[Eug]

However, it's a NAS. It's a single CPU with dual Freescale e500 cores. e500 is the little brother to e600, which is the continuation of the G4 line.

Interestingly, the clock speed is 1.067, exactly the same as my old iBook, except there are two cores.

I got this because currently shipping ARM NASes are still too slow. At 1.2 to 2 GHz, the single-core ARM CPUs are a significant bottleneck to write performance, even with regular platter drives.

Mine is a Synology DS413. As you can see from this Synology CPU page, the lower end 2011-2013 models all use ARM, and the higher end ones use Intel, while my one mid-end DS413 model uses PowerPC.

I will be moving most of my stored files off my Core i7 iMac, and will be using the NAS full time (with backups). I didn't do this before because speeds were too slow with my old ARM-based Synology 211j. Mildly ironic... my superfast Core i7 iMac will be dependent upon the performance of my PowerPC based NAS.

[Mike Wuerthele]

Other than power and size considerations, I still think from a pricing and flexibility standpoint, a 1,1 Mac Pro is the way to go on this.

Still silent, if a bit big. I guess if you're REALLY motivated, one could build a hackintosh to do the same.

[Eug]

If I were to use a desktop computer for this, I would have just built a cheap PC and used FreeNAS. However, size and power utilization are considerations here. I want it on, running 24/7, inside a closet.

Excluding the drives, the unit uses just 13 Watts. The drives use 4.5 Watts each at idle but spinning, and around 6.5 Watts under load. So, populated with 3 drives, we're talking about 27 Watts at idle.

A Mac Pro 1,1 with a single hard drive uses about 171 Watts at idle. Add in two more drives and it's 180 Watts.

Mac Pro: Power consumption and thermal output (BTU) information

That's a difference of 150 Watts or so. The added heat generation in the closet not withstanding, that's an extra 3.6 kWhr per day, or about 1300 kWhr per year. That's roughly about an extra $150 or so per year in electricity alone.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Eug 

I got this because currently shipping ARM NASes are still too slow. At 1.2 to 2 GHz, the single-core ARM CPUs are a significant bottleneck to write performance, even with regular platter drives.

The NAS options in that price range should be dual-core ARM or even dual-core Atom.

My dual-core ARM NAS almost saturates GigE.

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Rethink the closet decision, unless its a well ventilated one.

[Eug]

Originally Posted by mduell 

The NAS options in that price range should be dual-core ARM or even dual-core Atom.

My dual-core ARM NAS almost saturates GigE.

I wanted the Synology OS, but dual-core Atom was $150 more.



Which is your NAS?

You can get a QNAP with dual-core Atom for that price but with an older OS. Their newer OS is only currently on single-core ARM.



QTS 4.0 :: QNAP

Originally Posted by BLAZE_MkIV 

Rethink the closet decision, unless its a well ventilated one.

Closet's fine. I've had a NAS in there for years.

[mduell]

I've got the Drobo 5N.

[Eug]

What CPU does the Drobo 5N have? I've been looking and all I can find is that it is a dual-core ARM (with one site saying "multi-core" ARM). I wonder why the NAS makers Synology and QNAP don't make more use of dual-core ARM. It seems they often go to higher clocked single-core ARM (up to 2 GHz), and then for higher performance they switch to something else like Atom (at the higher end), or in my NAS's case dual-core PPC (at the mid end).

And when you said you can nearly max out GigE, I assume that's with the Drobo's BeyondRAID setup? You can do the same on the Synology DS413 with their Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) format or else RAID 5, but if I bought a 5-bay system, I'd probably use RAID6 or SHR-2. RAID6 & SHR-2 seem to take a lot more horsepower than RAID5 & SHR. (Both have 2-disk redundancy.) Dual-core Atom is much preferred for RAID6 & SHR-2.

It would be interesting to see a web browser on these NASes (esp. since some these days have HDMI outputs). I suspect they'd be fairly responsive if well-optimized, as the CPU in mine is twice the speed of an iBook, and dual Atom is much faster.

[mduell]

Yes, I'm using BeyondRAID with mismatched disks. I started with 4x1TB 1x2TB and I've upgraded to 2x1TB 2x2TB 1x3TB.

I'm glad to see SHR exists in case I ever decide to bail on Drobo.