CPU "Horsepower"

[garycase]

I know Tom uses Celerons in the servers Limetech sells ... and even the upgraded CPU he offers is only an E7400.

 

I plan to build a new UnRAID box, and while I don't want to use more CPU than I need, I DO want to use plenty to get max performance.  Clearly I don't need an i7 -- and I suppose not even a Core 2 Quad;  but I'd be very interested in performance differences anyone's noticed who's using a higher-end CPU ... especially if you've used the same board with a low end Celeron or Pentium Dual Core before upgrading the CPU.

 

i.e. is there any reason at all to use a CPU better than perhaps an E5300 Pentium Dual Core?  [Can't quite bring myself to consider the lower-end Celerons.]    I'm basically debating between an E5300, E8400, and Q9650 -- but don't want to buy the latter two if they don't actually provide some performance benefits to an UnRAID box.

 

[purko]

I know Tom uses Celerons in the servers Limetech sells ... and even the upgraded CPU he offers is only an E7400.

 

I plan to build a new UnRAID box, and while I don't want to use more CPU than I need, I DO want to use plenty to get max performance.  Clearly I don't need an i7 -- and I suppose not even a Core 2 Quad;  but I'd be very interested in performance differences anyone's noticed who's using a higher-end CPU ... especially if you've used the same board with a low end Celeron or Pentium Dual Core before upgrading the CPU.

 

i.e. is there any reason at all to use a CPU better than perhaps an E5300 Pentium Dual Core?  [Can't quite bring myself to consider the lower-end Celerons.]    I'm basically debating between an E5300, E8400, and Q9650 -- but don't want to buy the latter two if they don't actually provide some performance benefits to an UnRAID box.

 

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5076.msg46945#msg46945

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5001.msg46053#msg46053

 

[Stokkes]

I think one of the reasons to justify a faster CPU is not necessarily to increase unRAID's performance (as it has been indicated many times in the forums, a faster CPU doesn't really have any effect) but more for the idea that you may want to run additional programs on top of unRAID.

 

One such example I can think of is the upcoming 5.0 version that will allow plugins/addons to be installed. If you're going to install some CPU intensive addons (maybe even VMware Server), then a faster CPU will most definitely be beneficial.

 

For simple data read/writes and file server operations, your bottleneck is not the CPU/RAM but the magnetic rotating media (as previously indicated).

 

[garycase]

I had pretty much assumed as much, but just wanted to get some detailed stats if anyone had them available.  I asked the same question on the AVSForum's UnRAID thread, and Joe L. provided some very detailed stats that clearly show there's no performance benefit from a faster CPU.

 

As I have no intention of running additional software on the same box I'll just use a relatively low-end CPU (E5300).  This CPU on a C2SEA should result in ~ 50w idle consumption, which is very reasonable.

 

It'd be interesting to build an UnRAID box with an Atom ... but difficult to find an Atom-based board that will support enough SATA ports for the size server I plan (10-15 drives).

 

Thanks for the input.

 

[aiden]

It'd be interesting to build an UnRAID box with an Atom ... but difficult to find an Atom-based board that will support enough SATA ports for the size server I plan (10-15 drives).

 

Oh, it's possible... http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5133.0

[WeeboTech]

It'd be interesting to build an UnRAID box with an Atom ... but difficult to find an Atom-based board that will support enough SATA ports for the size server I plan (10-15 drives).

 

You could easily get 12 high speed drives with this board in flex-atx format.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/945/X7SLA.cfm?typ=H

 

When an 8 port card is available you can use that in the x8 slot or go with a pci card and accept the performance limit of PCI which would yield 16 drives.

 

is there any reason at all to use a CPU better than perhaps an E5300 Pentium Dual Core? 

 

Power efficiency.  If you have the CPU laying around it will be fine.

Just choose a power efficient cpu 2.0ghz or better.

I have a 2.6 core 2 duo I bought of eBay for a low price. I run it at 1.6ghz without a problem.

The faster CPU's only come into play if you are running other third party apps.

 

I've run unRAID on a celeron-M @ 1ghz without a problem.

 

[BRiT]

Pretty much what everyone else said.

 

If you're not planning on running streaming software that will be transcoding (PS3Media Server) or encoding from BluRay/DVD into x264 or H264, you really don't need the high performance cpus. In my low-power 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo system, the cpus sit around unused nearly 90% of the time. From what I can tell, the Atoms will be suitable. I guess a single-core Atom 230 is about the same performance as an older AMD Barton 2500, judging from WinOS Performance Ratings. The dual-core Atom 330 should be more than enough for unRAID fileserver duties, even in the future with whatever unRAID 5.0 and addons bring.