It isn't an ATOM processor. It may have its roots in ATOM, but it ain't ATOM. It's like calling a core i7 4770K a pentium 4...
Okay... you're right, it isn't an "ATOM processor", it's an "Atom[sup]
TM[/sup] Processor". At least according to its manufacturer.
You mentioned
and then cyberjock said
At $400 I'd rather go with Supermicro full size with IPMI, dual Gb Intel LAN and a Xeon
which is probably reasonable given that our experiences here are that lower core speeds tend to be disappointing. The Atoms and E350's and N36L's have been around for a long time and there are many people wandering around here with experience with various subsets of those products. The general opinion is that they do work, but that ZFS adds a lot of overhead.
And had I been less busy yesterday, I might well have pounded out some commentary on your long missive yesterday.
You can certainly buy a bottom of the barrel, XEON/SuperMicro combo for $400. That said, the RAM for such a purchase is exceedingly expensive.
Using the
ServeTheHome review, I picked the KVR16LSE11/8 which is
currently $98.57, or four for $394.28 to outfit the board with 32GB.
The proper kit for an X9SCL would be Kingston KVR16E11K4/32,
currently $325 to outfit the board over at Amazon.
Wait, what? You made it sound like the RAM for the Avoton was significantly less expensive. Not only is it not, it is actually a price premium. Eugh!
How much power are you using when you are transcoding a movie using plex? 100w? 200w?
Well, the TDP of the E3-1230V2 is 69W. Observationally, it isn't that hard to get a base node that idles at 40 watts and runs around 80 watts peak; add hard drives to that. The Avoton looks like it'll do better. Based on
Patrick's numbers, adjusting for a little more memory, I'm guessing 18 watts idle and 35 watts full tilt for the Avoton, which is remarkable.
Our ESXi nodes are designed for low noise; they're 4U boxes with 120mm fans at low rev and an oversize heatsink for the CPU. They're actually very quiet. What's your point?
Does your average home user need that much CPU?
Well, the problem is, that's all opinion, now, isn't it. ZFS is piggy. So you can skip ZFS and have full gigabit speeds on slower hardware, or you can have ZFS or not full gigabit speeds. But a lot of the guys here are doing this in part because they're the equivalent of hot-rodders. They want ZFS and full gigabit too. But experience says that core speed - not excessive cores - is a better predictor of the ability to get full gigabit.
Nearly all of them use a dual core ATOM processor. For the most part, they can keep up with a single gb connection just fine.
And nearly none of them use ZFS, or can support two dozen drives without a second thought. The problem is that ZFS is really pretty big and fat. We overcome this by throwing massive resources at it. If you want the cheapest, smallest NAS, FreeNAS isn't suitable. It is really more of an enterprise-class product that is available to home power users, or those of us who are using it for business purposes. All those other products you're talking about, yes, any idiot can throw Busybox on a SoC (and some of the products even prove that this has been successfully done ... by idiots).
If you think SuperMicro is high end we have a very different opinion of high end, sir.
SuperMicro is as high end as you can get within this market segment. Beyond it, you generally need to buy a vendor's box. I generally prefer HP's gear, but fixed configurations, high energy consumption, and high price have all been significant factors in our return to building gear in-house.
I can't point to a single product they make that doesn't have some horrible unnecessary flaw in it. [...] SuperMicro's support has never been great and I have no reason to expect it has gotten better.
Well, our experiences differ then. We rarely have issues that would require us to contact SuperMicro. Unlike other manufacturers, they don't think that a "server" is the guy who takes your order at a restaurant. They know what FreeBSD is too. Pretty amazing compared to other mfrs.
I brought it up here so other people could at least consider it. Like with everything, there is no such thing as a bad product, just a bad price. I wouldn't buy this board for $600, but for $250 you bet I will.
You did, and I even thanked you. I think for $250 this would be an attractive option for a lower performance fileserver. I'd been thinking about replacing our MicroServer N36L and this is actually just about the product I had been hoping for.
For you to dismiss the board out of hand seems a little arrogant to me (no offense).
Uh, wha...? cyberjock's post doesn't quite read that way to me. He's spent more time than most of us have helping people on strange platforms, and he has a lot of experience. His message makes good points. Let's try to be fair here.
Fact is, the Avoton looks to be a welcome addition ... but it is primarily raising the bar on the low end. We've had crap and crud down there for years, E350, Atom D510, N36L, etc., and you just don't see that much discussion of those options because people don't want to spend lots of money and wind up with slow. The Avoton has the potential to be massively better. But it isn't going to be a competitor to the Xeon, which outguns it in clock speed - except that the Avoton can apparently handle 64GB. So when we see a board capable of that, it is going to be a serious competitor for certain types of workloads.
