Is an Intel Xeon E3-1245V3 CPU overkill for me?

[chris.shelton]

Hi all,

As the title suggests, would this be a waste of money?

I'm going for a zfs system serving ~40 people from 6 x 2TB WD red drives set up in a RAID-Z2.

The NAS is going to be used primarily for file sharing and will also host a wiki - probably dokuwiki.

I'd rather put the money into more ECC RAM and get something like a Pentium G3450.

 

[Andy Holmes]

I have the 1245v3 in my freenas, i also run several jails including plex for transcoding and the cpu never gets off idle, put your cash in to zfs cache ;)

I have a G3230 i think that im not using after upgrading, you are welcome to it.

 

[Ericloewe]

Current Xeon E3s are in a somewhat tough position.

Computing power is plentiful, but the 32GB RAM limit can be rather... limiting. Especially with 40 users.
The problem with 32GB is that you're stuck. L2ARC doesn't do much good yet and more RAM is impossible.
I'd definitely consider either waiting for Xeon E3 v5 (Skylake Xeon E3s will support RDIMMs for up to 128GB of RAM, possibly even more) or going with a Xeon E5 system, to which you can easily add more RAM.

Since you'll be doing some basic (local, I assume) web hosting, I'd stick with a Xeon in any case.