I have had for over 2 years an HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10, which runs on FreeNAS and acts as a NAS as the name suggests. Equipped with a Celeron G1610T, it runs on FreeNAS and offered decent performance until I decided to activate disk encryption. This processor does not support AES-NI instructions, so encryption and decryption are done in software, it’s heavy.
To remedy this, it is possible to change the CPU and turn to slightly beefier Xeons. So I ordered an E3-1260L (4c / 8t @ 2.40Ghz). Level TDP we go from 35W for the Celeron to 45W, which remains correct for semi-passive cooling, especially since the CPU does not run at 100% continuously. This CPU offers 8 logical cores, the turbo, and the AES-NI instructions, which boost FreeNAS and the FreeBSD jails that I make it support.
We often talk about smartphones that are impossible to dismantle, as far as the HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10 is concerned, it’s all the opposite, obviously without a screwdriver. We open the case, we disconnect the connectors on the motherboard, and we pull it back, and that’s it.
Once the motherboard extracted, it remains only to remove the radiator, remove the Celeron, then insert the Xeon, and after a small change of thermal paste, we put everything back, and at boot, it works!!
The Xeon brings a certain comfort that is felt quickly. Exploring Samba shares is smoother, as is navigating the FreeNAS interface. The start of iocage jails, too, even if not free of latencies as long as the ARC cache is not filled. When the price of 1TB SSDs drops, I will consider replacing the mechanical disks.
