AM3 CPU sufficient?

[hellokevin11]

For various reasons I have an am3 setup.

Current cpu is Fx-4130 which has aes-ni. It's however using 100 watts.
Entire system is costing $200 a year to run.

I am thinking of putting in one of these:

AMD Sempron X2 190 45watt
or
AMD Athlon II X2 250u 25watt

Neither have aes-ni.

Would the 25 watt 250u be sufficient for a system with zfsz3?
13 1TB drives with a 64GB ssd + 16GB unreg ECC

 

[Fran Aquino]

You might be interested in having a look at this thread: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/c-states-bug.18314/

 

[Bidule0hm]

And the hardware recommendations thread too :) (the link is in my sig)

 

[hellokevin11]

And the hardware recommendations thread too :) (the link is in my sig)

I appreciate the Hardware guide, but it's all one sided. You should do amd just to be thorough, like the Asus AM1m-a with an Athlon processor and ecc
or Opteron. The choice might be not so great compared to an intel setup but some people have no choice, like myself.

Supermicro has a great warranty but by no means are their boards bulletproof, the big stack of dead boards at work speaks to that. They are like
HP, if something fails they just ship another.

I have an asus am3 board, and one of the rare am3 opterons. Total cost was $80. The Am1m-a and athlon had the same price.

A supermicro C206 board that works with some of the pentiums is $198, no CPU (add $70)

It is probably best to go intel if you are doing a scratch build, I happen to have a lot of assets here for free, so...amd.

You can get am3 opterons (6mb cache, quad core) for about $29 now, slap it on an asus am3 board and have a super cheap system
with ecc and sata 6g/s for less than the price of a supermicro enclosure.

It's a poor boy build for sure, but I am banking on the robustness of ZFS Z3.

I wish I had the bank to roll out an avoton with a 64GB ecc and an lsi card with 18 3tb drives...

 

[Fran Aquino]

Yes that HW guide says you don't need an ultra expensive CPU to run FreeNAS but with only Intel CPUs being officially supported that statement seems contradictory.

I pointed you to the C-states bug thread because that 100 W power figure looks somewhat high, even for a 125 W TDP CPU and 13 drives.

 

[Bidule0hm]

There is the pentium G3220 which is 3 GHz and is priced at less than $60... so, no, Intel isn't expensive if you chose the right CPU.

There is another problem with AMD: the ECC support.

And there is the same problem with consumer grade hardware, it's why we often chose SuperMicro MB for example (plus you have a onboard Intel NIC instead of a crappy Broadcom or even crappier Realtek...).

 

[hellokevin11]

There is the pentium G3220 which is 3 GHz and is priced at less than $60... so, no, Intel isn't expensive if you chose the right CPU.

There is another problem with AMD: the ECC support.

And there is the same problem with consumer grade hardware, it's why we often chose SuperMicro MB for example (plus you have a onboard Intel NIC instead of a crappy Broadcom or even crappier Realtek...).

Only ASUS has ecc ram support on AM1 and AM3, so there's not much there.

The $60 the G3220 costs is nice, but Intel board is $120-200

I can get three systems for the cost for the $180 the intel cpu and board costs. Supports ecc and aes-ni, 25watt cpu.
Or in my case it leaves me $110 towards the ecc ram.

As to "consumer" grade and the "server" grade, the only real difference is the warranty and support. I don't believe supermicro boards
to be built any better that asus boards. More features for certain, much more pro features like m2 ssd and 12gb/s sas.

I guess what I am saying is not everyone can afford even the entry level Intel setup.

Most people here won't give amd the time of day.

I know most people would say pay more up front, get the good stuff.

Some of us have no real budget, and you can build a 25 watt system with ECC and AES-NI plus psu and 8GB ECC for $189
for less that the cost of the supermicro motherboard.

ZFS Z3 is suddenly possible and affordable to people who could never consider it before.

