Worth waiting for Intel C3000 series or go with Pentium G4560

[Radl25]

Hi there,

i wanted to go for my first FreeNAS project and i already completed my first draft. I am looking for a silent, power consumption friendly system in my living room for storage and also for one or max. two vitrual machines.
I want to do a minecraft server for my kids but not heavy stuff. First I looked for the mini ITX form factor but the only way sticking to supermicro was the C2000 Atoms. But i did not want to risk a C2000 bug. Also the performance could have been a matter. So i planed this:

Supermicro X11SSM-F
Intel Pentium G4560
16GB Samsung M391A2K43BB1
64GB Supermicro SuperDOM
4000GB Seagate IronWolf (3x)
500 Watt be quiet! Straight Power
be quiet! Silent Base 800
be quiet! Pure Rock (CPU Cooler)

Now i have read that the C3000s are coming and maybe it could be also good to go. What do you think about my thoughts? Worth waiting?

Thank you very much and i am sorry for my bad English.
Benjamin

 

[Stux]

If you're interested in lots of cores and lots of ram and 10gbe then I'd wait. If not, then probably not.

 

[Radl25]

thx Stux! When could i have a benefit from more cores with a (free)NAS? Sorry for the nooby questions...
A friend told me that i also have to look at the single thread Performance for virtualisations. For example if the minecraft server is only programmed for one core i should look especially for this. Do you think this is important?

 

[Stux]

thx Stux! When could i have a benefit from more cores with a (free)NAS? A Sorry for the nooby questions...
A friend told me that i also have to look at the single thread Performance for virtualisations. For example if the minecraft server is only programmed for one core i should look especially for this. Do you think this is important?

Its a good point. SMB trasfers are single threaded, many other server roles are multi-threaded.

You may want more cores to use Plex, or to run many virtual machines.

 

[Chris Moore]

I am looking for a silent, power cunsuption friendly system in my living room for storage and also for one or max. two virual machines.

Being able to run a couple VMs (depending on what they are) Plex for example, will take more power than the Pentium has.
The first time I built a FreeNAS system from parts instead of re-purposing existing hardware, I used a Pentium because it was a suggested 'low power' processor at the time. I don't remember the model number, but it was a dual core at 3.2 or 3.4 GHz if I recall. It didn't have enough resources to do the things I wanted to do and I ended up going to a Xeon quad core with hyper-threading. The Xeon gives me the ability to transcode two or three streams at once in Plex and that is nice plus I can run a VM or two. My hardware is a little older now, but the big limiter for me is RAM. My systems max out at 32GB and when I get new hardware I will get more memory for sure.
Just don't go too low power because you may just end up disappointed in the performance and need to buy new hardware to make it work the way you wanted it to work to begin with.

 

[Chris Moore]

64GB Supermicro SuperDOM

You can use a smaller module here. An 8GB drive is the minimum and many people use 16GB or 32GB but when you get up to 64GB, you are just spending money you don't need to spend.
The only thing stored here is a few gigs of data for the boot image and some configuration files. It can't be used for anything else.

 

[Radl25]

Thank you very much for your advices. It´s like my friend who tells me that i should go bigger Maybe i should... I didn´t know about Plex until now. This looks like a nice tool! I have a very big music library, a lot of CDs i lovely lossless digitalised over the years and it would be very great to have flexible access to it. Do you think the C3000 will be able to run a Plex VM and another minecraft VM or should i go even bigger? But i don´t think that i will need more than 2 VMs and i really want to keep the power consumption quite low. at least on idle...

 

[Stux]

We don't yet know how suitable c3000 is for Plex as no media benchmarks are available (yet)

But it should be able to run plex (depending on how many cores you get (2-8))

The question is how many 1080p plex transcodes can an 8 or 16 core c3000 do?

Another option is Xeon D.

The 16 core c3000 benchmarks for non-AVX workloads about the same as a Xeon D 8 core.

 

[Radl25]

okay, i think you helped me understand my situation better. Thank you, so I´ll wait for the first benchmarks of the C3000 and then we will see if its enough for my project. The boards look like beeing slowly avaiable. At least here i found some early pricing. The price is heavy there but i think this will change when the boards are getting better accessible.

 

[Radl25]

hi again, maybe i should go with kaby lake xeon e....? It looks like on idle the power consumption is not so bad at all. I am a bit afraid waiting for the C3000 could be a bit frustrating and it could take a while until everything works stable because its a new architecture... Are there any good recommandations for a xeon "e" that work very stable?