Intel Core 2 DUO

dweimer dweimer at dweimer.net
Wed Oct 30 04:54:40 UTC 2013


On 10/29/2013 10:00 pm, Olivier Nicole wrote:
> Dean,
> 
> On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 9:02 PM, dweimer <dweimer at dweimer.net> wrote:
>> I am looking at replacing an old mini tower PC running with a 900Watt 
>> power
>> supply (simply old parts left over from PC upgrades) with a small form
>> factor PC to run backups to eSATA with Bacula.  Main goal is to cut 
>> down on
>> the UPS load, hate having that beast of a power supply running 24/7 to 
>> only
>> be used about 10 hours a week.  I have been searching eBay, and there 
>> are a
>> ton of Dell and HP small form factor PCs with the Intel core 2 DUO 
>> CPUs a
>> few of which have 4G ram, for cheap.  Assuming I can find one that I 
>> can put
>> two internal drives in to run zfs mirror for FreeBSD install, does 
>> anyone
>> have any experience on performance, will the Intel core 2 DUO, be able 
>> to
>> handle GELI and ZFS on the eSATA disk with decent throughput?
> 
> I have no experience of Bacula (I use Amanda), but I would not go RAID
> on a back-up machine. I prefer to rely on duplicate copies on
> different drives: if something ever happens to my backup system, the
> single drives will be readable from just any  other machine, so I can
> access the backup data.
> 
> From experience with Amanda, network, then CPU and RAM are the
> critical resources. Compressing a 500GB dump takes a lot of
> calculation.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Olivier

Raid, was only intended for the O/S install, and backup database just a 
mirror to help out in case of disk failure.  Backups are written to 
single 1TB Western Digital Green Drive in eSATA dock, with a 4 disk 
rotation, swapped out on weekly basis, full backups on Monday night, 
after disk swap with next one stored in my desk at work, then daily 
incremental backups.  result is current weeks backups at home, past 
three weeks history at the office.  Drives are Geli encrypted, with zfs 
dataset, I do use LZO compression on the backup jobs, but that CPU load 
is handled on the client side.  The only data I have that isn't stored 
with either hardware or software raid is the backup disks.

The stats, from my file server backup, server O/S is windows Home Server 
2011, running under ESX 5.5 (free version) on top of a raid 5 data set, 
backed by an LSI Megaraid 8708EM2 controller.

   FD Files Written:       180,435
   SD Files Written:       180,435
   FD Bytes Written:       480,244,148,041 (480.2 GB)
   SD Bytes Written:       480,284,933,158 (480.2 GB)
   Rate:                   30209.7 KB/s
   Software Compression:   8.0 %

I have 2 other backup jobs starting at the same time, my workstation 
(windows 8) and Webserver (FreeBSD) both of which finished earlier, the 
workstation maintained 22500KB/s with 56% compression, the web server 
was very slow, with 65% compression, however sluggishness is due to 
nature of data, less than 10G, after the compression, but 650,000+ 
files.

With the Geli overhead, on the eSATA disk I can hit about 72MB doing a 
dd from /dev/zero to the disk using 4k block size, under current setup, 
so the speed of the backup system and disk is not my limiting factor as 
of now.  However I did discover today, that my rc.conf file was missing 
the "mtu 9000" setting on my Bacula server, so it may run faster next 
Monday, as I have jumbo frames enabled on everything else.

As someone else mentioned heat concerns, with the small form factor PCs, 
and my current setup is working well, perhaps I should just stick with 
it.

-- 
Thanks,
    Dean E. Weimer
    http://www.dweimer.net/


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