Best processor for budget NAS build

[CarpCharacin]

I'm planning on building a budget NAS. Would a Celeron G3930 work, or should I get a Pentium G4600?

 

[Brian_B]

Depends on your workload. Most consumer NASes run on Atom or ARM cores and aren't much worse off for it if it's just basic file serving of a small array on a small network.

 

[CarpCharacin]

It won't be under a heavy workload. I plan to use mainly to just store photos and videos.

 

[TahoeDust]

If you are not going to run anything like Plex on it, either will work fine.

 

[Shintai]

Agree its going to be fine

 

[thebufenator]

Agreed with everyone else. If you decide to run plex on it though, you'll need to buy something thatn can transcode in real time.

I bought an FX 8320e for $90 a long time ago for mine and with it undervolted its pretty low power, but can transcode real well when needed. Kinda EOL at this point though

 

[Shintai]

Plex supports quicksync.

 

[thebufenator]

Plex supports quicksync.

Didn't realize that, good to know. However, unless they added some magic sauce for it, gpu transcoding won't have as good of image quality (yet) as cpu transcoding image quality. Same reason I don't use quicksync on my i7 when I am handbraking my movies for plex.

 

[Orddie]

based off your workload you could go atom IMO. Most distorts have a hardware doc which will help ya determine what the nerds making the software suggest.

 

[CarpCharacin]

I'm planning to run FreeNAS. I'll probably go with the pentium, but I'm a little worried about not having ECC memory, but I think it will be fine.

 

[Randall Stephens]

I'm planning to run FreeNAS. I'll probably go with the pentium, but I'm a little worried about not having ECC memory, but I think it will be fine.

Go to their forums and see what others are using. I've noticed that there seem to be a few configs they recommend and you may have a hard time troubleshooting an issue if you are not using their "recommended" hardware.

 

[Bradley01]

Defend on your work list.

 

[4330thgink]

It doesn't take much CPU for NAS. You should be more concerned with bus and interface bandwidth than a CPU. An ages old CPU from the late 1990's and early 2000's will handle the workload, but wont have the buses for good throughput. Any of the Core or AMD64 processors with PCI-e buses will more than handle NAS duties.