Hello!
Is Sata-II 3Gb/s motherboard enough for a node? There are some HP DC5800 on the market and they are cheap as dirt.
Yes.
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So the node wont be too slow to win a a chance to store its piece?
No modern HDD is capable of fully utilitizing SATA 2 yet (though recently they’re getting close!). No point in going SATA 3. Right now the only way to take advantage of SATA 3 is to use SSDs, but they’re too expensive for Storj to become profitable and, frankly, not that needed either, because your network will likely be a bottleneck.
I’d worry more about power consumption and other components in this aged device.
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Thank you for your quick answer.
Speaking of power consumption, dc5800 can be with 35W Celeron 420 or 430.
It sounded like you were still planning to buy this… I would say… don’t. These CPU’s are so old and low performance that a raspberry pi 4 is about 4x as fast and most likely a lot cheaper and definitely a lot more power efficient.
If you have this stuff already, by all means, give it a try. But don’t spend money on it.
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Raspberry Pi 4 4 Gb costs $145-$345 in my part of the world.
DC5800 is $28.5
This CPU scores 235 points on the Passmark’s benchmark. My N36L scores 478 points and runs 13 TB in nodes while being still decently responsive… after startup and after I gave the box 16 GB of RAM. This Celeron will probably be working, but it will be slow enough that it might be another bottleneck for winning races. How much RAM do you plan to have in this computer?
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The one for $28.5 (i doubt it has Celeron 420 or 430) as it is described as having two-core cpu has 2Gb, but it can be upgared to 4x2Gb.
Yeah. My N36L used to have 2GB of RAM and it was barely enough. With a slower CPU you need all the caching you can get, so I’d consider at least 4GB. It will still be borderline, but I’d expect it to work for some time (until your node grows to few TB). The saving grace is that this is a 64-bit CPU.
This will be a nice experiment in figuring out how low-spec can you get (-:
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N36L is a nice piece of server. Is it loud? Can you sleep in the same room?
Not really, I don’t have a bed in the same room. It is loud enough to be a bit uncomfortable indeed, there are apparently some custom fans that make it less so. But the drives themselves do generate more noise, with four of them it stacks.
Are these 4 drives for 4 separate nodes?
Two and a half of them are dedicated to Storj. The rest contains private data. It’s still not that bad, two of the drives are 2.5", so they’re almost silent. But the two 3.5" can be heard from across the room with no problem…
often the problem with running old architectures is their inefficient power usage.
so in regions with cheap power it can most certainly make sense.
storagenodes run optimally around the minimum recommended specs.
1 core / thread pr node and 1GB of RAM… however they will often run on far less… however one can also quickly run into issues, when running below recommended specs.
in regard to sata300 vs sata 600, the sacrifice is max bandwidth, i don’t think it will matter.
however to that i will add that i have been using sata ssd’s for caches.
and even tho sata can do well over 120k iops the bandwidth of limitation of sata does seem to reduce the iops for the device…
atleast when compared to my pcie and nvme ssd’s
even an older pcie ssd will beat a new and faster sata ssd in iops… easily
i think this comes down to the bandwidth, not because the bandwidth is used 99% of the time… but there are peak usages over micro intervals which most likely maxes out the bandwidth on the sata…
however when using hdd’s i doubt sata2 vs sata3 matters much…
i mean sata2 is like 300MB/s and sata3 is 600MB/s
with any hdd you will never see those kinds of speeds…
there might be some further limitations with the controller itself…
you might only have one pcie lane from the controller to the chipset, which would be something like 500MB/s in the cases of pcie 2.0 x1 which then might be you max bandwidth for all drives on the controller.
i suppose that might be why we see a lot less sata ports on older mobos and in the later models they tend to get a ton more…
if you expect to fill the mobo with drives, you might want to think twice… sata2.0 is really old
but you might also get away with it, without issues… but then the power usage might ruin what you saved on the initial purchase…
Thanks for your answer. DC5800 has only space for 2 3.5" drives and has CPU’s with TPD from 35W (65W usually). Maybe i can play with undervolt and FSB speed in terms of power efficiency. When I run out of space, i will get another DC5800 and get some PSU redundancy.
Keep in mind that the BIOS of those machines checks for faulty fans via PWM rpm signal, so using fans that run slower than a certain rpm threshold will prevent it from booting.
Yeah, I know. That’s why I haven’t tried modding mine yet.