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 Post subject: power consumption survey
PostPosted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 6:35 am 
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Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:17 pm
Posts: 42
Location: Munich, Germany
Hi,

there are some information in a lot of different threats regarding power consumption of your systems.

For those who are planning to setup a new NAS (e.g. me :) ) it could be interesting to have a collection of different systems and their power consumtion numbers within one single threat in order to estimate the electricity costs per year.

What do you think? Anybody who likes could add the information somehow like this:

My system:
naslite-M2
CPU: Pii 350MHz
RAM: 256MB
HDD1: 250GB SAMSUNG SP2514N, ATA DISK drive
HDD2: 320GB WDC WD3200AAJB-00J3A0, ATA DISK drive
CDROM, FDD
NIC: 3C905B-TX
transfer rate: 4400kB/s
power consumption, load: ~145W
power consumption, idle: ~135W
power consumption, suspend: not possible
wake on LAN (WOL): not possible

any further info on howto build a cheap low power system is welcome


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 17, 2009 10:01 am 
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Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2004 4:11 pm
Posts: 1771
Location: Server Elements
To suspend drives, set the BIOS to spin the drives down after say 30min. In the NASLite-2 admin, disable the status by setting it to [--] or set the probe interval to 8 hours since the status probes will cause the drives to spin-up. Save, reboot and you should have a NAS server that will spin the drives down.

My advice however is to use a VIA CPU if you are interested in power saving rather than performance. Spinning the drives down will drastically reduce the lifespan and increase the chance of data loss. I prefer to keep mine spinning. You'll likely get 5 years from your drives without issues by letting them spin 24/7. SMART is also most effective when the drives are not disturbed. You can execute a SMART extended check and view the status in the Disk-X pages. SMART self diagnostic is a very good indicator of drive health under those conditions.


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 17, 2009 7:02 pm 
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Joined: Mon Apr 17, 2006 12:55 pm
Posts: 143
Location: Newcastle
Thanks for that heads up Tony re spin down.
I lost a small amount of data on a Synology NAS drive, possibly down to it spinning down the hard drive. Thankfully i kept a reasonable backup regime. My current setup is running full tilt 24/7. Possibly why my leccy bills are so high.
On the subject of data backup, on my new server i'm going to use two hard drives (hopefully cutting down power consumption). Any advice on whether to use RAID1 (software when it's implemented on Core3) or Rsync?


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 17, 2009 9:40 pm 
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Location: Server Elements
willsy wrote:
Any advice on whether to use RAID1 (software when it's implemented on Core3) or Rsync?


If you are interested in fault tolerance, then RAID is the way to go. If you are interested in a backup solution, then rsync is more suitable in my opinion. I work directly off of the server and have been known to overwrite files. Save vs Save As will do that, so the standing rsync mirror is always there to bail me out of trouble.


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PostPosted: Mon Oct 19, 2009 1:01 pm 
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Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:17 pm
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Location: Munich, Germany
Tony wrote:
... If you are interested in a backup solution, then rsync is more suitable in my opinion. I work directly off of the server and have been known to overwrite files. Save vs Save As will do that, so the standing rsync mirror is always there to bail me out of trouble.

How does this mirror work exactly?
I thought, "mirror" means an exact replication... so, in case you overwrite a file it will also be overwritten on the mirror!?
Or is it configured with naslite like a "snapshot"? Means, there are several backup versions for the last x backup events available...?


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PostPosted: Wed Oct 21, 2009 7:49 pm 
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Joined: Mon Sep 11, 2006 10:38 am
Posts: 231
Location: Belleville MI
So what did you use to see how much watts your system is using?

I guess if you told that more people would post theres there.

-Raymond Day


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 3:00 am 
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Joined: Sat Jun 02, 2007 2:45 am
Posts: 485
Location: France
keks wrote:
How does this mirror work exactly?
I thought, "mirror" means an exact replication... so, in case you overwrite a file it will also be overwritten on the mirror!?


Hi.

Mirror is an exact copy (like a real life mirror ;) )!

You write things to Disk-0, add, change files on it. Nothing changes on Disk-1. Disk-1 will be the copy of your disk-0 at the last time mirror triggered.

Then mirror starts. When mirror finishes, your disk-1 will be the exact copy of your disk-0. You WILL NOT have a copy of disk-0 at 21 Oct 09 and at the same time another copy of your disk-0 at 22 oct 09. You will have ONE hard disk identical to the other. Then you'll do on changing disk-0 data the the cycle will go on for ever ;)

I hope this was clear.

Regards


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 3:23 am 
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Joined: Sat Nov 19, 2005 6:39 pm
Posts: 633
Location: California
Right ! And ... in other words ... the "mirror copy" is (to use keks's term) a "snapshot" taken once every 24 hours (until you turn it off).


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 4:55 am 
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Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:17 pm
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Location: Munich, Germany
Raymond Day wrote:
So what did you use to see how much watts your system is using?


Thanks for the hint.

