I'm investigating for a build i'm planning.

main usage for the rig would be, File-serving to media streamer, backup and downloading with torrents and/or Usenet.

I have no idea how fast a processor needs to be to allow Usenet downloading over SSL at 120Mbit while parring and unraring at the same time.

This preferably on a disk that is not part of the Unraid.(is that even possible? and will it count toward the license drive limit?)

not sure if torrenting and usenet would work at the same time, on my PC they will both run like crap if turned on at the same time.

other concerns are to protect the data-integrity maybe just using quickpar or something I havent heard of yet.

 

another goal is to keep power consumption down

 

 

this new processor looks sweet and it is set to launch at the end of februari

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=53423

 

would it be overkill or worth the wait?

and how long will it take until it will be usable with Unraid?

 

possible candidates for motherboard

 

Asus MB from the P8H67 series (there are so many will take some time to find the right one)

 

biostar TH67+

http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/content.php?S_ID=511

 

cheers!

 

 

 

 

Even the old Intel i3 530 CPU is more than enough to do all those tasks nearly at complete idle speeds of 1200 Mhz on a single core. When you're unraring and parity checking, the other cores will help out and kick into full speed, but you will mostly be IO bound, not cpu bound.

 

My i3 530 based system using an Intel H55 Chipset motherboard with the disks spun down will idle slightly under 39 Watts as measured at the wall outlet by a Watt-Meter.

 

You can utilize drives outside the array to download to and they wont be counted towards the drive limit on your unRAID license. You could also use a 'cache' drive to download to, which is considered to be a drive in the unRAID array.

 

If you have issues with torrenting and usenet fetching at the same time, have you made sure it's not your internet bandwidth that is the bottleneck as opposed to your PC? Typically if you don't have proper limits in place for your torrents, it will introduce excessive latency which will impact the usenet fetching. The issue might also be your router. Some older or lesser consumer grade routers simply can not handle the sheer number of connections that torrents can generate.

that is good news, I was asking about the speed because i read somewhere someone was having pretty low speeds on an atom bases board when using SSL. and turned back to normal when SSL was off.

that was if i remember correctly on a 1.6 atom.

 

39 watts looks like a desirable result.

do you have a link to your build for reference?

 

i wonder what power savings the new processor could accomplish.

 

downloading to a cache drive might be an option, tho i have not yet decided on a cache drive

is it possible to partition such a drive into a cache part and a download part?

 

 

with torrenting i have always set my upload about 10% under my maximum that seemed to help a lot whit the download speeds of torrents. it might not have been enough for running a newreader at the same time.

 

 

so the its still the question

if the power savings and other benefits of the new processor will weigh up against the availability and price of the old one

 

how long did it take last time until new processors and motherboard were usable for Unraid?

I don't have anything specifically posted about my build, so I'll give a quick rundown, though nearly any recent Intel i3 build should be very comparable. I think there some very similar in the reference builds list.

 

Intel i3 530 CPU

MSI H55M-ED55 (expired deal link)

4GB (2*2GB) DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Mushkin

1 2TB Seagate 5900RPM Parity Drive

3 2TB WD 5400RPM Data Drives

Corsair HX 1000 PSU

 

The PSU needs to be replaced to reliably support more than 8 drives since it's not Single 12Volt rail, but it was a carry over from my old gaming rig that needed to power multiple PCI-Express graphic cards. For an unRAID build it is ideal to get a PSU with a single 12Volt rail so it can power a larger number of HDDs. I'm keeping an eye out on a nice quality 650Watt Single 12Volt rail with high Amps PSU or whatever is suitable for 22 drives.

 

As for support, unRAID usually supports most motherboard and cpus provided nothing is drastically different on them. It relies mostly on Linux support to be included in the kernels. I haven't seen anything specifically mentioned about being needed for the new CPUs or chipsets. Fortunately unRAID only needs basic text console support along with SATA ports and network card.

 

As for wanting to partition the cache drive into separate sections, it can be done as simply as using a directory begining with a single dot character '.'. Those directories are skipped over by the mover script. I use a ".downloads" directory as the root for downloads, with ".downloads/import/", ".downloads/imported", ".downloads/incomplete/", ".downloads/logs/", ".downloads/cache/", and ".downloads/extracted/" subdirectories. They're used by SABnzbd and Transmission for import of .nzb or .torrent files, archival of imported tasks, downloads in progress or not finished yet, logs of download processing, usenet article caches, and finally fully downloaded, checked, and processed files.

 

The next unRAID 5.0 beta series is supposed to be rebased on a newer(est) version of Slackware with a newer Linux kernel, so depending on what's needed for the new chipsets and cpus, they might already be supported.

So the 2100T remains a great option.

I will have a month to read up and select/collect other hardware, given it is available at launch

 

Thanks for posting a build it helps me put things in perspective.

 

Partitioning the drive was meant to prevent fragmentation, but in hindsight that is not that important

I assuming that for a cache drive you would want a drive with higher write speeds which might not be a green drive.

if that's the case it might seem better to use a green drive for torrenting since for maintaining proper ratios it will be in use a lot. so it will keep the energy consumption down

 

of coarse i might be wrong.

