At 01:54 PM 1/8/2015, John R Pierce wrote: >On 1/8/2015 11:32 AM, david wrote: >>The price point of Intel's NUC unit makes it attractive to use as a >>server that doesn't have significant computational load. In my >>environment, a USB connected hard-drive could provide all the >>storage needed. I wonder if anyone has had experience with it, and can answer: > >IMHO, its totally unsuitable as a server, there are many better choices. > >A) there's no ECC, and servers tend to keep data in memory for a >long time. soft bit errors in gigabytes of memory are a more >frequent occurance than you might think. With a file server, that >corrupt data stands a good chance of ending up back on disk, where >it becomes permanent silent data corruption. > >B) a single USB drive is a very poor choice for any sort of server, >there's no redundancy whatsoever. When (not if) that drive croaks, >you lose everything. > >something like an HP Microserver is a much better choice for a SOHO >server. Been running one of the older N40L models here for 2+ >years, running FreeNAS, although it certainly can run CentOS. >supports 8 or 16GB ram, with ECC, and has 4 SATA drive bays. Mine >has 4x3TB in raidz (like raid5) for 7.3TiB total usable storage, I >have no trouble reading or writing at near gigE speeds. > >Another good choice would be one of the mini-ITX "Avoton"/"Rangley" >Atom C2xxx family of boards (don't let the 'Atom' branding fool you, >these are low power high performance server processors). These have >2-4-8 cores at 1.6-2.4ghz, support ECC RAM up to 32GB, and have 6+ >SATA ports and 4 gigE ports onboard. A variety of people make >mini-ITX chassis that hold 2-4 disks, and a few with 6-8. > >>... >>3) Is it possible to add an additional NIC for possible use as a >>home router/gateway? If not internally, then via a USB connected NIC? > >for a home gateway/router, I would suggest looking into an APU1D4, >such as are sold by Netgate. This little 6x6" board draws less >than 10 watts TOTAL ACTIVE, has 3 GIgE ports and a dual core 1Ghz >CPU with 4GB ram, it has SD card slot, miniSATA slot (for a SSD), >and 2 miniPCI-E slots (for expansion boards such as wifi), its >fanless (convection cooled via a heat spreader to the aluminum case, >and basically rocks. > >I'm using one with pfSense (a freeBSD based firewall distribution) >and its very slick. routing tons of connections (bittorrent) to >my 30Mbps internet, it uses only 3-5% of its CPU, I've been told it >can handle AES IPSEC vpns up to about 100Mbps, and 400-500Mbps >simple NAT routing. > >-- >john r pierce 37N 122W >somewhere on the middle of the left coast John Thanks for your comments. In the particular application, I used the word "server" only in the sense that GUI is only rarely used, and CPU speed isn't an issue. The data the server holds has other "primary" copies elsewhere, so if some corruption or damage occurs, it can be restored within acceptable time. Thus, I am not interested in ECC memory or RAID for this situation, although I do appreciate the need for servers with mission-critical data. As a former employee of Tandem Computers, mirroring, backup, check-everything, dual everything is in my blood. David