I used a simple power watt meter like this one and pluged it beween the PC and the power line:
http://www.energyoptimizersdirect.co.uk/acatalog/Energy_Devices.html


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 5:24 am 
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Location: Munich, Germany
georg wrote:
Right ! And ... in other words ... the "mirror copy" is (to use keks's term) a "snapshot" taken once every 24 hours (until you turn it off).


I'm sorry :) By saying "snapshot" I meant a concept like it is implemented e.g. in NetApp-Filers.
There, the snapshop is a file-wise bit-by-bit comparison of the current state of HDD compared to the state of the HDD at the time of the last snapshot-run.
You can configure there how often the snapshot is taken and for how long these snapshots are kept before deleted.
In our company-environment these snapshots are stored virtually on the same share in a hidden write-protected folder with subfolders for every snapshot event like here:
\~snapshot\hourly.0
\~snapshot\hourly.1
\~snapshot\hourly.2
...
\~snapshot\nightly.0
\~snapshot\nightly.1
\~snapshot\nightly.2
...
\~snapshot\weekly.0
\~snapshot\weekly.1
\~snapshot\weekly.2
...
"hourly" means noon, "nighly" is midnight. Under each of these folder you can browse the complete directory tree as it is existent in the root directory also. So you do not see only the changed files but all files.
So, you have a backup-copy twice a day. Then after a few days only a weekly snapshot is kept. After a few weeks nothing is kept anymore.

However, I understood that such or a similar backup-strategy is not implemented by rsync in naslite (which doesn't matter at all :) )

Mirroring I personally knew from MS-robocopy and there I used the /mon switch. With /mon:1 you can force the service to mirror every single change on your HDD. I assumed this "as mirror" and therefore I was a little bit confused by Tony's statement
Quote:
the standing rsync mirror is always there to bail me out of trouble

Because then, in the moment you overwrite a file it would also be changed on the mirror disk...

But now, everything is clear since of course mirroring does not necessarily mean that every single change on the HDD has to be replicated immediately. It depends on the mirroring settings...

To cut a long story short: thank you for the explanations and sorry for the confusion I may have caused :mrgreen:

... and now ... let's proceed with the power consumption numbers of your systems :D


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 24, 2009 8:33 am 
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Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:17 pm
Posts: 42
Location: Munich, Germany
In case anybody might still be interested in this topic :lol:

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to buy an old FSC Celsius server for 3€.

So, I put my HDD's into that one and now my system looks like:

naslite-M2
CPU: Piii 700MHz
RAM: 768MB
HDD1: 250GB SAMSUNG SP2514N, ATA DISK drive
HDD2: 320GB WDC WD3200AAJB-00J3A0, ATA DISK drive
CDROM, FDD
NIC: 3C905B-TX
transfer rate upload: 8300kB/s
transfer rate download: 8900kB/s
power consumption, with Matrox AGP graphic adapter: ~170W
power consumption, without Matrox AGP graphic adapter: ~70W

I am shocked a little bit that this damned old graphic-adapter card consumes around 100W.
Fortunately, I do not need it after NL-installation :D


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 24, 2009 9:49 am 
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Joined: Sat Nov 19, 2005 6:39 pm
Posts: 633
Location: California
Yes, still interested in this topic.
Wow! Thanks for the warning in that "bad" AGP card.

Intel D945GCLF2 with single stick 2GB RAM, 1xST3400 (400GB Seagate SATA), two small 40mm case fans, one 60mm fan to keep the HDD cool, an idle DVD-RW, picoPSU-120 with external 60W power-brick. When OFF: 3w; Running NL2.6Beta, but totally idle: 39w; during NL Mirror operations: as high as 43w. An extra Watt if I turn the variable speed case fans to maximum.


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 24, 2009 6:51 pm 
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Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:17 pm
Posts: 42
Location: Munich, Germany
I've to correct myself.
When writing the numbers in my last post I didn't notice some other power consumers on the line between the power meter and the PC.
Now, the correct number of my running nas with swapping HDD's without any other devices in between is ~52W (without the graphic adapter).
8)

I'd say, this is a good value for such an old system (built in 2001). I think I can live with that for a while :)


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PostPosted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 6:17 am 
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Joined: Mon Sep 11, 2006 10:38 am
Posts: 231
Location: Belleville MI
I got a "Watts up?" used it on my Mini-ITX. A Atom 1 core board. D945GCLF model It has a gigabit Network card in it too.

On boot up it got about...

power consumption, load: ~32W
power consumption, idle: ~28W

It has a WD Blue type hard drive in it.

I guess when they come out with a Atom CPU with GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) on it too. So system on a chip it should take less power. The GPU has the fan on it not the CPU in this system. I guess that's taking most of the power and don't even need a good GPU to use for a NASlite server. Can only set it in the BIOS to use a GPU card. I picked that with out a card but it auto goes back to the built in GPU.

-Raymond Day


Last edited by Raymond Day on Fri Oct 30, 2009 8:56 am, edited 2 times in total.

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PostPosted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 11:04 am 
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Joined: Sat Nov 19, 2005 6:39 pm
Posts: 633
Location: California
So, Raymond, is this the D945GCLF model ?


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