Modern X10SDV-2C-7TP4F replacement?

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altano

altano

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Sep 3, 2011
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My X10SDV-2C-7TP4F is too underpowered to handle zfs native encryption, apparently, and is therefore officially too old to be a useful storage board for me. Not to mention my getting sick of hardware incompatibilities wasting my time.

Anyone have any suggestions for a replacement?

Required:
  • Enough power to do zfs native encryption, maybe even over encrypted tunnels (e.g. syncthing or zerotier), and basic storage server tasks (smb/nfs shares, etc) but not much else. No VMs or anything. Just storage.
  • 10gbe (sfp+ or rj45)
  • LOW POWER: as low as possible. I have a pretty constrained power budget. My X10SDV-2C-7TP4F has a 25w tdp!
Nice to have:
  • I would love an onboard HBA so I don't have to think about it. Support for 12 drives.
  • m.2 slot for boot drive.
Cost: <$2k
 
M

Markess

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altano said:
I would love an onboard HBA so I don't have to think about it. Support for 12 drives.
Click to expand...
zac1 said:
A2SDi-TP8F?
Click to expand...
I have no idea, but I assume ZFS encryption is multi-threaded? The 8, 12, & 16 core Atom C3xxx CPU equipped boards in the A2SDi series are overall going to be more powerful than the Pentium D1508, but their single threaded performance is probably a lot worse.

They're SOCs with TDP of 25-32w, so that fits the desired power draw.

If you're working with SATA drives, there's boards in the A2SDi range with 12 SATA and two 10gbe ports onboard.
 
altano

altano

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Unfortunately I'm working with SAS drives and I don't see an Atom board that can do 12 without an add-in card. It looks like even older Atoms have Intel QAT, interestingly, while these Xeon-D boards don't. I don't know how hard it is to get ZFS working with QAT now-a-days but that could help a lot.

It looks like someone on Reddit said the X12SDV-4C-SP6F has a 36w power draw on idle which isn't bad.

Looks like I might have to just get a separate HBA and buy something without an onboard controller.
 
zac1

zac1

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Ah, didn't see SAS as a requirement. A2SDi-8C-TLN4F has 12 SATA ports (4 SATA + 2x MiniSAS HD) but no 10G networking.
 
altano

altano

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This is insane but the 16 core atom can't keep up with ZFS encryption either:

1679799636080.png

That's ONLY a transfer speed of ~100-150MB/s. Are my expectations about how much CPU I need just stupid? Is ZFS on Linux terrible? Hmmm.
 
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zac1

zac1

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  • Wow
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A

ano

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a dual 7763 h12 with zfs & encryption on vs off, takes a performance hit, allthough its the only test that isnt a massive difference. on most systems you get about 50% with it enabled.

zfs = cpu monster
zfs + encryption = more.

try selft enrypting drives?
 
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altano

altano

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@zac1 that link is interesting, thanks for sharing. I was actually virtualizing my storage server and I didn't realize that AES-NI and some other instruction sets don't get passed-through to VMs by default in Proxmox/qemu. Once I did a full CPU-passthrough I was able to get the performance up to ~200MB/s and less CPU usage which is enough for me. The CPU is still pegged often, but I was able to verify that when writing to disk my VM switched from `gcm_generic_mul` being at ~100% CPU in `perf top` to `gcm_pclmulqdq_mul` being ~25%. Hopefully this pull request makes it into the kernel and improves things further!

@ano that has not my experience at all on FreeBSD. I confirmed that even with this exact pool on the same hardware the I use WAY less CPU on FreeBSD than NixOS. In @zac1's thread it looks like other people are seeing that too. I think ZFS on Linux is just more CPU hungry.
 
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