Just exactly how important is CPU?

[tucansam]

I know the answer is "not very important." 

 

I have an ASUS C60M1-I, 1.0GHz dualcore, six SATA.  Super low power, and seems like it would be the perfect unraid server board (before all the new Atoms started coming out) for someone who just want the server to, well, serve (that's me, I don't run apps on my unraid system).

 

There has been some availability issues with it, even when it was in production, so maybe that explains why more folks didn't adopt it?

 

I have only set mine up as a backup server at the moment, and I'm waiting on some new parts so I can't test it.  Plus I ran it without a cache drive, so writes were painfully slow at the time.  But I am thinking about using it in another build, with a cache drive, to save some cash vs buying new hardware.

 

Wondering if anyone here uses it, what performance you get, etc?  I would think it would be perfect for me, but I'll be connecting it essentially directly to my main workstation, and I'd like to be able to saturate the gig interface.  Wondering if this lower-end MB would be able to do that.

[ZeroK]

I have several low wattage embedded processor motherboards, one being the asus c-60.  I can tell you every instance where I've tried it with unraid it has been the worst at everything, performance, availability, etc.  My e-350 and d525 atom motherboards have been better than this c-60.  Writes were slow even though it has 6gb sata support, I'm talking 20-25mb.  It lost connectivity all the time even during copies.  This was trying different unraid versions and plain vanilla start from scratch version with new drives.  I don't even think I would use this motherboard for pfsense or anything it's so unreliable.  Maybe it's a bad board, maybe it's just not that great, who knows.

[dmacias]

I had been using the Asus c60m1-i for the past couple years add my main unraid server. I used it for mostly serving mkv movies and tv shows. Had sab, sick and some torrents running. I never had a reliability problem. I didn't write to the array a lot. Just to cache and then mover script. Yes it's slow but when it's all automated in the background I never noticed. I recently sold it on eBay and wish now I would have kept it as a backup server.

[garycase]

I don't use the C60, but do use an Atom D525 based system that's not much more powerful ... and it works GREAT as an UnRAID server => not at all slow for basic NAS functions (which is all I do).

 

Your C60 scores 556 on PassMark, compared to 695 for a D-525 ... only a 25% increase => not enough to really matter.

 

Neither, of course, is a system where you'd want to run any CPU-intensive add-ons (e.g. Plex).

 

But for basic UnRAID NAS functionality, you're absolutely correct:  The answer to your question is indeed "not very important."

 

[tucansam]

Well I just got 90-112MB/s sustained reads and 30-40MBs sustained writes without a parity disk, so I think I'll build a legit system around this baby.