After doing some of my own research, I have found that the AMD EPYC 3251, seems to beat out comparable xeons (like the 1718t and the 2141). I have found a board too that satisfies my needs in the ASrock w680d4u-2l2t.
I plan to use it for a nas that has 5 drives at 28TB each running raidz2.
It will only be used as an SMB file share, in this case to store backups. I plan to have it powered off and physcially disconnected from my LAN and power when not in use.
As I see it, the only two requirements I have is that I would like to utilize the full 2.5GBe connection and that I will be using encryption feature of zfs.
The processor though is, at this point, 7 years old. Is it still good to get or should I go for something more recent and with a bit more punch, like the Xeon E-2378?
Er… The board and CPU do NOT match.
Nor do they match with consumerish 2.5G networking.
Anyway, embedded EPYC is already overkill for a simple backup system. Ten years young Xeon D-1500 would still do.
Why 8C/16T for backups and (single threaded!) SMB serving?
To answer the other question, I just wanted to make sure the CPU wouldn’t be a bottleneck for maximizing the network bandwidth or doing crypt in ZFS.
I plan to keep this system for 5-7 years so by the time I would be ready to replace it, the cpu will be close to 15 years old. Ergo my question as to if the CPU is still good. As stated in my initial specs, the total HDs it would be processing would be 140TB, with a usable space of 84TB. I will also use 128GB of RAM, unless 64 or 96GB will do
Embedded CPUs are on 10-year product cycles, so 15 years sounds reasonable. And I suppose that 64 GB RAM would do for a large backup pool—but DDR4 RDIMM is cheap and higher power when it’s on use may not be much of a concern.
