Looking for low power CPU for NAS

[CAlbertson]

I'm trying to decide on a CPU, then I will pick a motherboard. The only thing I care about (in order of importance) is:
#1 power consumption.
#2 It has "just enough" performance for my application
#3 Cost, lower is always better

I'm building a NAS that will run freeBSD and ZFS. I need at least 8GB of ram and the Intel D525 Atom CPU is almost powerful enough except it has a limit of 4GB RAM. I'm looking for a step up from the D525 but power use is really a big deal as I'm running more than one of these 24x7

BTW I really like the new WD "Red" disk drives. Will use them in ZFS' RAID-Z2. This is the best (in terms of data integrity) files system on Earth but it does requires tons and tons of RAM and I will likely need to go with 16GB even for a small 8 drive array.

As for performance needs.
1) Don't care about graphics, the system will run headless with no monitor or keyboard
2) The main bottle neck is stuffing bits down a 1000BaseT Ethernet port at the full wire speed. Once that can be done there is no point in gong faster. So the NAS server is like watching a DVD video where there is no point in playing the movie at double speed, The 1.8GHz Atom is about 70% of required performance.

Whatever I do buy needs to go into a motherboard that can (maybe with a add-in card) drive eight SATA disks. What about mobile CPUs? Are there MBs that can use a low power mobile CPU? The availability of a suitable mother board may drive the selection of a CPU.

I'm looking for pointers and terms I can Google. I do have a good background in computing and a degree in computer science but my background in NOT with PCs or IT. It is all in embedded micro controllers, radar signal processing, digital camera design and so on.

Thanks,
Chris

 

[Insert_Nickname]

#1 power consumption.
#2 It has "just enough" performance for my application
#3 Cost, lower is always better

Depending on your budget I'd look at something like the Intel Serverboard S1200KP with an E3-1220(L)v2. They are pricey, but have almost all the characteristics you describe. You have to add a controller card to get 8 SATA or SAS ports though...

 

[BrightCandle]

I did this with an mitx board, added an additional bunch of sata slots with pci-e and an i3. The i3 will sip power even when there is a data transfer going on but can carry enough ram to make it all fast. Mine happily saturates a 1gbit network on sustained transfers running raid 5 on Linux with samba. Verry happy with it.

It replaced an atom D525 based prebuilt nas which in the end had a CPU bottleneck limiting its performance despite its high cost.

 

[ShintaiDK]

What about the new server atom? (No clue about price tho.) Else some 40$ SB celeron.

 

[Concillian]

You might try to find out if this is suitable:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131933

I don't know how a 1.1 Ghz Sandy Bridge stripped down Celeron it stands up vs. Atom, but it's certainly inexpensive and probably outpaces a D525. Whether it's enough or not is the question. If you could somehow get that up to 1.5 GHz then it'd definitely run circles around the D525, at 1.1 Ghz though, I have no good idea if it's fast enough to suit your needs.

It sounds like you need a PCI-E card for your SATA ports, but any board will have that, just don't use the PCI-E for video.

If gigabit speeds are your bottleneck though, you may just go with a desktop board with a cheap celeron and put an Intel NIC + SATA board in it. The on-board NICs are alright, but if you're pushing to full speed, then the Intel NICs are more able to push to the limits.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

If gigabit speeds are your bottleneck though, you may just go with a desktop board with a cheap celeron and put an Intel NIC + SATA board in it. The on-board NICs are alright, but if you're pushing to full speed, then the Intel NICs are more able to push to the limits.

That's an excellent idea... :thumbsup:

I'd just point out that Intel's own MB's use Intel NIC's, so there is no need for an expansion card.

An Intel MB + Celeron/Pentium GxxxT + SATA controller would be viable...