NAS appliance or home server
in [UK Linux]
|
Prev: Linux Laptops
Next: I've finally snapped
From: Theo Markettos on 20 Aug 2008 07:32 Gordon Henderson <gordon+usenet(a)drogon.net> wrote: > In article <3eA*IuBks(a)news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>, > Theo Markettos <theom+news(a)chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote: > >I'm quite surprised that this hefty great lump is actually considered > >relatively low power these days. Which is going to make beating it a bit > >tricky. > > You think so? Check... > > http://unicorn.drogon.net/power.jpg > > So that's an EK1000 motherboard with a flash-drive, (and a 4-port PSTN > interface card - this is a Linux box running asterisk) but add in 2 x > low power (sub 10W drives) and you're still under half your box... Oh yes, I know you can get boards powered entirely from their built-in hamster wheel. I should have put 'for a desktop PC'. My current options are: 1. Leave my server switched off half the time (not ideal from a backups POV) 2. Replace it with a secondhand lower power machine 3. Replace it with the bottom end ITX/etc board (because anything else is too expensive at the moment) Replacing drives is not an option right now, but I'd only save a few watts in any case. 1 is what I do at the moment. 3 is probably too underpowered (quick compiles are useful). For 2 I'm looking at machines in the small ads, which is why I want to beat the spec of my current machine. So really I'm concerned about what the power consumption of machines produced by PC World (etc) was in about 2005. Don't forget that 60W idle is also driving a (non-spinning) DVD-ROM drive and a monitor (with the most basic VGA card I could find). > Don't spin down until about 2 hours of idle time. You'll need to change > the ext3 mount parameters too, or use ext2. > > Check http://www.samwel.tk/smart_spindown/index.html I'm going to be spinning down two backup drives once a day. I wonder if there's any stats on drive lifetimes based on spin up/down cycles? For starters I probably ought to find a USB/firewire case that will spin down. Any suggestions for a cheap-ish 3.5" case? Theo
From: Theo Markettos on 20 Aug 2008 09:07 Tony Houghton <h(a)realh.co.uk> wrote: > Early (2nd generation?) Athlon64s with the Winchester core were very > efficient, about 30W loaded IIRC, and they have the Cool'n'Quiet feature > so you can reduce the clock speed at idle. But have you read the Athlon > Powersaving Howto and applied it to your Athlon XP? That's useful, thanks. I have athcool on my machine, and it does noticeably make a difference (to the fan noise as well as the power meter reading - think it saves about 10W), but for some reason Debian doesn't seem to run it on boot (it's in /etc/init.d). I must chase this up - thanks for reminding me! > I'm not sure, but I got the impression VIA chipsets were more economical > than nForce. I had an nForce 4 board and had to replace the stupidly > undersized and noisy chipset cooler with a big passive Zalman heatsink, > and it ran a little on the hot side. IIRC (this is very vague) its VIA > competitors tended to have passive cooling off-the-shelf. So an early Athlon64 with a VIA chipset would be worth looking out for? I think I have an nVidia at the moment. That at least is something I can test in a prospective secondhand machine. Theo
From: Daniel James on 20 Aug 2008 12:18 In article news:<VA.000014a7.1fa82938(a)nospam.aaisp.org>, Daniel James wrote: > 1. A NAS appliance ... I noticed that SCAN were offering a FREE Samsung HD502IJ 500GB drive bundled with the 500GB Netgear ReadyNAS box ... then I noticed that the bundle was one of their "Toady Only" offers ... so I weakened. http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=797762 The factory-fitted drive is a Seagate 7200.10, BTW. So I now have 2x500GB in a RAID-1 array in a low-power NAS box for �189+VAT ... which is only about �25 more than I would have paid to get the rather less capable (and rather flaky, according to some reviewers) Icy-Box 4220 and the same two drives. Initial feelings are that it's a very neat little unit - smaller than I was expecting - well constructed and sensibly designed ... but it's NOT silent by any means. When it starts up and the fan comes on at full blast it's positively noisy but it settles down to a mildly irritating hum ... I shall have to think of somewhere a bit out of earshot to locate it. As it sits here chuntering away to itself the Seagate disk is at 50C (according to its own SMART data) and the Samsung is at 38C ... I don't know whether that's an accurate reflection of the temperatures of the drives or whether it reflects greater optimism on the part of Samsung's Smart code, but it is possible that it's an indication that the Samsung is a cooler-running drive as the two are side-by-side in identical bays. Thanks to everyone who chipped in with information and advice in this thread ... I'm rather sorry I didn't go for the mini-ITX solution in some ways, but the NAS solution was pragmatic -- and turned out to be cheaper than I had expected. Cheers, Daniel.
From: Martin Gregorie on 20 Aug 2008 20:09 On Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:07:44 +0100, Theo Markettos wrote: > That's useful, thanks. I have athcool on my machine, and it does > noticeably make a difference (to the fan noise as well as the power > meter reading - think it saves about 10W), but for some reason Debian > doesn't seem to run it on boot (it's in /etc/init.d). I must chase this > up - thanks for reminding me! > Have you enabled it? The general distros tend to put lots of boot time scripts there but only enable the ones that everybody will want to run on almost every host.. I don't know Debian, but in Fedora it would be enabled with the chkconfig command. -- martin@ | Martin Gregorie gregorie. | Essex, UK org |
From: Tony Houghton on 21 Aug 2008 08:34
On 20 Aug 2008 14:07:44 +0100 (BST) Theo Markettos <theom+news(a)chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote: > Tony Houghton <h(a)realh.co.uk> wrote: > > Early (2nd generation?) Athlon64s with the Winchester core were very > > efficient, about 30W loaded IIRC, and they have the Cool'n'Quiet feature > > so you can reduce the clock speed at idle. But have you read the Athlon > > Powersaving Howto and applied it to your Athlon XP? > > That's useful, thanks. I have athcool on my machine, and it does noticeably > make a difference (to the fan noise as well as the power meter reading - > think it saves about 10W), but for some reason Debian doesn't seem to run it > on boot (it's in /etc/init.d). I must chase this up - thanks for reminding > me! athcool is a program that runs all the time isn't it? You don't even need to do that, just poke something into the chipset at boot time and it does it on its own. The HOWTO only ever had "recipes" for VIA and AMD chipsets though, I don't think anyone ever got round to figuring out the nForce ones. -- TH * http://www.realh.co.uk |