Can an embedded Xeon-D motherboard handle this?

TrueNAS General
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I’m pondering swapping to a Supermicro X10SDV build for RAID-Z data storage.

I’m currently running a Supermicro Socket 2011-3 build, and I’m concerned that a lesser CPU might struggle handling the data.

The goal is to have 2 VDEVs on a SAS 12GB/s controller, each with 8 spinning SAS drives in RAIDZ-3, and possibly add two more VDEVs as a mirror later.

I use a 10Gb/s network, and my data transfers can currently achieve 1GB/s.

Would an 8-thread 2.2GHz Xeon D-1518 CPU be a bottleneck for this build?

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Yes it can.

What would be the purpose of that?

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Thanks!

The two new VDEVS would mirror the current ones as additional protection against data loss.

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That isn’t how ZFS works.

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No?

Is there no way to have two sets of the same data in case a VDEV fails?

I suppose I could have a second pool, can those be mirrored?

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You can replicate data to somewhere else. Another pool, another dataset or another machine.

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I mean, you could always set up a 3-way or 4-way mirror. But all vdevs are always striped.

Not mirrored, but you can replicate one to the other.

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The biggest issue with Xeon-D is the relatively low single core clockspeed.

This can be problematic on single threaded transfers, such as SMB.

But in practise I believe the Xeon D is sufficient for 10gbit, but have not actually confirmed that.

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It’s pretty hard to tell what the CPU bottleneck throughput limit is unless you have access to some pretty fat pipes, a fast SSD pool, etc. On top of that, there is the question of what protocol and within each protocol what options you’re into. For example, encrypted SMB3 may or may not impose a significant burden on CPU performance, depending on the CPU era.

I’m somewhat convinced that the 1.7GHz default clock speed of my D-1537 is holding me back on 10GbE transfers as I can see the single-thread 100% bounce from core to core as a long transfer progresses. For all I know, that may also be an artifact of the TrueNAS GUI dashboard.

For SMB in a SOHO setting, I’d counsel looking into low-core-count, high-clock dies like the 8300GE Ryzen. It should blow the doors off the X10 generation and the biggest issue is that you have to build a board from scratch (with a x710-2AD and a 73xxx or whatever HBA) rather than luxuriating in a AIO option like the motherboard I bought.

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You didn’t mention what speeds you’re getting on those 10GbE transfers. :frowning:

I used to have 8 spinning drives in RAIDZ3 like you, but adding a second VDEV to the pool doubled the throughput without the need for sVDEVs.

Also, is your build used for other duties, or only for storing data like mine?

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Not to mention: SMB or NFS?

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Normally, I’ve been getting about 400MB/s if I’m using my QNAP 10GbE SFP+ Thunderbolt Adapter. A quick test right now (with a replication running in background) got me about 3Gbit/s with somewhat perplexing Dashboard results.

Screenshot 2025-10-08 at 22.04.52
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Rather than see consistent load / throughput as the server settled into getting 50+GB shoveled into it via SMB, the results keep pinging all over, as do the CPU loads. The above is a high, the low is in the single-digits.

Just file storage for now.

Smaller files just disappear, they copy so quickly. You have to use larger archives to see the impact of sustained writes.

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