Scalable Xeons?

[southwow]

Does anyone remember the days when all you had to do to run SMP was make sure your board and CPU were compatible?... sheesh. I started SMP in the pentium pro days and lived through various slots, sockets, and LGA's. Then everything became a numbers game where you had to look at a chart to get performance numbers. Now, you need to know what precious metal you have and what number it is. I'm not sure what I'm even looking at now, lol. Sure, multiple cores on die have made things better and much easier, we no longer need things like slot/socket terminators, etc... But where does that leave the average entheusiast? What the heck do I buy to replace my aging hardware?

my box has evolved over the years and is currently sitting on an E3 1200 V5 (I think it is a 1231 if I remember correctly, no video). I absolutely love the board, which is an X10SL7-F with the 2308 cross flashed to IT mode. I'm also running an M5015 and 32GB of ECC DDR3. I've been happy with this setup for a while. I'm currently using a healthy mix of 5TB drives from different vendors and have almost exhausted my free space. I'm running vdevs with 3 drives each for redundancy and currently have 15 drives in my 3 backplanes.

I'd like to move to 10TB drives and was thinking of just building a new system since the drives and RAM are going to be 75% of the cost. I already have a spare 4U case, some extra backplanes, etc, so why not. I'm semi-interested in a dual CPU board since all of the current xeons seem to be dual socket or more (why no E3 replacement?).

My use case is nothing shocking. We have:
1.) A PLEX server delivering video to less than 10 screens in the house only. Transcoding # threads are a concern
2.) live copies of family photos, video, etc that are backed up elsewhere
3.) low-ish power consumption

So, which scalable xeons are best suited to NAS use and why?

 

[Chris Moore]

It may not be as sexy as a brand new system, but if I were buying today, I would buy this:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro...-2-6ghz-8-Core-128gb-24-Bay-JBOD/292399861990

There is just not enough advantage to be had buying the latest generation hardware.

PS: If you need something faster, there is this:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro...8x-8gb-10600R-24-Bay-SAS2-846EL1/372160071137

 

[southwow]

I love the idea of grabbing one of these beasts.

I was actually shopping around for them a few days ago. The only downside in a residential setting is that power consumption is through the roof.

I agree with you about the latest-gen hardware.

I've been shopping for dual LGA 2011-R3 boards, I'll update the thread when I pull the trigger on something.

One option I didn't mention is the Denverton Atom C3000 series. I'm looking at the higher-end models, but am saddened by the idea that you can't find anything that isn't mini-itx yet. I'd love to have 2 x8 slots for some extra options (2x perc 310, etc).

 

[Chris Moore]

The only downside in a residential setting is that power consumption is through the roof.

The power consumption is not all that. The drives draw more power than the difference in CPU draw will ever make.

I've been shopping for dual LGA 2011-R3 boards, I'll update the thread when I pull the trigger on something.

Don't wait for that. There are plenty of other's here that have info to share. Throw your ideas out and we have discussions.

One option I didn't mention is the Denverton Atom C3000 series.

It just is not worth the cost of the new hardware and the associated memory cost for DDR4 ...

 

[Chris Moore]

I agree with you about the latest-gen hardware.

There is a discussion about it now on another thread:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/obsolence-vs-modernity.60793/

 

[southwow]

Thought I'd update. I ended up picking up a used supermicro 846 24-bay complete server (AMD) with a passthru backplane for a song and dance. I'll be stripping it out this weekend to rebuild my current rig. I'll post up some progress in a thread.