Building NAS - Intel or AMD (FM2+)?

Doge on 28/05/2014 - 14:40

Hey guys looking for some advice on completing my FreeNAS based home server. At the moment my desktop (2500K & 290) is on 24/7 and at idle it's pulling >100W from the wall. So I'm looking to build a server that will use significantly less power and reduce the wear on my beloved desktop. I want it to be reasonably powerful; will be running plex, downloading "legitimate" torrents and performing nightly backups among other things once I learn the ins and outs of freenas. Definitely want to saturate the 1Gbps line between NAS and PC.

So far:
Antec True Power Classic 450W gold psu
Fractal design define r3
8GB DDR3
4 x 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001

I'm trying to decide between using an Intel/AMD platform.

The options:
A8-6600K & Cheap A88X Mobo
i3-4150 & Cheap H97 Mobo

The 6600K is pretty much the cheapest 4 core APU I can get locally, same story for the 4150.

At this stage I am leaning towards AMD because:
8 native SATA 6Gbps ports
4 USB3 Ports
Around $50 Less than comparable Intel setup

Intel Pros:
Lower power usage
Faster CPU with less cores
Many cheap asrock mobos still have intel lan
Low power graphics

My main issue is that it's hard to find find power consumption information for the later APUs. From what I can find the i3-4130 would only consume around 20-30W at idle. I can't imagine the 6600K getting anywhere near that considering it has a 100W TDP. The A8-7600 specs look great but it's nowhere to be found.

Has anyone here built a NAS based on an AMD platform? How's it working? Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated.

Computing

Comments

  • sane on 28/05/2014 - 15:20
    +1

    Why on earth are you going for such power hogs?

    HP Microservers take ~30-40W with CPU, disks, etc. - you don't need a fast processor.

    Aim at a real low power processor, an Atom line or similar designed for laptops, and minimal GPU. There is even talk of ARM home servers coming to market.

    • Doge on 28/05/2014 - 15:36

      I don't want an n54L and the cheapest bare bones gen8 is ~$420 plus ram, so $500 and will be slower and less expandable. I already have the case, power supply and ram from a previous machine, seems a waste not to use them.

    • samfisher5986 on 29/05/2014 - 23:20

      Microservers, atoms etc are very very slow and can't be used if you want it to be more than just a NAS.

      Also my custom build HTPC/NAS etc holds 10 hard drives and an SSD, can your NAS?

  • scrimshaw on 28/05/2014 - 15:44

    will be running plex, downloading "legitimate" torrents and performing nightly backups

    Pentium G3220 will do this easy. Idles at 26~28 watts, low temps, even lower if you do some undervolting adjustments.

    • [Deactivated] on 28/05/2014 - 16:31

      Those Pentium G3220 are surprisingly powerful. They compare to an Intel Core2 Quad in some scenarios.

  • futaris on 28/05/2014 - 16:17

    Intel. Much lower power usage.

    Or ARM (in the future)

  • p1 ama on 28/05/2014 - 16:25

    Just go with the cheapest Celeron you can get, it'll perform the job more than fine.

  • flatwhitepls on 28/05/2014 - 16:41

    I would pickup this MB. Low power usuage and heaps of power !! http://www.gigabyte.com.au/products/product-page.aspx?pid=50…

    A faster option : http://www.anandtech.com/show/7832/bay-traild-from-asus-the-…

    I have an old NAS/HTPC running on the gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 . No issues playing 1080p on xbmc and streaming through plex media server. I presume the 2 above choices would be more than enough.

    • tonyjzx on 28/05/2014 - 20:48

      intersting boards but only 2 sata

    • [Deactivated] on 29/05/2014 - 07:53

      I run Plex on an old Duron with 1.2GB RAM and 40GB boot drive. Plex is amazing!

  • bradsmrbetty on 29/05/2014 - 08:07

    The design looks fine. I have used a first gen i3 for ages as an esxi host it was drawing about 100 + watts with 3 7200 RPM HDD.
    NAS drives made that drop a fair bit, obvious I know.
    The i3 are much, much better as you already know.
    I have an HP N36L it was drawing about 75 to 80
    With the stock 7200rpm and 2 NAS drives. That dropped a fair bit about 20 watts once I put an SSD in as the main OS, I run another machine virtually on the same SSD.

