I find myself in possession of two different platforms on which I could host FreeNAS. I cannot use both since there is only room for one. I am turning to the community for opinions.
Usage Model:
Wins for Platform 2:
Usage Model:
- iSCSI for Virtual Machines (30+ VMs, 3TB)
- SAMBA/CIFS for Documents and Movies (low traffic, 14TB)
- Looking to move away from iSCSI to Fibre Channel
- 2x AMD Opteron 2419 EE (1.8Ghz / 60W TDP / 6 cores each)
- 128 GB DDR2 533MHz @ 1.8V
- SuperMicro H8DI3+-F Motherboard
- 2x Intel Xeon E5620 (2.4Ghz / 80W TDP / 4 cores each [8 w/HyperThreading])
- 96 GB DDR3 1333MHz @ 1.35V
- SuperMicro X8DT6-F Motherboard
- IBM M1015 HBA flashed to IT Mode
- QLogic 2432 4Gb Fibre Channel card
- 24x 1TB Hard Drives
- 128 GB SSD L2ARC
Wins for Platform 2:
- I know that FreeNAS's iSCSI service and SAMBA/CIFS service tends to be single threaded, so the extra MHz of the Xeon would help there.
- The DDR3 is 1.35V vs 1.8V (DDR2), so I could save some power there.
- The Xeon idles at 0.8V while the Opteron is at a fixed 1.125V, again giving the power savings win to the Xeon.