Help with creating a low power NAS server

[fl-tsk]

Dear members of Overclockers Uk,

I was wondering of any of you could give me some advice as to the construction of a low powered NAS machine. I realize that there are similar thread to this one concerning NAS devices, but I wanted to ask some questions on some certain topics that I was unsure about.

My main goal for the construction of this machine is that it should operate at a reasonably low power without sacrificing too much performance, but with efficiency the priority. There is also a possibility in the future that the hardware may be used for a more general purpose server, so this would mean that performance is still an issue. I have done some investigation into what hardware to get, but I would value your opinions greatly.

I have been looking at the Intel Atom and the VIA C7 processors as candidates for the server, as they seem to be power efficient and low cost. However, I stumbled upon this review from Tom's Hardware with a review on the new Athlon 64 2000+ (Codename Lima) which demonstrates that combined with a 780G chipset motherboard the whole system is more energy efficient than an Intel Atom setup. However, I cannot seem to find any information on this processor anywhere, and I was wondering whether you had any opinions on this choice.

Secondly, following the review, the motherboard I have been thinking about getting was the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H since this was used in the article and the northbridge used remarkably little power. However, since this server shall be headless, I fear that the graphical processing power from the 780G chipset will be an unnecessary expense. Will I be better going off for a less advanced chipset, like the one on the Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2H or are there better chipsets for this task? (On a side note, I am quietly kicking myself for not getting the GA-MA78GM-S2H which was on special a few days ago for £30)

For the power supply, I was thinking about the Antec EarthWatts 380W PSU since this seems to be the most power efficient and quietest of the traditional PSUs. I am reluctant to get a PicoPsu or similar DC-DC board as despite their efficiency, I am looking for some expandability, and the option to have a few hard drives, but again, opinions welcomed.

As for hard drives, I have two old drives that could be used, a 160GB Maxator and a 500GB Samsung Spinpoint, Though these drives are likely to be changed in the future for perhaps another 500GB Samsung to create a software raid.

For OS, I have been experimenting with FreeNAS which I have found to my liking, but this could be changed for something more fun like Ubuntu Server or Debian (or Openfiler). At the moment, I have been experimenting with FreeNAS on a Compaq Deskpro that I literally found fly tipped at the side of a country lane (P III 700Mhz ~300MB RAM). This is my first time with experimenting with anything to do with storage over a network, but one thing that I noticed was that while transfers were fine, the were not as fast as I expected. I did some measuring and general read rate was about 4MB/sec (~30Mb/sec) over 100Mb/sec LAN. Speed of transfer is not a great issue to me, but is the hardware of the computer limiting the speed (I put a VIA SATA controller card in to access the drives) , the actual speed of the drives themselves or the network it is on. Which one of these would you think is the limiting factor?


Thanks for reading through all of this. If you have any opinions or advice I would be delighted to read them, and I thank you in advance for any replies!

 

[bigredshark]

I've been impressed with the WD Green edition drives for power usage. Probably not a huge gain in a home machine but a nice saving in a enterprise environment. Worth consdiering if you must have the absolute minmum power usage...

 

[King Arthur]

why not just built it using a mini-itx board? Some of them come with sata onboard now too along with only needing 80w PSU's. They can fit into smaller cases and will only take soemthign like 10-20w.

Have a look at some mini-itx systems. I dont think overclockers do them but a google will turn something up im sure.

Phil

 

[bigredshark]

why not just built it using a mini-itx board? Some of them come with sata onboard now too along with only needing 80w PSU's. They can fit into smaller cases and will only take soemthign like 10-20w.

Have a look at some mini-itx systems. I dont think overclockers do them but a google will turn something up im sure.

Phil

Fairly certain the Atom boards are mini ITX and are a fair bit faster than the VIA processors. That said, the ones available to consumers are using desktop chipsets rather than the low power notebook ones so aren't actually that low power.

 

[King Arthur]

the thing is the processor makes very little difference in a nas, unless your serving a lot of people. What matter is the network connection, the hard drives, raid type and amount of through put you can get.

Despite what processor you get, if all its been is a NAS it will be sat at less than 10%, 99% of the time.

a lot of people run share box's on crap hardware and its fine.

Phil

 

[Dist]

the thing is the processor makes very little difference in a nas, unless your serving a lot of people. What matter is the network connection, the hard drives, raid type and amount of through put you can get.

Despite what processor you get, if all its been is a NAS it will be sat at less than 10%, 99% of the time.

a lot of people run share box's on crap hardware and its fine.

Phil

The OP mentioned that later on it may be used for more then just NAS, but as general server stuff too. So planning for the future may be the best course of action (depending on budget) rather then just getting the cheapest CPU just because 'it will be sat at less then 10%, 99% of the time"

 

[bigredshark]

At the end of the day, an Atom board (with processor) is going to be about £50, pretty low power usage and pretty fast. Thats difficult to compete with. Even if you want to run a web server, bittorrent or whatever on it, it's a 1.6Ghz Core based processor, it'll do it just fine.

 

[fl-tsk]

At the end of the day, an Atom board (with processor) is going to be about £50, pretty low power usage and pretty fast. Thats difficult to compete with. Even if you want to run a web server, bittorrent or whatever on it, it's a 1.6Ghz Core based processor, it'll do it just fine.

Thanks, I guess that will be the option I will for, as the price / performance / efficiency all seem to be pointing in the right direction. I am a bit confused about the Atom processor though. Is it two cores or one? I know that it has Hyper Threading which makes the system see two cores instead of one, and this increases performance; but is this something to take into consideration?

 

[amkan13]

at the moment the atom is single core. a dual core atom will be out in q4.