CPU Considerations and Advice

[James Coleman]

I have a FM1 board and have been looking at the AMD offerings. It will be a pool for book, movies, pictures, and general files. Integrity and safety of the
files is my main concern in a home setting.
1. I did not find a real consensus of processor speed vs cores. My clients are windows 7. Which would be better- dual core with 2.7 Ghz or a 2.1 Ghz triple core?
2. If I use ZFS if appears that a 4 disk(4x2t) is not recommended. At best, I could go to a 5 disk array. Which of these would be more reasonable?

 

[Stephens]

1. What you've probably seen is CIFS/Samba (which is what you'd use for Windows 7) is single threaded and benefits from greater Ghz than cores. So for that aspect of FreeNAS, 2.7Ghz would be better. There are other things in FreeNAS that do take advantage of cores. I suspect either chip would work fine, though.

2. ZFS is a file system with many implementation options. If you read noobsauce80's guide on ZFS (linked to in the signature line of his posts), you'll probably understand it better. It depends on what you're implementing. A 4-disc RAIDZ2 is fine. 5-disc RAIDZ1. 6-Disc RAIDZ2. But read the presentation. It's a quick read and very helpful.

 

[noee]

1. Just testing two older AMD X2s (BE-5000@2.6Ghz and BE-2400@2.3Ghz) on an M3A with GbE, UFS with 4GB RAM, I can get about 95MB/s copy from the NAS to my Win7 clients. Testing with 8.3 alpha/betas. I do have some tweaks in Tunables, Sysctls and CIFS Aux.

FWIW, I have had no luck getting the Win7 NFS client to perform over 30MB/s.

 

[James Coleman]

Thanks for the info. Will look at the guide. If I an not mistaken both of the X2's are dual core with just basically a change in core speed. The break in the A4-A6 line allows a choice of a dual core 2.7 or a triple core 2.1. Power requirements do not seem to be readily available. Thanks again.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm not sure what performance should be expected from NFS on Windows. I know that SMB is Microsoft's baby so I'd expect SMB to have more resources spent on it's optimization than NFS. Technically CIFS is not exactly the same as SMB, but the 2 are compatible. CIFS is used interchangably as SMB in the forum because for the 99% of users out there they will not know the difference. It gets messy because alot of places don't acknowledge the differences betweeen CIFS and SMB. Some places even say they are the same, which isn't entirely correct.

The best analogy I can think of is like saying a Ford is exactly equal to a car. Its more accurate to call it a type of car.