Recommend a nice low power usage ECC cpu for FreeNAS

[sesipod]

I'm trying to find a nice low power usage ECC supported cpu that will just run FreeNAS all day. This FreeNAS system will run 9x 3TB drives only no SSDs tho they might be added later for caching. This FreeNAS box will just be storing data (documents, pictures, Iso and plex data).
Send me some suggestions :)
Plex encoding will not happen on this box.

I would like to run up to 3 PCIE devices on the motherboard and have 8GB of DDR3 / DDR4 RAM to start.

Thanks!
Shawn

 

[garm]

Intel Atoms are low power, but the boards are usually mITX. I think Supermicro has a uATX variant though.

 

[Ericloewe]

If only there was a document covering this...

 

[Nick2253]

What kind of power usage is "low power" to you? Most modern Pentium CPUs idle within a few watts of the Atoms, though they can burst much higher, which is advantageous for single-threaded uses like Samba.

8GB will probably be insufficient for your 9x3TB drives. I would recommend 16GB at the very minimum, through 24GB will probably be better, depending on exactly how many users you have. If you decide to go with any kind of services on the box, I'd recommend 32GB. At this design stage, I would not consider any solution that cannot be expanded to 32GB of memory.

 

[tvsjr]

And, your 9 drives will eclipse the power consumption of whatever board/processor you choose. If you want to reduce power consumption, buy larger drives and run less spindles.

 

[Chris Moore]

Power consumption as a consideration, the WD Red 8TB drives have the best numbers. I recently did the math for a project of my own.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[sesipod]

I'm just looking for something that is low cost on parts and is good on power. I don't need an E3 cpu running just FreeNAS on its own. As it is right now I'm running an E3-1230v3 with 10 3TB drives and I'm just at 130 - 170 watts in power usage. I'm fine with that usage just not wasting that sort of cpu power on just FreeNAS that is only doing data work no vms or anything.

Currently have been running FreeNAS with 6Gb of ram all of its life (4+ years) and have not seen any issues with performance. I would put the system to 8GB as a starting point for dedicated hardware.

 

[Chris Moore]

As it is right now I'm running an E3-1230v3 with 10 3TB drives and I'm just at 130 - 170 watts in power usage. I'm fine with that usage just not wasting that sort of cpu power on just FreeNAS that is only doing data work no vms or anything.

This right here is the least expensive server I know of that will run FreeNAS reliably:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5173247
Only $265 but you will need to upgrade from 4GB of system memory to 8GB.
We have had at least one user take the system board out of this case and put it into a larger case to mount more drives.

EDIT: That Intel Pentium G440 processor only has a pasmark scor of 3578, so it might not be able to do anything more than run FreeNAS.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+G4400+@+3.30GHz&id=2634

Currently have been running FreeNAS with 6Gb of ram all of its life (4+ years) and have not seen any issues with performance. I would put the system to 8GB as a starting point for dedicated hardware.

With the amount of storage you have, I would seriously think that more memory is called for. Seriously, ZFS uses the RAM for ARC and if you don't have some RAM available the performance of the system must be terrible.

 

[Inxsible]

EDIT: That Intel Pentium G440 processor only has a pasmark scor of 3578, so it might not be able to do anything more than run FreeNAS.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+G4400+@+3.30GHz&id=2634

I don't think it should be a problem as @sesipod mentioned that he does not transcode.

I have a Pentium G3240 with a passmark of 3175, and it works great with running transmission, couchpotato, emby. I have also tried streaming to 3 different devices at the same time without issue. Now if you are talking about "transcode" -- then yes, I will agree that it won't be able to handle anything else during that transcode, but it will still transcode 1 stream.

 

[sesipod]

I will have a look at the HP! Seems to be a good price for the build. :D

----

9x 3TB wd red - z2
1x 3TB wd purple - Security camera storage.

ETH1 192.168.1.4 - home network shares
ETH2 10.0.0.4 - Private network ( proxmox / plex / camera system )
ETH3 10.90.0.4 - Private share to my friends condo for plex / nextcloud storage.

At this moment I'm running 3 vms on a proxmox server and their disk files sit on an NFS datastore form FreeNAS.
Serving SMB and NFS shares to other computers on the network.
Plex media server media files / Plex Recording video to the NAS.
Storing recorded video form my security cameras.

With all of this going I am still able to move files at (or) over 100MB/s.

Like I have said 6GB of ram is plenty of ram for my needs. We could go back and forth all day about ram. But as it stands I will put 8GB in the new box.

 

[sesipod]

This right here is the least expensive server I know of that will run FreeNAS reliably:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5173247
Only $265 but you will need to upgrade from 4GB of system memory to 8GB.
We have had at least one user take the system board out of this case and put it into a larger case to mount more drives.

Currently that server is $209 on tiger :0

 

[Chris Moore]

Currently that server is $209 on tiger :0

WOW. They must have just put it on sale because I got that price earlier today and I actually still have the page open on my computer, showing the old price.