Cores and Ram for 3 ITX file servers - 1 ufs, 2 zfs

[capndave]

I am scratch building 3 ITX form factor Freenas boxes, for personal use.

I'd like to save $10 per CPU (Celeron G440 v G530) and lower the Ram costs if possible.

As long as the throughput bottleneck on Box 1 is the Gigabit NIC, and not the array, I'm happy.
(And, of course, I want Box 1 to serve as close to Gigabit speed as possible.)

Here's how the Trio will be used:

Box 1 - 6TB *UFS Raid 0* (4 x 1.5TB). 4GB DDR3. Gigabit.
Box 2 - 6TB Raid-Z (4 x 2TB). 8GB DDR3. Gigabit.
Box 3 - 6TB Raid-Z (4 x 2TB). 8GB DDR3. Gigabit.

Box 1 will be the "live data". It needs to be my throughput performer.
Box 1 will run CIFS, Rsync, monitoring services.
Box 1 will be mounted to one Win 7 node via CIFS. Gb Nic on Win 7 node.
Box 1 will get heavy read/write for personal photo and video editing.
None of the boxes will serve media streams or do media decoding.

Box 2 & 3 will only receive replication from Box 1, on an hourly basis.

For *the use-case described above*, ie., not benchmarking, or pedantics,

- Is there any benefit to a dual-core versus single-core cpu?
- Is 4GB good for Box 1 (ufs raid 0) or will 8GB matter?
- Is 8GB needed for Box 2 & 3. It'll just be doing hourly pulls?

Thanks!

Dave

 

[survive]

Hi capndave,

A couple of thoughts:

I'd go with the G530 if you want to do CIFS. CIFS likes clock speed and it looks like the G440 is a 1.6Ghz proc vs. 2.4Ghz for the G530.

Cheap as ram is these days I'd go ahead and get 8GB on all 3 boxes, if for no other reason than simple standardization.

It might be worth checking to see if you can get the performance you need out of a ZFS volume on box 1 and then do ZFS replication between the boxes. Keep in mind you really only need to be able to move at best ~120MB\s to disk, so there may not be much to be gained with RAID 0 on box 1. It might be worth adding another NIC to box 1 to handle the replication data.

-Will