Enough horsepower for server? (And other Q's...)

[NightHawkVCT]

I recently was able to get my hands on a Acer RevoCenter RC111 for free, along the lines of http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16859321094. The microserver uses an Intel Atom D525 (1.8GHz, 2 cores but 4 threads), comes with a 2TB drive, 2GB of ram, and runs WHS 2011. I've been building systems for 20 years, but I'm out of my element when it comes to networking sometimes.

Had a few questions:

1. I'm planning on using the server for local backups of other computers on my network, and streaming music and movies. Does this have the horsepower to stream a 1080p video (assuming I use gigabit ethernet) given the processor/motherboard? Someone online was saying they streamed two 720p MKV's to two different computers with the same processor without any issues, but I don't have the experience with this setup.

2. What kind of speeds should I expect file transfers to/from the server, again assuming gigabit ethernet. 100MB/sec-ish? Slower?

3. There isn't a whole lot of documentation that came with the server - can I add drives that are larger than 2TB? I'd like to load a 4TB drive in it, perhaps two with RAID for redundancy, but I'm not sure what the limitations of WHS 2011, the motherboard, or the bios would be. I've done some reading and it sounds like WHS 2011 doesn't want me backing up drives from my computers larger than 2TB which I'm fine with, I just want to make sure putting a 4TB drive in the server is a possibility.

4. For only doing backups and streaming music/movies, is there any value to maxing out the ram by going up to 4GB?

5. Since this comes preloaded with WHS 2011, is there any benefit to switching over to FreeNAS or any other widely used freeware OS? About the only thing I might do outside of what I listed earlier is some torrenting, but not often. Don't know much about the plugins out there.

6. I've got a spare 120GB SSD lying around that I'm not doing anything with. The server has the capability of using a smaller 2.5" drive for the OS that's separate from the drives it uses for server duties. I'm thinking of throwing it in there for the potential power savings since as I'm not doing anything with the SSD anyways - thoughts? Would TRIM still function or does it not even matter since it's not writing to the OS drive that often?

Thanks in advance for answers to any/all of the questions, appreciate the help!

 

[BrightCandle]

1. Yep its more than capable of that even at 50 mbit/s encoding.

2. I have only tested a D525 on a Linux machine but I found it to be about 12MB/s completely limited by the CPU. It might be different on Windows of course. This speed problem is the reason why I sent it back and got an i3 Ivy Bridge instead that does achieve 100MB/s.

3. Don't know.

4. More cache can speed things up a little bit but basically no not really.

5. Linux is nice on the server and you can run a lot of other server side things (web caching, mail server, DNS etc etc) that is a bit easier to use and setup than on Windows. But by and large they do the same thing and if you don't know Linux WHS 2011 at least initially be easier to use.

6. My NAS sits on most of the time, so I don't think that an SSD would do a lot for me. It would boot faster and run programs quicker but by and large the NAS is sitting there just servicing background activities and pushing out files, its not the sort of workload that really benefits from an SSD for the OS. Trim will work normally but since you are barely using the drive it wont make a whole lot of difference one way or the other.

 

[NightHawkVCT]

Thanks for the quick reply! Might build my own with an i3 now... decisions, decisions I think I'm going to wind up building a HTPC/NAS using an i3 now and getting a Ceton tuner card to just roll everything in one and get rid of our cable company's DVR.

Out of curiosity, if I can get a i3-4130 for $120 or an i3-4330 for $150, the 4130's a no-brainer, right? Everything I see has it just .1 GHz slower and 1 MB less cache - wouldn't be noticeable for what I'm using it for given the $30 difference, correct?

 

[BrightCandle]

I see like 15% CPU usage at full transfer, so any minor differences you might have in CPU performance aren't going to make any difference. While an Atom might be too slow the lowest end of Intel's CPUs are much more powerful than you need for this task.

 

[jumpncrash]

you would be fine with a pentium g I think, I have that in one of my computers and it's leaps and bounds faster than my atom 425

 

[NightHawkVCT]

Thanks for the info guys!