Little old(er) hardware help if I may

paradigm · 6 Jan 2009 at 10:02

I'm just hacking together a quick and dirty NAS box (have a spare 8 port adaptec SATA RAID card lying around, along with an Intel Dual-Port Gigabit LAN card), and have the choice of two boards/processors.

I've got a Mini ITX board with 2 PCI, and an Athlon XP 1900+, single DDR slot, up to 512MB.

Or, a Micro ATX board, with 3 PCI and one AGP (un-needed, it has onboard VGA), with a Sempron 2400+. This has two DDR slots, and a maximum of 2GB.

I can't decide which would be the better platform. The board size isn't an issue as they will be in a case large enough for 6 drives anyway.

misterPK · 6 Jan 2009 at 10:19

One will be bigger and faster, one will use slightly less power. But, as you'll have 6 drives I doubt power usage is an issue here, so I'd go with the mATX option. You can always swap them around later!

PK!

paradigm · 6 Jan 2009 at 10:33

So, the Sempron is faster than the AXP?

This was the bit I was unsure of.

misterPK · 6 Jan 2009 at 10:46

Only very slightly, the only difference at stock is the Sempron has a higher FSB and twice the cache size. To be honest I didnt realise they were so similar until I looked at the specs!

PK!

Crowze · 6 Jan 2009 at 10:55

I'd go for the Sempron system, mainly as it can take much more memory.

paradigm · 6 Jan 2009 at 11:17

But surely, looking at the specs of similar small form factor off-the-shelf NAS boxes, the amount of RAM is moot anyway, as it doesn't need much.

bb_karn · 6 Jan 2009 at 11:59

If you don't need the extra performance you could go for the sempron and undervolt it a little bit to get power usage down even more.

SinaiSound · 6 Jan 2009 at 13:42

Memory size won't make a difference.

Saw some magazine where they tested a Windows Home Server with various amounts of RAM and the difference between 512MB and 4GB was something like 0.01MB sec.

I'd have the Mini ITX as will probably use less power

Crowze · 6 Jan 2009 at 16:24

If it's a purely NAS box then I'd agree with you, but if the OP wants to run all sorts of other stuff on it then the extra memory will be handy. Since the CPUs are similar and size isn't an issue, why not have more memory?

paradigm · 6 Jan 2009 at 17:59

Crowze said:
If it's a purely NAS box then I'd agree with you, but if the OP wants to run all sorts of other stuff on it then the extra memory will be handy. Since the CPUs are similar and size isn't an issue, why not have more memory?

No, I'm building a NAS box, for NAS.

It will be running a NAS specific OS, and only being used as a NAS via iSCSI.