AM1 Athlon 5350 FreeNAS file server

[Aquinus]

Are those transfers over gigabit on Samba?

 

[TRWOV]

yes

 

[Nordic]

I would use the terminology of overhead room to upgrade to in the future, not overkill. But yes, overkill.

 

[TRWOV]

Looks like it wasn't as overkill as I thought, in large transfers free RAM goes down to 6GB.

 

[newtekie1]

I believe that is because FreeNAS uses the RAM as a buffer. The 5350 can't calculate the parity fast enough so it is filling up RAM with data waiting to be written. Better hope you don't have a power outage.

 

[TRWOV]

I have an UPS

 

[newtekie1]

I'd still find a way to disable the RAM cache, especially since you aren't using ECC memory.

 

[TRWOV]

you jinx!!! we just had a blackout!!! Scrubbing now... I was going to do it tomorrow anyway.

 

[newtekie1]

Going back to your power consumption issue. You might try undervolting the processor. I just built a very similar build with a 5350 and an AM1M-A. It doesn't have any hard drives in it yet, just two SSDs in RAID1 for the OS, but it is only pulling ~25w idle from the wall. However, that is with a 650w 80+ Gold Power Supply. I was able to up the multiplier on the CPU to 21 and still lower the voltage by 0.1v. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it is about a 20% drop in voltage. I could probably drop it by 0.15v, but I haven't tried yet. And if you aren't to concerned with performance you could probably even drop the multiplier and lower the voltage even further. Heck, you could drop the multiplier to 13 and lower the voltage, and you'd basically have a 3850.

 

[TRWOV]

nah, I think I'll leave it at that. I wouldn't want to risk the system stability over a couple of watts. I think getting a 200w PSU would be more benefical. I'll surely slow down the graphics core though

 

[newtekie1]

Yeah, I'm running my through 24 hours of OCCT to make sure it is stable.

 

[messerchmidt]

the asus board allegedly supports ecc ram, why did you not use it? freenas 9.3 working ok?

zfs is a ram pig, uses 1gb per 1tb of storage space. uses ecc to self heal

 

[TRWOV]

The only board that has "confirmed" (as in, a few guys say it works) ECC suppoort is the AM1A-M and it seems to be picky about which DIMMs it supports. Only a few guys tried (failed) ECC injection tests so memtest reporting ECC support might be a bug.

 

[messerchmidt]

i ended up going xeon 1230v3+supercomputer+ecc because i was a bit worried about data failures. overkill and a power pig. i wish amd released their vaporware opteron x1150 to the masses

 

[messerchmidt]

the way we test for ecc on the intel platform does not work with current amd systems according to the people on the freenas forum. without being able to verify it, given how picky zfs apparently is, they suggest sticking to intel.