Replacing my R710 with something less power hungry

NickF

Guru
Joined
Jun 12, 2014
Messages
763
Hi All,
I currently have my main FreeNAS server running on a Dell R710 with two L5670s and 96GB of ram. 5x4TB HGST 7200RPM drives.
I am looking to save on my power bill, while maintaining at least the performance level I have now. For now I will migrate my current drives into my new system. Black Friday I am looking to get some 10TB drives.

What I have purchased: An empty Supermicro CSE-825 Chassis. 8 drive bays, 2 more than I have now. A step in the right direction. 3 Noctua 80mm fans to quiet it down.

What I am looking to purchase:
A CPU/motherboard/RAM.

I am strongly considering a Denverton CPU, but I have also considered using a Ryzen 1700 I already own and then buying an Asrock Rack server x470 motherboard. The x470 board has the ability to have 10G on board (in copper) and I have an existing 10G card I can use (Mellanox) but in either direction that's additional power load, and the Denverton has it built into the SoC.

ASRock Rack C3558D4U-2OP
https://www.newegg.com/asrock-rack-c3558d4u-2op-intel-atom-c3558-series-processor-4-core-16w/p/N82E16813140019?Description=ASRock Rack C3558D4U-2OP&cm_re=ASRock_Rack_C3558D4U-2OP-_-13-140-019-_-Product

This particular board looks very interesting. I was assuming I would have to add a 10Gig NIC and an LSI HBA to whatever build I do. With that one, I will only have to use the HBA (LSI 9211i I already have an extra one), as it has 10Gb nics already. It also has an m.2 that goes up to 110 so I can add some Optane goodness as an l2arc if I want in the future. I dont do alot of writes to the box, let alone sync writes, so I don't strictly speaking need a dedicated ZIL device, but I do have room to add one if I wanted to.

This is primarily a storage box, I have a seperate box that does VMs and Plex.

In terms of scrubs, cpu performance, the only concern I have is that the l5640’s are several times faster than the Denverton, which is using . While the Ryzen is faster than them, while consuming half the power. The Denverton is about 1/8 the power of the l5640s.

I havent seen anyone use this particular board. Any thoughts on my build out?
 
Last edited:

joeinaz

Contributor
Joined
Mar 17, 2016
Messages
188
"I currently have my main FreeNAS server running on a Dell R710 with two L5670s and 96GB of ram."

L5670 or X5670 or L5640? I assume you have two L5640s On the CPU charts, dual L5640 setup is roughly 9600 units. The Atom CPU you are looking at comes in at about 2500 units. The annual power cost for the two L5640s is about $22 versus $3 for the Atom.

One option is an x9 board which supports socket 2011 and get an E5-2630L-v2. You get roughly 9000 units of computes and the power cost is $11 per year. Perhaps 24- 32 GB of RAM. The other option is to get a larger CPU (E5-2680-v2: almost 16000 units) with 32+GB of RAM and use the FreeNAS solution for storage, Plex and Virtualization and save power by not using the other systems. 10Gb Ethernet and m.2 devices can be added by PCIe card.
 
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