 

[Bidule0hm]

"Some of us have no real budget" there's your problem... if you don't have the budget for proper hardware then don't buy crappy hardware and hope it'll be ok. It's like buying a motorcycle instead of a car because you don't have the budget and then expecting you'll be able to do the same things you would do with the car, you'll don't like the result...

 

[DJ9]

The specs on that motherboard clearly state: 2 x DIMM, Max. 32GB, DDR3 1600/1333 MHz Non-ECC, Un-buffered Memory

Per: http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AM1MA/specifications/

 

[Fraoch]

I don't believe supermicro boards to be built any better that asus boards.

Good point, but Supermicro does thoroughly test their motherboards for compatibility with many, many, many OSes. Have you seen this?

http://www.supermicro.com/support/resources/OS/C224.cfm

That's one generation of motherboards with one chipset.

Most people here won't give amd the time of day.

It's nothing personal but AMD does not thoroughly test for things like ECC support. I bet many here would love to run FreeNAS on an AMD system but odds are it may not even boot FreeNAS. Again, it's nothing personal, Intel and Supermicro stuff just works in FreeNAS. AMD sometimes, sometimes not.

Some of us have no real budget, and you can build a 25 watt system with ECC and AES-NI plus psu and 8GB ECC for $189
for less that the cost of the supermicro motherboard.

FreeNAS is a kind of a pay-to-play system now. It's irrevocably tied to ZFS and "ZFS be a cruel mistress". The RAM requirements are steep and the foundation on FreeBSD means that not all hardware will work seamlessly. The hardware was not chosen with low cost in mind, it was chosen because that's what works.

There are other NAS appliances where the AM1 hardware you're quoting would work fine, and it's not a personal slight against anyone without the budget for FreeNAS to advise them to look there. It would be much worse to advise them that this hardware would work fine, particularly if they expected ECC.

 

[cyberjock]

Sorry, I'm gonna lock this thread. This has been an argument that is as old as this forum.

- If you don't have a budget for the proper hardware, arguing that you don't have the budget as a justification for improper hardware is starting off your future server on a terribly bad foot. You won't save money when you build a system that doesn't work so you "get" the opportunity to go buy a whole second system. Building once is cheaper than building twice.
- If you think that AMD is somehow some great product that is very compatible with FreeBSD, you are lying to yourself. The CTO of iXsystems (which is also a founder of f*ckin' FreeBSD itself) has said on more than one occasion in the forum and to plenty more in bug tickets that AMD is just not a good choice, period. So I don't care why you think AMD is okay over Intel, there's people with decades more experience touching the exact-freakin-code you'll be *needing* to run properly telling you AMD isn't well supported. If you truly believe your experience trumps his, well, why are you even talking to us mere forum mortals since you clearly know everything about everything. If the c-state thing doesn't make you go "wtf" I don't know what it takes.
- Supermicro does *significantly* more testing than Asus. Asus is great for desktops. They are terrible for servers. Even in the Intel forums Asus just recently got a big middle finger because it seems that Asus is either lying about what is supported, isn't doing good testing and validation before claiming support, or hacking the BIOS. If you want to trust *your* server to a company that has that kind of quality, well, why are you talking to us? Clearly you'll believe just about anything you read and take their word for it with no questions asked. In all fairness I wouldn't buy a Supermicro desktop board either. Different objectives with the hardware and how it is used and I don't want to learn the hard way what desktop use Supermicro didn't test in their QA process.
- If you read the engineering docs on ZFS, they pretty much start off with "use proper and quality hardware". So you can "bank" on RAIDZ3 all day long, but the ZFS powers that be have already told you not to do what you are doing, so you shouldn't expect ZFS to save you from what you are going to do. They already told you not to!
- Using FreeNAS is not some God-given right. It is not something that everyone is entitled to use because they want to use it. FreeNAS is not for everyone. FreeNAS is also not appropriate for all hardware.

Good luck to everyone involved and thanks for the discussion.