[OpenIndiana-discuss] Any hardware snafus in this lineup?

[Philip Robar]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 7:20 PM, Harry Putnam <reader at newsguy.com> wrote:

> These hardware specs are for a planned home lan zfs NAS
>
>
> CONFIGURATION
>         CPU : AMD 64 CPU AM3/AM3+
>         AMD FX-8350 Piledriver (Vishera) 4.0GHz (Eight Core) 32nm,
>         AM3+ 8MB Cache
>
>         Cooling Fans : AMD 64 CPU Fans
>             Coolermaster GeminII S, 5 Copper Heat Pipes, Extra Quiet
>             140MM CPU fan
>
>         Motherboard : AMD 64 AM3/ AM3+ Motherboards
>             ASUS M5A78L-M/USB3 AM3+,AMD 760G, Onboard video,HDMI,
>             USB3.0
>
>  NOTE: I'm pretty sure this ram can be ECC.
>        Most asus boards accept both.
>
>         Memory : DDR3 Dual Channel memory
>             32GB (4x8GB) PC14900 DDR3 1866 Dual Channel (high
>             performance memory)
>

>From your description you're building a dedicated home single purpose, i.e.
file, server. Unless you have other plans in the back of your mind the
parts you chosen seem inappropriate or gross overkill from, respectively,
either an energy efficiency or compute power standpoint. I suggest that
instead you consider an Intel socket 1150 CPU and a real server motherboard.

Even the lowest end Haswell Celeron has more than enough compute power for
a home file server and all Haswells have much lower TPD than the AMD and
probably also idle at a much lower wattage too.

Haswell Celeron G1820 - $40 at Microcenter.
Haswell Core i3 4130 - $100. If you need AES-NI support for file system
encryption.
Haswell Xeon E3-1200 V3 - Starting at around $200. If your server is going
to do something like video transcoding.

A server motherboard will have ECC support, Intel NICs and IPMI for remote
management. Supermicro is most people's server board brand of choice, but
there's also Tyan, ASUS and others to choose from.

One of the new Intel Atom Avoton (4 or 8 core) server motherboard/CPU
combos from ASrock or Supermicro are even more attractive from an energy
cost standpoint. (This is a serious consideration for a system that runs
24x7.) (http://www.servethehome.com has reviews of several of these.)

Since you said this is a home server I assume that that means that there
will be at most a handful of connections at any given time. In that
situation even 16 GB of memory will be more than you need, but in any case
get ECC RAM. It costs so little more that it just doesn't make sense not to.

Phil