BUILD Inquiry for a P4 (630 or 640) for FreeNAS

[lloydopol]

I was wondering if somebody here had used these CPU for their NAS box. I'm planning to build one for my brother. I can purchase used components here at a very affordable price. Main use of his NAS box would be just a back-up storage (nothing fancy). I have an extra ram (2GB DDR2 800) as well as an extra mobo. I'll just pull these put from my personal collection of past PC hardware and hand it down to him. The NAS would just be switched "on" during the weekly back-up activity. So, power consumption is not a big factor. This project would be a low budget as possible.

I'm very eager to know all of your inputs... both positive and negative are all welcome.

Thanks a lot...

 

[cyberjock]

If you plan to use ZFS you really need at least 6GB of RAM. DDR2 is so expensive right now it may be cheaper to buy newer hardware that isn't top of the line but uses DDR3.

Personally, I think P4s aren't on my list of "recommended used hardware to repurpose for FreeNAS".

 

[lloydopol]

thanks cyberjock,

It would be only be a UFS volume... HDD would be either 1 x 2TB or 2 x 1TB (as he told me)... and would be set up as an individual drive... no RAID configuration. I'm currently based here in Shanghai... old PC components here are very easy to find through Taobao and very cheap...

I would like to let him do a "kick-start" on FreeNAS... if his need would arises, I'm pretty sure he'll upgrade the HW :)

 

[cyberjock]

If you are gonna use UFS, I'd say go for it. It would definitely be a machine to experiment with and actually store some data on it reliably. Don't expect to saturate a Gb LAN port (but you might be able to).

Edit: I really trust ZFS more than UFS(I'm not saying UFS isn't reliable) but my main reason for switching to ZFS was the silent bit detection and correction.

 

[lloydopol]

thanks cyberjock...

 

[lloydopol]

oh, I had another question. this is for my NAS box... got a SB Celeron G460 as a standby back-up CPU. I would like to know if there would be a big or noticeable improvement if I'll opt to use a Pentium G870 or i3-2120. Current HDD config is 2 x 2 TB on RAID1. Once I can purchase another pair of the same HDD's brand & make, I'll set it up for RAIDZ2. Ram would be 16 GB...

Thanks

 

[lloydopol]

ditched out the P4 "nostalgia project" for my bro's FreeNAS box and instead, bought a used Celeron D 360 @ $5 USD equivalent... paired it w/ an intel DP965LT used mobo...

does anyone here had tried to use this CPU in FreeNAS?