BUILD Will an ATOM 330 board suffice when NAS is used as file backup for another server

[bigblue]

Hey,

I have a spare ASRock 330 Atom board with 4gb possible ram laying around (as well as 6 sata ports). I want to build a freenas but I already run a media server in my apartment.

My goal is to get the power usage as low as possible and have a separate space for my backup harddrives. I don't really see myself using this nas as anything more than file backup, so I can't imagine the CPU or RAM will be too stressed.

I haven't bought a case or hard drives for it yet so that's why I am asking.

 

[cyberjock]

If you don't use ZFS compression, encryption(which comes out with 8.3.1), or care that the backups may be slow, that is a great choice. Some Atoms will take 8GB of RAM. Personally, I think an Atom that supports 8GB of RAM is an excellent machine for backups. Just keep in mind if you ever have to do a recovery it will be quite slow ;)

 

[bigblue]

I don't care that backups will be slow since it's really just backing up my main server. It won't support encryption though?

 

[bigblue]

Thanks for the reply earlier! I did some reading and it looks like the encryption might only be on ZFS. I understand now.

 

[cyberjock]

I say no encryption because as far as I know none of the Atoms support AES-NI and doing encryption/decryption algorithms without AES-NI can bring even fast CPUs to their knees. Then try doing it on an underpowered Atom CPU and you probably won't like having read and write rates that may be single digit MB/sec. :)

 

[ProtoSD]

I say no encryption because as far as I know none of the Atoms support AES-NI and doing encryption/decryption algorithms without AES-NI can bring even fast CPUs to their knees.

That, and I just flat out don't trust the encryption with FreeNAS yet, seems too experimental and risky. I just put my stuff in Truecrypt containers in a dataset.

I have an Atom with 8GB of RAM and it works quite well for me, not really that slow, except lately since I'm over 90% full.

 

[bigblue]

Ahh okay. Thanks. I've looked into freenas in the past but I've never had the hardware to support it until now. I currently run backups on my media server, but I am at the point where if I want to add more storage I will need a separate device. (Or a much bigger case and more raid cards which I don't want).

How do you backup the truecrypt containers? Does it only work if they aren't being accessed? I don't currently operate with encryption but I'd like to add it.