Octo-core Atom overkill for home setup?

[Shroom]

So I've been reading up on all the most recent mini-ITX builds and hardware discussion and the latest chatter seems to be on these Avoton/Rangeley boards which feature next-generation 8-core Atoms which supposedly benchmark on par with some E3s.

I've recently been stuck in a toss up between going with a simpler ASRock E3C226D2I 2-DIMM 1150 board and a Haswell Pentium G3220 or with the Rangeley board by SuperMicro, which has 4 SO-DIMMs, the 8-core Atom C2758, and a quad-Gb NIC.

I plan to build a small Mini-ITX home NAS with 6 WD Red 3TB and 8GB ECC memory to start - I will upgrade to 16GB if this does not prove to be enough for ZFS/RAID-Z2.

For home purposes, is this new cutting edge 8-core Atom overkill, underkill, or just the right balance between power and energy efficiency? Would a Pentium G3220 (Haswell-based) work better in any situation where heavy applications outside of file storage/file serving would not be used?

The Atom in this case seems to be more sophisticated as it is a SoC, and probably boasts a wider range of features, including supporting 32GB/64GB of RAM, whereas the Haswell board only supports 16GB. For a 6 x 3 TB setup in RAID-Z2, which would be 18TB in total, would 16GB of RAM be plenty, or will speeds suffer until I upgrade it to 24GB?

It seems like the Rangeley board is a clear winner but I can help but wonder if the Atom ends up being underpowered in certain scenarios, or if FreeNAS wont even utilize all those 8 threads and instead relies more heavily on single-core performance.

 

[xcom]

To be honest it all depends on the type of application use you are going to do. For Encryption/Media Streaming (Transcoding), and others I think is just fine.
In general file servers are process intensive.

By the way I just order a FreeNAS Mini for a project at work. Eventually it will find it's way to my home :D

 

[Shroom]

To be honest it all depends on the type of application use you are going to do. For Encryption/Media Streaming (Transcoding), and others I think is just fine.
In general file servers are process intensive.

By the way I just order a FreeNAS Mini for a project at work. Eventually it will find it's way to my home :D

Oh my, it looks like that uses a C2750/2758!

 

[xcom]

I am thinking it is. Will know for sure when it arrives.

 

[Shroom]

So will FreeNAS definitely benefit from all those 8 cores?

 

[cyberjock]

FreeNAS is a combination of programs. Some of those programs are multi-threaded, some are single threaded. So the answer is both yes and no. ZFS is multithreaded as is NFS. iSCSI and Samba are single threaded though. But, iSCSI generally isn't bottlenecked with slower cores while Samba often is. But, these new Atoms can apparently saturate Gb LAN over Samba, so even though Samba is single threaded I don't consider it a problem for the hardware in question.

 

[Shroom]

Thanks cyber, I was also just reading your noobie guide which has been extremely helpful.

I saw you in some of the threads regarding those C2750/58 boards - did they ever turn out conclusively or not to be good boards for FreeNAS? I know the SuperMicro looked real sharp and only needed USB 3 disabled to boot, I'm just curious if you've heard of any further testing/benchmarking/real world results with a C2758 SoC.

 

[cyberjock]

They seem to not be bad. I don't think they've been called "good". I don't consider things to be 'good' until they've proven themselves in the field for a year or more.

 

[xcom]

I am agreement with cyberjock with the exception that I do not tend to formulate opinions without first hand experience. I do not recommend anything unless I can speak for it personally.
Once I get my hands on the mini I can tell you my own pros and cons... Now one thing I can say for sure is that iXsystem is not going to "just" release one of their products immaturely. To my understanding allot of research and testing went through this setup.

 

[Shroom]

Will a 6 x 3 TB setup need much more than 16GB for full throughput where memory would not be the bottleneck? I imagine 24GB would be ideal for this kind of setup, I know the recommendation is 4GB + 1GB/TB storage, so that would work out to 18+4 (22). The main reason I want to go with the Atom board is that it has twice as many DIMMs and 4x the total allowable memory, as well as a much more sophisticated NIC (that I'm sure I'll only barely be able to appreciate).

It's my understanding that the G3220 should perform just fine, I'm just worried it'll lag a bit in certain applications that would excel with the Atom's 8 threads, and I'm not too worried about the TDP although it would be nice to have the lower-power, passively-cooled Atom.

