Recycle a 775 CPU for a NAS?

Long time lurker, first time poster... was hoping to get some advice about a potential NAS build.

I feel like my network storage situation at home is in tatters. Basically I have a Pogoplug E02 running Arch off of an external 2 tb WD Passport. This system hosts a few NFS shares for movies, music, torrents, and other stuff and an AFP share for Time Machine (backing up the wife's MBP). Essential files are otherwise strewn about between the Pogoplug, my desktop, and my laptop – not an ideal solution, and maybe in total about 1.5 tb. I am worried the external drive might fail without warning.

My desktop (also Arch) is an i3-3220 with 8 gb of non-ECC ram on an Asrock H77m board. It is on 24 / 7, as it hosts a MythTV backend and a hostapd service, providing ~450 Mbps wireless-N from the vertical center of the house.

I have an old C2Q Q9300 sitting in front of me (from a previous desktop build) and two HGST 4 TB NAS drives waiting to be installed as a raid1 mirror somewhere... should I recycle the Q9300 as a standalone NAS, or should I plop these two drives in my i3 desktop using mdadm or ZFS-on-linux?

In researching a NAS build, all roads seem to lead to ZFS, and by extension ECC. The Q9300 would make a nice nas4free type build with a X7SBE and 8 gb ECC DDR2 (~$40 and ~$80, respectively, from ebay). I am at peace with the idea of putting a respectable VT-d capable processor to good use with relatively little $$. Cons would be 1) a second system running 24 / 7, using a somewhat inefficient processor by today's standards, 2) a maximum of 8 gb of ram, possibly limiting future storage expansion, 3) painful monetary investment in old DDR2, and (4) dependence on a used motherboard that could fail at any time.

The other option is to install these two drives in my desktop. The problem is while the i3 is ECC capable, the motherboard and current ram are not and would have to be replaced (~$250 for 8 gb ECC ram and a X9SCM) if I wanted to use ECC. I would then have spare parts, which I am somewhat lazy in reselling. If I abandoned ECC, mdadm / LVM with raid1 seems to be a more time-tested than ZFS-on-linux, but abandoning ECC seems... scary.

What would you do? I'd appreciate any thoughts! TIA.

Without going to much into details, I would go for an Ivy Bridge or Haswell based system. Those are so much faster than the Yorkfield processors on a core by core basis and consume significantly less power.

You can use a board like X10SLM-F and add a cheap Pentium G3220 and still get the benefits of up to 32 GB ECC RAM. It will be a bit more expensive than what you suggested, but you get a server grade solution with IPMI. Is there a reason you would like to use VT-d?

omniscence said:

You can use a board like X10SLM-F and add a cheap Pentium G3220 and still get the benefits of up to 32 GB ECC RAM. It will be a bit more expensive than what you suggested, but you get a server grade solution with IPMI. Is there a reason you would like to use VT-d?

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I thought about this option too. No specific use for VT-d, other than for future proofing. I briefly thought about adding a pfSense VM to this new system, but the [H] consensus seems to be that a separate system is more secure.

I understand the urge to reuse these processors. After all I have still a E6320, E8200, Q6600 (that ran at 3.6 GHz für 2 years) alone from the Core 2 generation, but a new system is cheap and does not produce so much heat.

Also, using a passthrough ethernet controller for pfsense would not qualify as more secure as a fully virtualized solution.
And the e1000 emulation usually works without hassle. So no VT-d needed even for that.
You would only need it if you want to passthrough a SAS HBA or something like this.

I prefer using a standalone pfsense box, not so much for security, but what if you have to do maintenance on your server... can you do without your internet connection during this time?

omniscence said:

I understand the urge to reuse these processors. After all I have still a E6320, E8200, Q6600 (that ran at 3.6 GHz für 2 years) alone from the Core 2 generation, but a new system is cheap and does not produce so much heat.

Also, using a passthrough ethernet controller for pfsense would not qualify as more secure as a fully virtualized solution.
And the e1000 emulation usually works without hassle. So no VT-d needed even for that.
You would only need it if you want to passthrough a SAS HBA or something like this.

I prefer using a standalone pfsense box, not so much for security, but what if you have to do maintenance on your server... can you do without your internet connection during this time?

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There are still LGA775 motherboards that would, in fact, be ideal for a pfsense server - one is even still new.

