Second Attempt at avoiding being Dumb. Build Vs Buy

[LtHaus]

Good day Brain Trust!

I'll keep this pretty simple... I'm in the market to upgrade my 6 yo Freenas setup. IT looks like I have out grown my limited memory footprint.

I really like the look of the Mini XL (is that not the best contradiction), since I have the disks already. BUT 1400....ouch.

Browsing around on Amazon I find :
High-End Dell PowerEdge R720 Server 2 x 2.60Ghz E5-2670 8C 192GB 8 x 2TB (Renewed) for 850~
and
Dell PowerEdge NAS Server, 2 x Intel X5650 6 Core, 32GB RAM, 12TB Storage, Rail Kit, iDRAC 6, FreeNAS (Renewed) for 900~

I have the technical skill to build, but I'm growing out of the desire to mess with things. Sad but true.

I did a quick search and see that "high-end" version has a raid card that is not optimal but the "NAS" box looks like its turnkey for a good saving and has enterprise disks I could reuse to create a Mirror NAS with my most important pictures,Taxdata, junk.

So.... I'm not asking for you to take and hour and direct those 3 options, but could you give me a your best bullet on Cost Vs Weight and is that MiniXL+ worth the ~600$ more I'd have to pay? Please? Thankyou,
v.

 

[danb35]

I'm struggling to see any way in which the "Dell NAS" would be preferable to the R720. Maybe in number of drive bays? No, according to the spec sheet, it's worse there too. The R720 has more, faster, and more energy-efficient cores, 6x the RAM, and 4 TB more disk space for $50 less. It might even have a supported disk controller, or at least one that can be flashed to be (no, now that I've found the listing, it doesn't--but the "NAS Server" also has a highly-inappropriate RAID card). Between those two, the R720 is a no-brainer, and pick up a H310 controller on eBay and flash the LSI firmware onto it.

The real comparison, then, will be between the Mini XL and the R720. The R720 is used, rack-mount enterprise kit. That means it's relatively bulletproof, it weighs a ton, and it sounds like a jet engine (caveat, I'm basing this on generalizations--I have a 2U Dell rack-mount server, but not a R720). It's also going to burn watts like it's going out of style--as an imperfect comparison, my main server (specs in my sig) has the same two CPUs as that R720, 2/3 the RAM, but 18 disks--and it idles around 350 watts. Idles. Load up the CPUs, and you can hit 500 watts. It's ridiculous overkill for my needs, but eBay made me an offer I couldn't refuse. Do the math on power usage, though; that may make a big difference in the cost delta.

The Mini will be much lighter, have a much smaller footprint, almost certainly be much quieter, and burn much less power (I wouldn't be at all surprised at a 90% power savings, and I'd be willing to bet on 80%). It will also have a lot less computing power and RAM. It's new hardware, has a warranty, and comes from the folks who wrote FreeNAS, so you can expect good compatibility and support.

What's your use case? If you're going to be doing heavy computing, the R720 is the obvious choice, and damn the power bill and the noise. If you're going to be doing lots of block storage, the RAM again makes the R720 the obvious choice. If you're wanting to do home file storage, maybe run a Plex server, possibly a Nextcloud jail to access stuff when away from home, the Mini would be perfectly capable of all that. And the power savings are nothing to sneeze at.

 

[LtHaus]

I agree with your assessment.. AND after processing that both Raid cards are bad, I see your point. My use case is to take and relocate my first 6 disks out of the underpowered, under memories system I have and with the extra horsepower, it would be nice to have some virtual machines, perhaps a Minecraft server, Plex etc,.. I Have a network closet from a former life that has 2pole rack and this would be out of the way so the noise is not a big thing. Power and heat, thats something to think about. I'll do more review when I get back from coffee roasting... but Thank you for pointing out the bigger server.. I was fixated on how bad its Raid card was without realizing both would require replacing.

 

[danb35]

The RAID card should not be a big discriminator; the H310, flashed to the LSI IT firmware, is only about $50 on eBay, even if you need the special "mezzanine" version (I'm not sure if the R720 would need that or not)--and it's a perfectly suitable card for FreeNAS. So even if the "NAS Server" had a perfectly suitable card (which it doesn't), replacing the card in the R720 just has you breaking even on price. You might even be able to sell the old card for a few bucks.

In terms of CPU horsepower, the Mini XL+ isn't bad; the C3758 chip has a reported Passmark of ~4600--but a pair of E5-2670s runs around 15,000. OTOH, max power dissipation of the C3758 is 25W; the two Xeons combined can reach 230W. So you get ~3x the performance, but burn ~10x the watts to get it. You could certainly run a Plex server, even transcode a stream in HD (though more than one stream would probably be pushing it), and simultaneously run a lightweight VM or two (even if I'm not a fan of FreeNAS as a hypervisor), on the Mini.