[geeks] Cheap Processing Threads

[Lionel Peterson]

See below

> On Mar 18, 2019, at 9:14 AM, Jonathan Patschke <jp at celestrion.net> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 16 Mar 2019, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>>
>> AMD Ryzen 5 1600 6 core, 12 thread, 3 GHz processor and cooler ($79.95)
>>
>> Gigabyte B450 mATX mb w/ 4x DDR4 memory slots, 4x SATA III ports, an M.2
>> slot and more ($69.95 - less $30 when bought with CPU)
>>
>> They had Crucial DDR4 RAM at $37.50/8 Gig DIMM.
>
> Though not widely advertised, Ryzen supports ECC memory on most
> motherboards.  Most of the times I've used non-ECC memory on a machine
> that I hit hard, I've regretted it.

I've had good luck with non-ECC Ram in these types of 'play' boxes, I have
actual server hardware for actual serious work.

>> And finally, an off-brand M.2 Gen3 x4 SSD board (which will fit nicely
>> on the above MB), 256 Gig for $45
>
> Does your motherboard support PCI bifurcation, or is this interposer using
> a PCIe switch?  At $45, I'd expect it to be a mostly-passive device that
> requires bifurcation support.

Wow, never heard of 'bifurcation' for an NVMe device, I have no idea.

All I know is there are SATA and NVMe devices, and my device and MB are "Gen 3
x4" compatible, and the device claims 2900 MB/s read and 950 MB/s write and
150K/220K read/write IOPS.

All I was really looking for was a boot device independent of the 4x SATA III
connections.

If I understand what you mean by 'bifurcation' you mean to 'steal' PCIe lanes
to dedicate for the SSD - is that correct?

>> Should be a nice little box for trivial VMs and other work - that CPU is a
bit
>> long in the tooth, but at that price I'm not complaining.
>
> You'll probably be able to upgrade all the way to a Ryzen 3 later, if you
> need.

I know the board currently supports Ryzen 2.

>> I've got a small Antec case, 650W PS, and 4x SATA III drives (250G ea) to
>> round out the build with a small RAID 10 array using chipset RAID.
>
> Pfft.  FreeBSD, ZFS, and bhyve.

Who knows, maybe - it might wind up a windows box, might not, I'll have to see
how it plays out.