    A third option, a bit out there is to scale back the amount of NAS drives, get an old laptop you have already and an external dual sata docking station with esata.
    I used a laptop for a year 24/7 and it worked reasonably well about 30 odd watts at idle.

  • PsychoLogic on 29/05/2014 - 18:42

    For many this will be TL;DR, so the short version, you are over-speccing the system and could save money & electricity by choosing other components and/or OS.

    The long version…
    I have just built a similar system for similar reasons this week - I had one power hungry PC on 24/7 to run services which my (full :( ) Netgear ReadyNAS pro 6 couldn't without severe OS modification. Specs I opted for are as follows:

    Gigabyte F2A88XM-D3H Motherboard
    AMD A6 5400K (2-Core) - 65W TDP
    Corsair CMV4GX3M2A1333C9 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333 memory
    Kingston SSDNow V300 60GB SSD (OS)
    6 x 4TB WD Green drives

    IMO your CPU choice is complete overkill for the application - a headless NAS will use minimal compute resources. One consideration I had was to go for the new AMD Kabini (socket AM1 Athlon/Sempron) processor. They are lower power, have better integrated GPUs than the Intel i3 parts should you want to drive a screen in future, and are significantly cheaper, and will quite happily run a NAS OS.

    The only reason I opted for FM2+ motherboard and processor instead is the number of integrated SATA ports available (F2A88XM-D3H has 8). The most I found on an AM1 motherboard was 4 on both the ASRock AM1H-ITX and the ASRock AM1B-ITX. It would be possible to add in a cheap SATA raid card to rectify this - I also plan to have a wireless card in the box so this wasn't an option for me.

    Another consideration I think you should make is the operating system. I spent most of a morning weighing up the pros and cons of FreeNAS / OpenMediaVault / NAS4Free and ended up choosing OpenMediaVault. Being based on Debian Linux there is more freedom with installation of 3rd party software and other customization. Within a couple of hours, I had Python 2.7 installed, running FlexGet from a scheduled service (configured in web ui) to talk to Transmission - the main task I required a PC over the Netgear NAS for. The only downside is lack of ZFS support, but ZFS is resource-intensive overkill for this kind of application (oh great, it self-heals, so I don't need to schedule RAID scrubbing?). You can then get away with less memory - ZFS is the main consumer in a FreeNAS based system.

    To give you an idea of the performance to expect, as a resource usage test I'm currently streaming 720p content VIA DLNA to two TVs, and one PC via SMB, and other background services running (transmission, coupld of ssh sessions). CPU usage is hovering around 0 - 1%, (load average 0.01, 0.03, 0.00) and memory 4%. My specs are off-the-charts overkill for the application. Yours are far more so.

    Also don't be locked in by local parts availability, unless you specifically want to support your local suppliers. I bought my parts from PCCaseGear and Amazon. Newegg was also considered but with postage came out slightly more.

    • [Deactivated] on 02/06/2014 - 10:51

      I highly doubt you are actually streaming with 0 - 1% load. I have more loan then that on my 4770k when streaming.

  • Doge on 28/06/2014 - 18:26

    Thanks for all the advice guys. In the end I got one of those Asus z87m-plus motherboards from ebay for $75 delivered. Paired it with a Pentium G3240. After some difficulty I got FreeNAS up and running on it and I'm getting 100MB/s writes to it and it's only consuming 45W with the 4x3TB drives which is just amazeballs, that Antec PSU must be pretty good (I think it is made by Seasonic). Really happy with it and glad I could save the money compared to a i3 system. The total cost would be around the $250 mark not including case or drives which is awesome.

    • pumpkinspice on 08/07/2014 - 12:17

      How are you going with the Realtek LAN on that?
      I've read that they're really bad with FreeNAS.
      Also I read that you ideally need 1GB RAM per TB of storage, did you leave it at 8GB or up to 16GB?

      • Doge on 08/07/2014 - 12:28

        It has been fine. BSD has had support for it since version 9 I believe. I tried the latest version of FreeNAS 8 at one stage and it definitely does not support the realtek NIC. Just left RAM at 8GB. Seems to be fine, I haven't noticed any performance issues even during the initial migration of all my junk where I was writing to it for over a day. I have 4x3TB in raidz1 which gives 7.8TiB total storage maybe that's why it's OK?

Login or Join to leave a comment
Login Join