Recommendations for low power ZFS Hardware for small office?

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idea

Gawd
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Jan 24, 2005
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Can we get a thread going for low power hardware that would be good for a small office/home NAS/SAN? I would like features that are easily found in more expensive server hardware like IPMI (remote power, remote console) and ECC RAM (required for ZFS). I am not really concerned with CPU power because any typical processor these days can handle a few users, even the dual core Atoms.

My current setup is showing it's age. Supermicro X6DVL-EG with dual Socket 604 Xeons that are 110W each. It runs OpenSolaris 2009.06 just fine.
 
No IPMI but here's my ECC low cost / low power setup:

CPU: AMD ATHLON II X4 640 (it idles at just 4 watts) / AMD Athlon II X4 610e (if you really need low load power, it has a 45W TDP)
M/B: ASUS M4A78LT-M LE
RAM: 2 x 2 GB Kingston KVR1333D3E9S/2G
HBA: Supermicro AOC-USAS-L8I

What do you need IPMI for? Nothing that wake-on-lan and ssh access cant solve.
 
Last edited:
Relativistic said:
No IPMI but here's my ECC low cost / low power setup:

CPU: AMD ATHLON II X4 640 (it idles at just 4 watts) / AMD Athlon II X4 610e (if you really need low load power, it has a 45W TDP)
M/B: ASUS M4A78LT-M LE
RAM: 2 x 2 GB Kingston KVR1333D3E9S/2G
HBA: Supermicro AOC-USAS-L8I

What do you need IPMI for? Nothing that wake-on-lan and ssh access cant solve.
Click to expand...

You cannot recover from a kernel panic, controller failure or the like with SSH.

@ OP: How many users? How many drives? The big issue with Atom's is that you do not get ECC support. Look to LGA 1156 platform for low power + IMPI 2.0/ KVM-over-IP.
 
pjkenned said:
You cannot recover from a kernel panic, controller failure or the like with SSH.

@ OP: How many users? How many drives? The big issue with Atom's is that you do not get ECC support. Look to LGA 1156 platform for low power + IMPI 2.0/ KVM-over-IP.
Click to expand...

8 drives. I could've sworn I saw an Atom with ECC support but can't find it right now.

After some searching, I found this little guy. This seems like the best choice.
Supermicro X8SIL-F
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon3000/3400/X8SIL.cfm?IPMI=Y

I'm probably gonna buy it, but not yet. I'm still searching for something that is compatible with my older hardware just because I have so many spare CPUs (771 Xeons, C2Q) and RAM (DDR2 FBDIMM) lying around.
 
FB-DIMMs are particularly power hungry, if you want a low-power setup you would want 1.35V DDR3 ECC SDRAM instead.

The other SuperMicro boards offer more functionality, such as onboard 1068E HBA and more DIMM slots; have a look: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/X58/X8ST3-F.cfm
It does not support ECC though. You need a server chipset for that and Xeon CPU i believe. AMD boards may be cheaper but little AMD-oriented server boards; though supermicro has some as well.
 
sub.mesa said:
The other SuperMicro boards offer more functionality, such as onboard 1068E HBA and more DIMM slots; have a look: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/X58/X8ST3-F.cfm
It does not support ECC though. You need a server chipset for that and Xeon CPU i believe. AMD boards may be cheaper but little AMD-oriented server boards; though supermicro has some as well.
Click to expand...

The X8ST3-F does support ECC memory, but you need to use a Xeon CPU aswell.
Anandtech.com used this board in their ZFS-build on page 6, with a Xeon CPU and ECC ram.
 
The other SuperMicro boards offer more functionality, such as onboard 1068E HBA and more DIMM slots; have a look: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/X58/X8ST3-F.cfm
It does not support ECC though. You need a server chipset for that and Xeon CPU i believe. AMD boards may be cheaper but little AMD-oriented server boards; though supermicro has some as well.
Click to expand...

Just some thoughts:

1. X8ST3-F does, as mentioned, support ECC if you use a Xeon CPU, not if you use a Core i7. I have a few and they work great.
2. LGA 1366 CPUs tend to use a lot more power than LGA 1156 (in general). The low power CPU mentioned should be compared with the LGA 1156 equivalents.
3. DDR3 DIMMs of differing voltages don't save THAT much power. CPU selection is a lot bigger component.
4. If you are going OpenSolaris based instead of FreeBSD based ZFS system, you can use the LSI SAS 2008 based cards. That makes a X8SIL-F + LSI 9211-8i or X8SI6-F plausible. The main drawback with the X8SIL-F is that you only have four DIMM slots. The X8SI6-F has six slots but to use all six one needs to use registered ECC DIMMs. Then again, that is really only an issue if you want more than 16GB these days.
 
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