I did a lot of research in the past to get the "most bang for the buck" for my setup.
Sometimes I am on a tight budget or the UseCase does not justify the spending (like employing a "real" server for a backup array, that would run a couple of hours a week only).
Well, what is on my shopping list for a (file-)server, are these two features....always:
- ECC memory support
- AES-NI (Hardware Encryption in CPU) support...I need/want full-disk encryption and performance as well.
But with Intel based CPUs, this is *only* available with XEONs, which are quite expensive and ECC-RAM support only comes with server motherboards here.
With AMD, things are a bit different though.
- Almost all AM2, AM3 and AM3+ socket CPUs support ECC memory
- all AM3+ CPUs support AES-NI instructions
...and almost all ASUS AM3+ socket based motherboards support ECC RAM...officially...check the specs!
I am running a system based on
- ASUS M5A78L-M/USB3 (cheapest with 4x DIMM-Slots, USB3, onboard GPU and microATX)
- 4x ECC UDIMMs (this is unbuffered, unregistered memory)
- AMD Opteron 3350HE (Opteron AM3+ socket based)
with great success.
ECC memory is confirmed to work and I see no performance penalty from using encryption on the array (7 disks curently) as I can easily max out the GBit connection.
Costs were about 50% of the comparable Intel based setup/combo (35% if I would have gone for a FX-CPU instead of the HE-Opteron).
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p3x-749
I did a lot of research in the past to get the "most bang for the buck" for my setup.
Sometimes I am on a tight budget or the UseCase does not justify the spending (like employing a "real" server for a backup array, that would run a couple of hours a week only).
Well, what is on my shopping list for a (file-)server, are these two features....always:
- ECC memory support
- AES-NI (Hardware Encryption in CPU) support...I need/want full-disk encryption and performance as well.
But with Intel based CPUs, this is *only* available with XEONs, which are quite expensive and ECC-RAM support only comes with server motherboards here.
With AMD, things are a bit different though.
- Almost all AM2, AM3 and AM3+ socket CPUs support ECC memory
- all AM3+ CPUs support AES-NI instructions
...and almost all ASUS AM3+ socket based motherboards support ECC RAM...officially...check the specs!
I am running a system based on
- ASUS M5A78L-M/USB3 (cheapest with 4x DIMM-Slots, USB3, onboard GPU and microATX)
- 4x ECC UDIMMs (this is unbuffered, unregistered memory)
- AMD Opteron 3350HE (Opteron AM3+ socket based)
with great success.
ECC memory is confirmed to work and I see no performance penalty from using encryption on the array (7 disks curently) as I can easily max out the GBit connection.
Costs were about 50% of the comparable Intel based setup/combo (35% if I would have gone for a FX-CPU instead of the HE-Opteron).
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