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Atom Performance

celliott

celliott

celliott

Soldato
Joined
21 Jun 2004
Posts
2,790
Location
Berkshire
I am sure this has been asked over and over again, and I actually have an Atom in a netbook. But does an Atom have enough poke for a small home fileserver?

i.e. assuming the disks are fast enough, does the Atom have enough grunt to do say 80MB/sec over gigabit ethernet?

thanks
 
Dunno about the Atom but it should manage a decent speed on gigabit...

I've managed a good 40MByte/s over gigabit with an old P2 + Jumbo frames so it should do atleast that easy.
 
Should be fine, we have been resold some network monitoring appliances which are rebadged EEE PCs, and they are doing a lot of traffic.
 
It should do. I asked something similar a while ago and ended up going with an amd 7750be and am glad I did. I'm sure the atom would succeed in doing things like rebuilding a raid 5, but it wont do it quickly and speed is important really. It falls down pretty hard on multitasking, so streaming a film from a degraded array is unlikely to go well.

If you're not using the laptop itself for it, I'd recommend the dual core atom with a lightweight operating system, at which point I think you'll be fine. Single core with vista would not make a good fileserver I fear
 
I'm going with an Atom 330 + CentOS I think as I know it inside out.

FreeNAS does look very good but I like the bit more control you get with a full OS

Ugh there are no atom boards with 4x SATA ports. Well, except for the nvidia ION based ones. I doubt linux will play nice with that?
 
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Might do. nvidia graphics cards have excellent linux support, plausible that their motherboards do too.
Definitely hard to find atom boards with four sata ports, pov do it, and zotac kind of do. Not sure either is a brand I like much though.

cent os will work just fine, good operating system

cute and user friendly is not so much what I want from a computer, not sure an nas needs more than a command line and open-ssh server
 
Openfiler> FreeNAS IMHO - quite like it, use it at work.

I haven't heard good things about Atom as a filer CPU, due to the overheads required to shift files around Gb LAN - Atom boards don't tend to come with usefully powerful TCPoffload engines on board so it all goes on that poor wee CPU which really isn't optimised for that kind of workload unless its parallelilelelelellised - a few companys are making four-card Atom servers for cheap VM platforms, but that's different - they have full sever class Gb NICs that support teaming, fibrechannel adapters, etc. They are, shall we say, somewhat less compromised.

As for SATA, if it has a PCI socket, then a four socket SATA card can be picked up, and softRAID it in FreeNAS/OpenFiler/CentOS. If you really need speed though, you'll want a hardware powered RAID adapter and a Core2Duo [or at least a Core2 Celeron] with 4Gb of RAM for lots of RAM caching goodness....
 
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