Is N3150 good enough for file-server duty?

Considering a barebone to replace my Raspberry Pi2, and the one I really like is ASRock Beebox with Celeron N3150. Everything is great about it but the CPU performance, and I am concerned. Will it be good enough to run a file server under Windows 10 Pro with Bitlocker-ecnrypted drives? Also, it has firmware-implemented TPM (fTPM) to secure the drives - is it a bad thing, or nothing to be worried about?

My priorities are: compact size, low power consumption, maintainability. I really like this particular model very much because it has mSATA alongside 2.5" 9.5mm SATA internal slot, and accepts 8GB DDR3L laptop memory sticks - so I would populate it with surplus parts from my notebooks; also, I would strip the wi-fi module from it right away. (=

 

For simply serving up files onto a network, that CPU should be more than plenty. However, with Windows as the OS, I don't really know if that'd be a smooth experience due to the OS overhead.

 

@Jarhead I'd like to listen to music, and watch movies, from bitlocker-encrypted drive connected to this device, over 802.11ac network. I would put 8GB RAM in there. If the drive is not encrypted, I believe Raspberry Pi 2 should be good enough for the job, even with its very limited bandwidth, and higher CPU usage because of NTFS drive.

 

Not sure about music, but if you're streaming video you might have to consider if the server needs to transcode the stream (for example, a plex server streaming to a roku). That''s computationally expensive and you might have to bump up the specs as a result. For example, I'm planning on a home server too and while I originally considered an embedded Celeron (J1900, iirc), I decided on a Pentium G3260 instead since it has enough horsepower to transcode a 1080p stream (according to Plex recommendations) and enough headroom for other services.

Encrypted drives shouldn't pose an issue if the CPU has hardware support for encryption. And 8GB should be plenty; that's my plan as well.

 

@Jarhead I don't have a smart TV, or other smart devices - only two convertibles to serve. Will there be any benefits from transcoding in this situation? Price-wise, I am absolutely not willing to pay over $200 sans memory and storage; the server must be as light and as compact as possible, so that it could be transported in bag alongside notebook with ease.

 

Well, if no transcoding needs to take place, then streaming videos shouldn't be any more computationally expensive than streaming regular files. At that point, your biggest bottleneck will probably be the networking interface (but that'll still be faster than any HDD for sure).