How much cpu power do you really need?

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MotionBlur

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 27, 2001
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Going back and forth, I think I've decided on having a separate 4U File Server.

Last year I had a Dual 2210 Opteron, 4GB of Ram, a HPT RocketRaid 4320 and 4x1.5tb Seagate 7200.11s in RAID 5, Dual Intel gigabit ethernet cards bonded running Windows Server 2008 R2. It worked great, but I downsized last Fall, bought an Antec 1200 and just moved all of the drives and Raid Controller into my main machine. Since then I've bought 2 additional 1.5tb drives and converted the array to RAID 10, along with the other drives I already had in my Antec 1200, all of the bays are full.

So my question is, could I get away with using an Intel Atom 330 or 510 processor with 4gb and my current RAID 10? It doesn't have to be an Atom, I was just going for cheapest to power while not impacting performance. I know the gigabit ethernet will be the bottleneck, I just didn't it to hinder me maxing out the 2 gigabit cards transfer rates.
 
i take it you are more worried about throughput than crunching power, eh?

i'd say you want at the minimum a dual core cpu. throw in as much ram as humanly possible (i'd say 8gb, if you are using a cheap solution) so you could run like a 4gb ramdisk. then using windows junctions to symlink all the temp and cache folders to the ramdisk, the machine will be blistering fast for most purposes. also, you can use the ramdisk as a temp location for downloading files before dumping it to the hdds :] the performance difference is amazing, always.

this is how i lived on a netbook for a year, but with 1.5gb of ram total.

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1035537451&postcount=29 - earlier post i made about making fun use of a ramdisk and forcing google chrome to cache to it (firefox, etc are much easier to tweak)
 
So I was using a N330 with the NVIDIA ION chipset. When I was comparing it to the new i5-650 and i3-530 I bought (http://www.servethehome.com/intel-core-i5-650-v-atom-n330-nvida-ion-review/) the N330 was really barely running R2, I didn't even try to run VM's on it. On the other hand, the i3/i5's I run R2 and VM's on with no problems.

Now if you just wanted to run something like a ubuntu based raid 10 box, there are no parity calcs associated with raid 10, and even if there were, the N330 will saturate a single, and probably two gigabit links.
 
SinShiva said:
i take it you are more worried about throughput than crunching power, eh?

i'd say you want at the minimum a dual core cpu. throw in as much ram as humanly possible (i'd say 8gb, if you are using a cheap solution) so you could run like a 4gb ramdisk. then using windows junctions to symlink all the temp and cache folders to the ramdisk, the machine will be blistering fast for most purposes. also, you can use the ramdisk as a temp location for downloading files before dumping it to the hdds :] the performance difference is amazing, always.

this is how i lived on a netbook for a year, but with 1.5gb of ram total.

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1035537451&postcount=29 - earlier post i made about making fun use of a ramdisk and forcing google chrome to cache to it (firefox, etc are much easier to tweak)
Click to expand...

The sole function of the file server is for my business which does both SD and HD video work, which can range from 20mb/sec to over 100mb/sec for uncompressed HD streams. The majority of the time I'm just streaming video from the array into Adobe Premiere or After Effects so it's definitely geared towards more reads then writes if that makes a difference.

I do have a Sempron 140, 4gb of ram and an Asus m3a78-cm (780V chipset) that is just lying around, I guess I could try that. My end goal is to get a better SAS Raid Controller with more ports then 8 later this year, but for the time being the 6x1.5tb drives are performing pretty well (over 350mb/sec sustained).
 
pjkenned said:
So I was using a N330 with the NVIDIA ION chipset. When I was comparing it to the new i5-650 and i3-530 I bought (http://www.servethehome.com/intel-core-i5-650-v-atom-n330-nvida-ion-review/) the N330 was really barely running R2, I didn't even try to run VM's on it. On the other hand, the i3/i5's I run R2 and VM's on with no problems.

Now if you just wanted to run something like a ubuntu based raid 10 box, there are no parity calcs associated with raid 10, and even if there were, the N330 will saturate a single, and probably two gigabit links.
Click to expand...

The only experience I have with Atoms is on my HP Mini 1000 that I only use for remoting into my Windows 7 desktop and my D510 (The new dual core version) running OpenSUSE.

Since I have a hardware RAID controller I was just curious if I could work with a slower/low watt cpu, but it looks like a Athlon II X2 might be the best bet.
 
i use a N270 netbook for my torrents and that can barely do 10/100 let alone gigabyte

now i know thats with 2gb vs 4/8GB and single vs dual core but still you can only pull so my power out of an atom

personally i think a E5200 or something like that should be alright
 
I use an Athlon II x2 in my WHS box and it works well. Normally it is idling @ 800Mhz for normal tasks, but has the omph needed to run VMs when I want.
 
sorry, i was tired beyond compare when i made that most. i don't think i read even half of what you originally wrote lol.

a dual core with 1-2gb of ram should be overkill, but i wouldn't go less. (for the storage box)

[edit] i actually have an ftp server running for my father's work on a 1ghz p3 with 1gb of ram with a software raid 5 running (mdadm) - it's a piece, but it works
 
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