SOLVED Thoughts on a 2C/4T Xeon-D board (X10SDV-2C-TP4F)?

[Evan Richardson]

My current FreeNAS box consists of an X11-SSL-F board and an E3-1230v5 processor (4C/8T). This also serves to handle as a syncthing & plex media server box, which the E3 handles well. I'm running out of space though (backups/photography/home-lab), so I'm looking at building a new storage box. I'm currently looking at the following two boards: https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/D/X10SDV-2C-TP4F.cfm and https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/D/X10SDV-4C-7TP4F.cfm

This new box will serve ONLY as NFS storage (possibly ISCSI as well for VMware) but will NOT be serving as a syncthing target or plexmediaserver, so the hardware requirements are pared down. Give that it will be an NFS box only and sitting Idle most of the time, I'm thinking the 2C/4T processor board will be ok, but I'd hate to get something underpowered. Given that ZFS rebuilds are processor driven, if I ever have to do a resilver of a drive, would the 4C/8T board be a better fit? At almost half the cost I'd rather go with the 2 core version if it'll be adequate. For reference, my build will be a 100+TB build with WD red drives, consisting of 4 6-drive RAIDZ2 vdevs.



Thanks!

 

[Evan Richardson]

looks like someone asked a similar question https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/pentium-d1508-vs-10gbit-s-performance.46376/

 

[Chris Moore]

This new box will serve ONLY as NFS storage (possibly ISCSI as well for VMware) but will NOT be serving as a syncthing target or plexmediaserver, so the hardware requirements are pared down. Give that it will be an NFS box only and sitting Idle most of the time, I'm thinking the 2C/4T processor board will be ok, but I'd hate to get something underpowered. Given that ZFS rebuilds are processor driven, if I ever have to do a resilver of a drive, would the 4C/8T board be a better fit? At almost half the cost I'd rather go with the 2 core version if it'll be adequate. For reference, my build will be a 100+TB build with WD red drives, consisting of 4 6-drive RAIDZ2 vdevs.

You could add more drives to your existing build and do it all with one server.

 

[Stux]

The key is if you are interested in 10gbe performance. The Xeon D cores are slower than the 1230 cores.

SMB is single threaded, but I think NFS is not. For gigabit it’d be fine. For 10gbe I’d lean towards a 4C//8T model

 

[Evan Richardson]

You could add more drives to your existing build and do it all with one server.

Thanks. I thought about that, but I would rather have two systems up at the same time to migrate data than pull all hardware out of one chassis, add to a larger chassis, then hope nothing got screwed up.

The key is if you are interested in 10gbe performance. The Xeon D cores are slower than the 1230 cores.

SMB is single threaded, but I think NFS is not. For gigabit it’d be fine. For 10gbe I’d lean towards a 4C//8T model

I ended up getting the 2C version, over 200$ cheaper. I benchmarked my current box via NFS and suspending/resuming and snapshotting 15 VMs from ESX, and the best I could get was around 2.5Gbps (ESX is running on a C2750 atom board, so there's that to consider). Typically the 10Gb link in my current storage is never maxed out, only during the above tasks does it go any higher (and when I'm doing backups from my desktop/work machine), so it should be fine.. if cpu usage is high for a few minutes a day its fine for the cost savings.

Thanks!