game projects on less than 1TB of storage. Not everyone needs enterprise level storage capacity but everyone could do with enterprise level data integrity. From my point of view it's silly to drop 1000$+drives just to store movies ;).

Yeah true. But if you have 4 disks in RAIDZ2, you can add 2 more disks which will increase the pool by the entire capacity of those two disks. It's just efficient

 

[xcom]

Yeah true. But if you have 4 disks in RAIDZ2, you can add 2 more disks which will increase the pool by the entire capacity of those two disks. It's just efficient

While I understand your point, Not all of us need that type of storage. I only need 4 disk RAIDZ2, and need enterprise support. The FreNAS Mini made sense for our business.

 

[Shroom]

While I understand your point, Not all of us need that type of storage. I only need 4 disk RAIDZ2, and need enterprise support. The FreNAS Mini made sense for our business.

Yeah, it seems like a nice little unit.

You ever snap those pics? :)

 

[D4nthr4x]

You can build it yourself for much cheaper.

 

[xcom]

You can build it yourself for much cheaper.

You can, With no enterprise support ;)

 

[ser_rhaegar]

You can build it yourself for much cheaper.

Paid vendor support is often cheaper than an on payroll expert, especially considering how many different technologies a company may use.

 

[D4nthr4x]

Learn to support it yourself, make more money (or at least expand which jobs you can get).

 

[ser_rhaegar]

Learn to support it yourself, make more money (or at least expand which jobs you can get).

Depending on your work load, that may not be an option.

 

[hungarianhc]

Anandtech review is up!
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7970/asrock-rack-c2750d4i-review-a-storage-motherboard-with-management

 

[forsaken006]

I did not measure power consumption, the node 304 is designed to hold 6 hard drives watch the video.

Can you tell me if you ever calculated the power consumption of your build? Idle and Peak.

I want to build a similar FreeNas box to replace my Pentium4 Nas4Free Box. I am looking at the same Motherboard and case. My only question is if buying a 450watt PSU is worth it? Or could I manage to do it with a PicoPSU.

Thanks!

 

[Sol42]

Question along the same lings as this discussion; does FreeNAS make use of Intel QuickAssist technology? I ask because between the C2758 and C2750, this is probably the deciding factor. I think the turbo boost provided by the C2750 will only give a max 7 percent increase in performance from what I've read on other forums. Though this is desirable, the C2758 is cheaper and also has Intel QuickAssist capability. If FreeNAS utilizes it, it would probably be the biggest deciding factor to choose the C2758 cpu over the C2750.

 

[Ericloewe]

Question along the same lings as this discussion; does FreeNAS make use of Intel QuickAssist technology? I ask because between the C2758 and C2750, this is probably the deciding factor. I think the turbo boost provided by the C2750 will only give a max 7 percent increase in performance from what I've read on other forums. Though this is desirable, the C2758 is cheaper and also has Intel QuickAssist capability. If FreeNAS utilizes it, it would probably be the biggest deciding factor to choose the C2758 cpu over the C2750.

FreeNAS has nothing that benefits from QuickAssist and the C2750 supports AES-NI, so the C2750 is definitely the one more suited for NAS. I also think (but may be mistaken) that the C2758 does not support extended page tables, which is useful for virtualization (especially starting with 10.1).

 

[Sol42]

Thanks Eric,

Both do, however, support Extended page tables:
http://ark.intel.com/products/77988/Intel-Atom-Processor-C2758-4M-Cache-2_40-GHz

http://ark.intel.com/products/77987/Intel-Atom-Processor-C2750-4M-Cache-2_40-GHz

I'm still leaning on the Intel QuickAssist capability. Mainly because the PFSense forums have illuminated to providing support:
http://www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/1zqda7/newer_hardware_router/

But seems like a crap shoot as far as which will be the better platform for FreeNAS. If QuickAssist is used in the future, it may decrease server load which thus increase overall performance.