Intel Core 2 DUO

[Olivier Nicole]

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