Question Synology put a desktop CPU in my rackstation - Why?

[strelizia]

Hey!
Someone recently gifted me a Synology Rackstation RS3614RPxs and I'm planning to setup NixOS/vagrant/libvirt on it. Removed the dust, switched in some new drives, so far so good. But when I went on to change the thermal paste, I noticed the CPU was an i3-4130. According to cpubenchmark this is a desktop CPU, suited for single threaded applications. Why would Synology put this in a NAS? This doesn't seem to fit very well, especially since this is hardware made for businesses.

 

[kanewolf]

Hey!
Someone recently gifted me a Synology Rackstation RS3614RPxs and I'm planning to setup NixOS/vagrant/libvirt on it. Removed the dust, switched in some new drives, so far so good. But when I went on to change the thermal paste, I noticed the CPU was an i3-4130. According to cpubenchmark this is a desktop CPU, suited for single threaded applications. Why would Synology put this in a NAS? This doesn't seem to fit very well, especially since this is hardware made for businesses.

It is 10 year old hardware (the 14 in the model number). You are using 2023 comparisons...

 

[strelizia]

It is 10 year old hardware (the 14 in the model number). You are using 2023 comparisons...

So you mean this CPU was still seen as a "server CPU" in 2014 or am I missing something? I apologize for my incompetence, I don't have that much experience with hardware. Just built a PC a few times and fixed some servers.

 

[kanewolf]

So you mean this CPU was still seen as a "server CPU" in 2014 or am I missing something? I apologize for my incompetence, I don't have that much experience with hardware. Just built a PC a few times and fixed some servers.

A 10 year old NAS wasn't considered a "server". It had to handle 1 Gb of traffic and hand it off to hardware for parity and writing to disk. Not really that difficult. As long as it supports ECC RAM, that is the only server function required.

 

[CountMike]

So you mean this CPU was still seen as a "server CPU" in 2014 or am I missing something? I apologize for my incompetence, I don't have that much experience with hardware. Just built a PC a few times and fixed some servers.

NAS is not "Server" in classical sense to run programs for terminals, all it has to do is to handle disk storage which doesn't need a lot of computing power. All it does is to run very simple OS.

 

[hotaru.hino]

A "server" just means what kind of job the computer primarily has. A server doesn't actually mean any sort of computer with a certain performance requirement. As long as the computer can handle the requests coming in and out of its network port in a reasonable amount of time, any computer can be a server.

I mean heck, a lot of games before the mid 2000s required the player's computer to be a server to host games so they could play with their friends via online or LAN. I hosted a website on what would be considered an absolute potato by today's standards (1 CPU core, 1GB of RAM, 10GB of storage) and it worked just fine.

 

[kanewolf]

Hey!
Someone recently gifted me a Synology Rackstation RS3614RPxs and I'm planning to setup NixOS/vagrant/libvirt on it. Removed the dust, switched in some new drives, so far so good. But when I went on to change the thermal paste, I noticed the CPU was an i3-4130. According to cpubenchmark this is a desktop CPU, suited for single threaded applications. Why would Synology put this in a NAS? This doesn't seem to fit very well, especially since this is hardware made for businesses.

It is a dual core hyperthreaded CPU that DOES support ECC RAM. For a 10 year old part, that is pretty reasonable for a storage appliance.