Upgrade current, or buy new server?

[Robert Thomspon]

Hey gents... so, im at a turning point on my home lab and have to make a consideration...
Currently, I have an ML350 Gen8 with a single Xeon E5-2609v2 with 96GB of RAM and 4x8TB seagate garbage drives...

I currently have coming tomorrow, 5x 12TB WD Red Drives... and Ive decided that, with the savings I made on the drives (under budget), I could afford a few hundred bucks thrown at a new rig... Ive been eyeballing Dell R720s, 730s and 740s...
But the question is... is that money better spent on maxing out the CPUs in the ML350 or actually investing in new?
If I upgrade the ML350, i would be looking to move it to 2x E5-2697v2s OR 2x E5-2690v2s and probably increasing the RAM to 192 (I have the extra RAM already... and probably faster RAM than whats in the machine now (the newer processors can support faster RAM)...

Any advice would be MUCH appreciated...

 

[ChrisRJ]

It will be hard to make recommendations without knowing at least two things: What scenario(s) are we looking at and what is the CPU utilization for those?

 

[wolfman]

I bought two Dell R730xd's recently with E5-2620/30 v3 CPUs for TrueNAS-usage and i am very happy with them. But as ChrisRJ mentioned, without a use-case it's hard to recommend anything.
That said, while your mentioned options are still very powerful, i would really think twice about investing money in anything that uses DDR3 in 2021! But that's just my personal opinion.

 

[Robert Thomspon]

Generally speaking, the NAS is used for media storage and replay (it hosts our TV Shows, Movies, Music, Family Pics, etc...) It also runs a few jails and a VM... Jails are nothing more than media scrubbers (Sonarr, Radarr, SabNZB, transmission, jackett, etc)... If I upgrade it, i will also probably migrate my Home Assistant instance to it as a Debian VM...


Ive also been fighting weird lag with the system forever... which im attributing to the shucked Seagate 8TB drives that are currently in it (pulled from USB backup drives... (I forget what the terminology is for the types of drives they are... but they suck at being NAS drives :) )...

Aside from that, the CPU usage tends to be minimal... ranging from 1-3% at complete idle to 30% under minimal load (playing 1 video or downloading something) to 100% when unraring a bunch of things.... The CPU that's in it now is pretty much the lowest end CPU that the machine can handle... and it's a single processor... Even adding a second identical one, i think, would at least allow me to double the RAM im using (the 2609v2 can be found for like $10.... )

And as far as running or investing in a machine using DDR3 in 2021... that poses the other problem with a new build... EVERYTHING has to be bought again... id need to invest in RAM, CPU(s)... drives are already covered... whereas with the DDR3, i have craptons of 8GB ECC sticks.... so, no need to buy more... In addition to updating the CPUs a bit, it means i could use faster RAM... creating a faster machine overall... With a new build, I'll probably also need to find a new Intel NIC card to fit a 2u system.... possibly have to swap out (not to mention find) a new backplane that handles SATA...or buy SAS drives.... but then why did i just dump a small fortune into WD red drives :)

So, that's where I am I think... still unsure...

 

[ChrisRJ]

Well, if you already have the RAM, why not "risk" to spend a small amount of money on a faster CPU and see what you gain. I would assume you will be able to find something for less than 50 dollars.

 

[ThreeDee]

why not just grab a couple of these?

Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz Eight Core (CM8062101082713S) Processor for sale online | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz Eight Core (CM8062101082713S) Processor at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

..you'd get about 5 times the PassMark rating .. you might have to upgrade your heatsinks though

CPU taken from list in pdf

https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c04128239.pdf?ver=6

 

[wolfman]

Yes, buy some matching CPUs for your existing system.

 

[ChrisRJ]

I bought two E5 2670 for my XCP-ng servers for about 35 Euros each in October 2020. So it appears prices have gone down by almost 50% since then.

As for power consumption: The machine is running on a Supermicro X9SRi-F board with 128 GB ECC DDR3 in a Supermicro 1U case and with a single 1 TB Samsung Evo 860 (hourly backups is enough for me). With 10 VMs (1 Win 10, 9 Linux) it typically consumes 50 Watts overall. Certainly no record, but better than what I would have expected from 8 years old server gear.

 

[Robert Thomspon]

why not just grab a couple of these?

Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz Eight Core (CM8062101082713S) Processor for sale online | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Intel Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz Eight Core (CM8062101082713S) Processor at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

..you'd get about 5 times the PassMark rating .. you might have to upgrade your heatsinks though

CPU taken from list in pdf

https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c04128239.pdf?ver=6

weirdly enough... the 2690s are only a few dollars more than the 2670s...

So, I pulled the trigger and grabbed a matching pair...

figured its cheaper than refitting a new rig altogether... and worth a shot.

 

[ChrisRJ]

The reason why I went for the 2670, in addition to the significantly lower price in my case, was the lower base clock (boost is more or less the same IIRC). My unvalidated assumption was that if the load warrants it, the CPU would end up more or less at the same effective speed.

 

[neb50]

A v2 chip might be a little faster and more efficient, but not worth it if you already got the 2690's.

I am running a setup with dual 2667v2's and dual 2650v2's in a couple Dell R720's and haven't had any issues. I am running ESXi on the machines with FreeNAS as one of the VM's which is why I am using the dual 8 core CPU's with FreeNAS only getting 6-8 virtual cores.

On bare metal FreeNAS, depending on what you are doing, you might want to look at a faster lower core count single or pair as most of the stuff on FreeNAS appears to be affected more by core speed than number of cores.

Also, is there a limit on how much ram makes sense for FreeNAS to use? And is there a point where it is just there and not helping/doing anything?

 

[Robert Thomspon]

Also, is there a limit on how much ram makes sense for FreeNAS to use? And is there a point where it is just there and not helping/doing anything?

Im already on a v2 chip (the E5-2609v2)...

And as for RAM... As far as I know, the builders of freenas have always pushed the idea that you need 1GB of RAM for every TB of storage.. Im currently at 60TB of storage (effectively 48 with raid-z)... So, who knows... but the RAM for me is free (ive already got it... )

 

[neb50]

Im already on a v2 chip (the E5-2609v2)...

And as for RAM... As far as I know, the builders of freenas have always pushed the idea that you need 1GB of RAM for every TB of storage.. Im currently at 60TB of storage (effectively 48 with raid-z)... So, who knows... but the RAM for me is free (ive already got it... )

A faster v2 chip as that one is one of slowest with the fewest cores. Like a 2637v2 4 core, 2643v2 6 core, or 2667v2 (2687w v2) 8 core depending on cost and performance needed, etc.

The e5-2690 will work, but isn't much if any faster than a e5-2650v2 depending on which passmark scores you look at.

I'm not sure if you care about power or not, but I think my 2667v2 setup used around 20w more power when running 192GB vs 128GB ram and pulled out 8-8GB sticks to reduce the power.

I don't notice any performance issues with FreeNAS limited to 32GB with around 34TB of usable flash based storage, but haven't tried 64GB or anything else yet so maybe it would. It's performance over a 10Gb network doesn't seem much different than running off local SSD's.