Ideal Nanobsd hardware?
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Starting with pfSense 2.1 (which brings new compatibility in FreeBSD), what is the ideal low-powered fanless Nanobsd device? What is the defacto standard after the ALIX? How is the new Soekris Net6501 board faring?
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Starting with pfSense 2.1 (which brings new compatibility in FreeBSD), what is the ideal low-powered fanless Nanobsd device? What is the defacto standard after the ALIX? How is the new Soekris Net6501 board faring?
My net6501 works fine. Many people would argue to skip an Atom box in favor of an i3 instead though. They're slightly more expensive (for a small system) and use slightly more power but are dramatically faster.
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I'm looking for the ~ 10 watt, fanless device. Since the ALIX already does 85Mb or so, just doubling that performance would be sufficient headroom.
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There really aren't any devices out there that are viable between the Alix and Atom units. (That we know of… yet.)
Lots of people are looking for something in that area, it might be that some of the older/slower gear (e.g. 1GHz Via CPUs and similar) might be coming down in price, but the power consumption would probably still be closer to an Atom unit.
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There really aren't any devices out there that are viable between the Alix and Atom units. (That we know of… yet.)
Lots of people are looking for something in that area, it might be that some of the older/slower gear (e.g. 1GHz Via CPUs and similar) might be coming down in price, but the power consumption would probably still be closer to an Atom unit.
The newer Atoms (including the net6501) are fairly light on power consumption because they ship with power-optimized chipsets. The original crop of Atom system shipped with chipsets that ate more power than the Atom itself.
Personally, I have high hopes for the Intel NUC that should be out in October. It's a 4"x4" box with an i3. The two systems they'll be selling will have either a wired Gig-E connection or a Thunderbolt port. Toss one of these in with a VLAN-capable switch and you'll have a real strong showing from a very tiny package.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/13/intels-core-i3-nuc-mini-boards-set-to-hit-market-in-october-po/
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I live in a southern climate that's not exactly cool, especially during the summer. I have a garage which is not airconditioned, just passive vents to the outside. There I have an enclosed 16U cabinet only with a 120mm exhaust fan at the top. In there I have a 1U machine with Intel motherboard with Atom CPU, I believe D410, 16GB SSD, PicoPSU and dual gigabit Intel NIC (PCI) consumption is a little over 10 watts at the plug.
There is also no fan in the 1U system not an intake/exhaust fan or a CPU fan. My intent is to place a fan where the traditional PSU has been placed, but I have not gotten around to it yet. This has been like this for almost a year and never had an issue with overheating, lockups or shutdowns.
Like I said I "need" to add a fan to the pfSense and I also have an additional 120mm fan to add the the enclosure and also a temperature controller so the fans don't run 24/7 (the power consumption of the cabinet fans and also the system fans quickly adds up, I want to say it's around 5 to 10 watts per fan) but so far it has not given me any problems.