At MicroCenter today - http://www.microcenter.com/product/408923/G41M-P33_Combo_LGA_775_mATX_Intel_Motherboard

Yes; it's mATX - however, nothing prevents it from going into as large as an ATX full-tower case. (My larger ASUS P5G41-M LX2 was in an ATX mid-tower before I upgraded - the similar ASUS P5G41-M LX Plus was the same size; like the MSI one above, it supports DDR2 or DDR3 - I missed out on the ASUS board because it had its chop called before I could close the deal. I may purchase the MSI one for any of the three Core 2 derived CPUs that I would love to find new uses for (two Celeron DCs in addition to the Q6600) - primarily because they DO support DDR3, which is still reasonably priced for now.)

pfsense servers, home LAN servers, HTPCs, DIY Steam Boxes - the uses for LGA775, even long after their EOL, are many.

1. While these motherboards have only two DDR3 slots, they DO support 4 GB DIMMs - 8 GB is plenty for a typical desktop PC or a small server of any sort.

2. While the onboard PHY is 100mbps, this is fixable - use either the PCI slot or PCIe x1 slot, pop in a gigabit NIC of your choice, and go.

3. Four SATA ports - though limited to 3 Gb/sec. Desktop usage can be optical drive, SSD, and two platter drives; despite the lack of AHCI, you give up little in terms of performance.

4. DIY Steambox - Despite G41, it's doable - this motherboard DOES have a PCIe x16 slot - add a PCIe nVidia (or even AMD) GPU of your choice - the limits there are the speed of the interface (1.1) or your power supply.

With a small sticker mod and a box cutter you can use a nice E5450 3GHz Xeon in a 775 board. Xeons are really cheap, lower power, more cache etc.

PGHammer said:

pfsense servers, home LAN servers, HTPCs, DIY Steam Boxes - the uses for LGA775, even long after their EOL, are many.

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I generally agree with this statement and thanks for linking the 775 board. For my particular use case though, which is an ECC-capable ZFS NAS, there are very few options for compatible 775 motherboards. That particular MSI board does not seem to support ECC. A while ago I tried to look for all 775 boards clearly supported ECC, and the only ones I could find were the X7S series from Supermicro (X7SBE, X7SBi, etc). and a few Intel boards (DX38BT, X38ML, BSHBBL, and a couple of the S3210SH series). New, if you can find them these boards are ~ $150 and at that point you may as well go to IB or HW considering that the Pentium G chips are really cheap and the SM X9/X10 boards start at $170.

Pick up a Precision T5400 on Ebay.

daglesj said:

Pick up a Precision T5400 on Ebay.

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Do you mean an entire system or just the motherboard (Dell RW203)? It's an interesting idea since it takes FB-DIMMs (rather than UDIMMs the SM boards take) and FB ECC RAM is much cheaper than unbuffered, about half as much based on a quick look on ebay. And, maximum RAM is 32 gb. I wonder if this motherboard would fit in a Antec P180? My guess is no since most Dell cases and their power supplies are proprietary.

I meant the entire system as they are pretty cheap. I got a mint one with no HDDs but fitted with a 2.8GHz quad and 8GB of ram for £80 ($135). I managed to pick up a 16GB set of Kingston ECC ram on Amazon for £55 ($90) and a matched pair of 3GHz quads for £50 ($85).

These things are built like a tank. 850W PSU etc. etc. Designed to run forever. Parts are easy to find too.

Mine is so good I now use it as my main work rig fitted out with eSATA/USB3.0 and a HD7870. Wprimes in just over 7 seconds. Not too shabby for the cost.

I have the RAM risers for a T7400 that allows for 128GB of ECC ram. The T7400 is a huge beast though. Will take 4 HDDs easy and has native SAS built in. Other than that its pretty much the same as the T5400.

Thanks all for the suggestions. I ended up getting a X10SLM-F for $100 at MC (no idea why the price was so low, it's brand new). I think I will get either a Celeron G1820 or Pentium G3220 and a 8 gb ECC DDR3 stick and call it a day for now - will make a really cheap fileserver. It looks like the BIOS on some of these boards needs to be updated before HW refresh CPUs can be used, so I may get a proper Xeon later (don't have an older 1150 CPU laying around for the BIOS update).

The older T5400 and T5500 Precisions would be great alternatives though, particularly for a workstation. They are a lot of machine for their surprisingly low cost on Ebay and DFS. I couldn't confirm that T5400 would recognize an entire 4 tb HD SATA HD, which is necessary for me.

I will test my old LGA775 and DDR2 stuff and list it here or on Ebay. Hopefully someone can make use of it.

I'm still not sure what OS to run, but I'm now leaning towards ZoL on Arch since I'm more familiar with that than BSD, and I could move my mythbackend to it without having to use a jail. I may post a new thread after some more reading.