How far we've come.
I just realized I've been scouring Newegg for some pretty specific hardware. I need the combination of a low horsepower CPU and high network throughput. Yes, I'm actually looking for a slow CPU. Oh sweet irony, open your arms!
The reason I'm doing this is because I'm going to be doing the things I've said seemed like a good idea with ESXi. I'm going to build up my new server, install ESXi on a thumb drive which will be plugged in to an internal port on the server's motherboard. The server itself will have no hard drives.
I will then be building another machine. I'm hoping to use a fairly crappy CPU, since I don't want to waste CPU horsepower. All this machine will do is run FreeNAS, giving my ESXi box access to four 160GB drives and two 500GB drives. With that in mind, I'd like a gigabit NIC. I've run WDS from an ESXi host where the drive was connected via 100Mb, and it worked just fine. But since I have gigabit available, I really would rather use that.
So for the FreeNAS box I'd like to use like an Atom or a C7 processor, but the motherboard would have to have at least one gigabit port. I'll need the open PCI slot for a SATA controller to control all of my drives. Then I'll do the math and buy a low wattage power supply and a case to throw everything in to. Though, depending on how noisy the drives are, I may have a case already. ... No, no it's a trap. That's a different project that requires more than an Atom or C7 driving it.
The reason I'm doing this is because I'm going to be doing the things I've said seemed like a good idea with ESXi. I'm going to build up my new server, install ESXi on a thumb drive which will be plugged in to an internal port on the server's motherboard. The server itself will have no hard drives.
I will then be building another machine. I'm hoping to use a fairly crappy CPU, since I don't want to waste CPU horsepower. All this machine will do is run FreeNAS, giving my ESXi box access to four 160GB drives and two 500GB drives. With that in mind, I'd like a gigabit NIC. I've run WDS from an ESXi host where the drive was connected via 100Mb, and it worked just fine. But since I have gigabit available, I really would rather use that.
So for the FreeNAS box I'd like to use like an Atom or a C7 processor, but the motherboard would have to have at least one gigabit port. I'll need the open PCI slot for a SATA controller to control all of my drives. Then I'll do the math and buy a low wattage power supply and a case to throw everything in to. Though, depending on how noisy the drives are, I may have a case already. ... No, no it's a trap. That's a different project that requires more than an Atom or C7 driving it.