I'm still trying to get the massive amount of information concerning Unraid in my head.

 

 

what other cpu's are there with  low powerconsumtion that would be powerfull enough to do what i want?

While it does look like a nice CPU, is it worth paying the premium for new hardware at launch?  I generally wait 3 - 6 months for the price to come down.

While it does look like a nice CPU, is it worth paying the premium for new hardware at launch?  I generally wait 3 - 6 months for the price to come down.

 

Actually, it's not the price premium that's the issue. The bigger question is will these new parts be supported in unRAID yet? For Linux, it's best to go with tried and tested hardware rather than bleeding edge unless you like being a guinea pig.

 

Intel processors rarely go down in price and even if they do, the price drop is usually just $10~20 which isn't really as significant as the price drops we see from AMD. Heck, just check current retail pricing for LGA-775 processors. Besides, the S and T versions, given their specialized target applications, are unlikely to go down in price at all. It's already surprising that the price premium they carry over vanilla versions is just $20 or so. Previously, you'd have to spend at least $50 extra for low power versions.

 

Personally waiting for Celeron Sandy Bridge to come out. Hopefully, by that time, the new chipsets will be supported by unRAID.

Your not likely to break 39 watts even with the new chip. Get a green drive for the cache. The network is slower than most new drives. The best write speed was over 70MB/s using a SSD cache drive. Any drive with a 75MB/s write speed is sufficient.

 

my main concern is getting a cpu that can run using little energy and still have enough power so not to run into limitations.

 

The cheapest i3 is 95 euro here the 2100t is listed as  128 euro doesnt seem prices will drop that much.

MB can be had for around 80-100 so also there the price difference is acceptable.

 

That being said there might be energy efficient cpu's that are tested and would work just fine for my needs

 

What would be the minimum recommended energy efficient cpu that has enough oomph to run torrents, newsreaders with ssl, parcheck, unrar,

and possible some other programs that can ensure data integrity (if any) and security. Maybe even transcode tho that is far less important to me.

 

Maybe i could buy a cheaper tested amd motherboard and upgrade later.

Tho it will probably be a bit hard to justify an upgrade to the Misses .

 

 

 

Sooo many options

 

cheers!

 

May I suggest that the choice of motherboard is much more important than the choice of processor. In my opinion, the best way to do that is to copy a build that someone else is using successfully. Since you are based in Europe, your choices for components will be different than most here. If you intend to use more than six hard disks, what SATA card will you use? How many ports does it have? Will you require more than one SATA card?

 

It is not enough to pick a board with the right number of PCIe slots of the right flavor and more forward. Most of us are using consumer grade motherboards with multiple SATA cards and because we are such a niche market, some motherboards don't work.

 

An E3200 is sufficient for what you want to do. An i3 would work great. A 2100t would work great. I would choose the motherboard that is most stable and has numerous users. Only then would I worry about which processor. If you were USA based I would recommend a Supermicro X8SIL, but I think Supermicro is hard to come by over there.

FWIW, I was planning an i3-540 w/X8SIL-F for my rebuild, but with the new Sandy Bridges coming out, and SM already starting to release 1155 boards, I will likely wait until summer and go after the new Xeon E3-1220L @ 20W TDP.  That's a power sipper.

For what it's worth, I thought I'd share my experience with the i3-540. 

 

Running a 7 drive array and multiple add-ons... I was watching a 1080p movie being served from my unRAID server while downloading from usenet via SABnzbd+ and it simultaneously unrar'ing files, the CPU utilization never exceeded 12% according to top.  If processing power is what you're most concerned with and you're not doing things like video encoding, I think the current versions of the i3 will do you just fine. 

thanks for all the replies.

 

I assume there are right motherboards for all socket types, please correct me if I'm wrong. (seen am2, am3 ,775 ,1156 mentioned)

 

Indeed the possible lack of support and knowledge of the new upcoming MB's is the biggest concern.

I will definitely have to investigate on great tested mb cpu combo's. so a lot of reading needs to be done.

And maybe by the time I'm finished someone tested a socket 1155 MB.

 

 

Indeed the possible lack of support and knowledge of the new upcoming MB's is the biggest concern.

I will definitely have to investigate on great tested mb cpu combo's. so a lot of reading needs to be done.

And maybe by the time I'm finished someone tested a socket 1155 MB.

 

Actually, it seems someone has already tried them:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=10114.0

 

It boots but we still don't know if it would actually work or not as the poster wasn't able to test any file copies, etc. Still, it seems when unRAID 5.0 rolls around, there's a good chance of the hardware being supported. Hmm, wonder what motherboard Tom will use for the new server builds.

I pushed the button ordered and an  SuperMicro MBD-X8SIL-F-B with an Intel Core I3 540  with 4gb of ram, was slightly more expensive than my initial plan but better safe than sorry

 

see http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=10587.0

well with intels recent mistakes in their sandybridge chipset. i'm happy i didn't choose for that.