andstein85
Dabbler
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2017
- Messages
- 14
I tried running something very similar with an old Dell SC1430 with 2x X5355's (120w TDP each vs 80w for the E5335). Between the fan noise and the heat, it made my home office pretty unpleasant. But the Dell could run with only one CPU socket occupied, which helped a bit. I'm not sure the Supermicro board would run correctly with only a single socket occupied.
An old X9Sxx board with a Xeon E3 would cut the TDP in half, and offer almost double the performance.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compar...355-vs-Intel-Xeon-E3-1270-V2/1229vs1294vs1192
I'm already using Xeon E5335's in my current board :P.
But still... with my office door closed in the winter(and the HVAC vent closed), my office stays a toasty 75 degrees which makes working in shorts and a t-shirt kinda nice. Granted this office is insulated on all 4 walls with rockwool sound deadening insulation which is also r15 rated, so it traps heat really well. In the summer I vent the heat out of the closet using a brushless bathroom fan(nearly silent) installed directly above the rack and I keep a passive return vent open to allow cool air from the rest of the house to be drawn into my office. It stays fairly comfortable year round, but the key is I don't have to use a space heater to keep my toes from freezing in the winter, which in the long run actually saves me money in electricity.
Using iSCSI over Fiberchannel with this board and CPU combo is actually very performant in comparison to all of the other NAS configurations I've tested. With a 120MB/s transfer from my media server VM over the network to my desktop, the NAS server never saw over 8% CPU. An internal transfer from one LUN on my media server vm to another LUN (same array) runs about 400MB/s, but CPU still doesn't go past 50%. A storage vMotion from the local raid10 array on the ESXi host to a LUN on the FreeNAS server run's about 700MB/s which pegs CPU probably because the fibre card is maxed out and becomes a bottleneck. Now that I think about it....the last time I did a storage vMotion of a VM over 50GB, it caused the freeNAS server to crash, probably because RAM/chipset was overheating during the transfer. At the time, I couldn't figure out why though and ended up re-deploying the VM I needed directly to the FreeNAS array instead of moving it over from the local raid.
One day my wife will let me spend some money to upgrade this ancient NAS hardware.... and it will happen eventually, especially considering I've noticed FreeNAS 11.2 won't boot using this board. But it'd be a waste of a Christmas ask IMO as there are many more smart home devices I'd rather ask for. One day though... But then again, one day I'll build a deck... and one day I'll re-model my kitchen and master bathroom... #neverdone
BTW, thanks everyone for the feedback and help. I absolutely love the FreeNAS project.