This is strictly for home use, I just want a secure (RAID-Z2) NAS solution that can serve up media to all devices in the house as well as maintain weekly backups of all these devices.

I am agreement with cyberjock with the exception that I do not tend to formulate opinions without first hand experience. I do not recommend anything unless I can speak for it personally.
Once I get my hands on the mini I can tell you my own pros and cons... Now one thing I can say for sure is that iXsystem is not going to "just" release one of their products immaturely. To my understanding allot of research and testing went through this setup.

Definitely keep us posted dude, I'm excited to see how that thing works out. I'd grab one for myself if I had the coin or if it had more bays. I have high hopes for the Atom, I just need someone else to be the guinea pig :)

But maybe once I'm ready to buy hardware I can try out that SuperMicro board from Newegg and see how it works out. What could be the biggest issues I run into with such cutting-edge hardware? Drivers not working? Not booting? I'm mostly wondering because I want to be sure I can smooth out all the kinks when I start and not run into anything unexpected months down the road.

 

[engmsf]

Shroom, the Haswell G3220 is not enough horsepower if you force transcoding all the time on more than one client. I force it currently on my Roku Plex Rarflix. On most 5+ GB movie file I am at 60-80% cpu utilization. Once I do a file transfer in the background i hit close 100%.

Otherwise if all you going to do is move and backup files, than the G3220 is more than enough.

 

[Shroom]

Shroom, the Haswell G3220 is not enough horsepower if you force transcoding all the time on more than one client. I force it currently on my Roku Plex Rarflix. On most 5+ GB movie file I am at 60-80% cpu utilization. Once I do a file transfer in the background i hit close 100%.

Otherwise if all you going to do is move and backup files, than the G3220 is more than enough.

I'm not too familiar with transcoding. What is this and why do you need it done by your NAS? Can't I just serve the file to the computer and let it do the processing to view it?

Do you think the 8-core Atom would be better tasked for this sort of heavy lifting? It benches between an E3-1230 and a ES-1220, and at this point would really only cost about $40 more than going the Haswell route.

 

[Lordadmiral Drake]

If you have clients that don't have the ability or horsepower required to do transcoding themselves, then I see the point of serverside transcoding (Think settop box media player or very low end machine). However, if you already have a suffeciently powerful maching and don't need to transcode to often you can also do it locally before uploading to the server.

 

[Shroom]

If you have clients that don't have the ability or horsepower required to do transcoding themselves, then I see the point of serverside transcoding (Think settop box media player or very low end machine). However, if you already have a suffeciently powerful maching and don't need to transcode to often you can also do it locally before uploading to the server.

True. I just figure that a NAS should be as streamlined as possible. I plan to eventually upgrade my Athlon X2/9800GT HTPC to some Intel NUC box, but either way in that situation the NAS can still just serve up the files and let the machines do their own transcoding, correct?

 

[xcom]

In allot of cases if Plexmedia detects that the client can trancode it will let the client handle the transcoding.

 

[cyberjock]

In allot of cases if Plexmedia detects that the client can trancode it will let the client handle the transcoding.

What!? You clearly have no clue what transcoding is.

Transcoding in the context of Plex is converting your video from one format to another on-the-fly because the playing box doesn't support the file format or codec. Usually this is going from a Plex server to a limited device such as a cell phone or raspberry pi. Your average cell phone or pi doesn't support every codec and file format out there.

So why in the world would you transcode a video from one format to another, only to then decode the new format so you can play it on the same box? If you were capable of decoding the file so you could transcode it then you are capable of playing the file, so you wouldn't need to transcode at all! So yeah, that makes no sense. ;)

 

[xcom]

You are not understanding.
Take in example chromecast. If I try to watch mkv on my chromcast plex has to transcode mkv to mp4. If I watch mkv on my WD Hub plex does not transcode the format because mkv is a supported format on the hub.
Thats not hard to understand. Is it?

 

[ser_rhaegar]

In that scenario, your WD Hub is not transcoding the mkv, it is just playing it.

 

[xcom]

In that scenario, your WD Hub is not transcoding the mkv, it is just playing it.

Thats exactly my point!!!! :)

 

[cyberjock]

But playing ≠ transcoding, which is what we are trying to explain to you. So your example is not explaining whatever it is you are trying to explain. It's literally exactly what I explained in my example of why your comment about transcoding is incorrect.