I want to build a truenas server with the cheapest CPU I can find that can support ECC RAM: Celeron G4900T + 64gb ECC RAM + 4x18 TB SAS drives.

I don’t have experience with ZFS or with truenas (core or scale), how much important is the CPU?

Use case: hundreds of thousands of small files mostly under 1 mb, but just 2-3 concurrent users

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOP
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    1 year ago

    reason why i use a C246 motherboard and other high end expensive components, but such a cheap cpu: someone will sell me used supermicro mobo+ECC ram+SAS HDDs for 500 euro, but no CPU. A Celeron G4900T costs like 15 euro, i was wondering if it could suffice, because this is already overkill for me, at the moment i have no idea on how to use the 36 TB of storage (2x redundancy)

  • eleitl@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    You don’t mention your performance requirements and I’m unfamiliar with that CPU. Are you trying to saturate your 1G presumably NIC? Reads or writes?

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOP
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      1 year ago

      No, just thousands of small files. Windows takes around a minute to enumerate all the files in the main share via SMB

      • eleitl@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        You should be good, then. Probably don’t need SSDs for ZIL and L2RC either. Don’t forget to schedule a weekly scrub, to catch bit rot. Essential for large drives.

      • Bitals@fediverse.bitals.xyz
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        1 year ago

        @Moonrise2473
        That looks more like ARC problem, it can hold a large index of the filesystem if you give it enough room in ram, avoiding the need to seek thousands of files on a spinning disk, which takes time. HDDs are fine for sequential operations, Random IO, which is your usecase, is their biggest weakness.
        @eleitl

  • Esra@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’ve upgraded from Xeon E3110(DDR2-665) to Celeron G4300(DDR4-2666), I feel confident attesting that CPU is much less important than RAM clockspeed for overall ZFS performance. YMMV

  • Nogami@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    In my (admittedly) limited experience with ZFS, it utilizes more RAM than CPU except for scrubs.