Before you freak out about the price of an 8-16 core c3000 system, this system would also be able to be a VM host, allowing not just a very good file server but also a number of other things as well, whatever you need for a home or small office. The C3000 series can use 256 GB RAM if you go with ecc memory, and your board supports it.
The Atom is a system-on-a-chip the same as ARM. So not only is there a processor, there is some other devices like the network interface or sata stuff. Mine has encryption and compression hardware acceleration, tagged as QuickAssist or QAT.
The arguments I'm making for all this are:
- In order to make a decent backup system or NAS device, you need to buy a power supply, a case, drives, etc. Probably you need the same class of all that that you would use here.
- Virtualization utilizes the same hardware to implement several servers.
- A home or small office usually makes heavy use of one thing at a time, surrounded by long idle times for whatever service you're using.
- Virtualization allows you to have better performance for all your services because when you're heavily using your backup, for example, you are likely not heavily using some other service you might want.
- The c3000 series allowing more complete isolation of hardware devices for a specific VM would let you safely have, for example, a really good firewall/router as one of your VMs, and maybe IDS/IPS (intrusion detection/prevention systems) or a VPN.
- A backup system is architecturally almost the same as a NAS. You could make your device and implement a NAS with a removable cartridge like I said, then keep interesting data on that system, as well as an online copy of your most recent backup, and still take the real backup to a different location to provide protection from theft or fire or ransomware or whatever else.
- IMO an 8-core atom could do all that stuff very nicely. But it will cost you more than you had intended.
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