yeah, a lot of people replace the passive heatsink on their raid controller to an active fan... it gets quite hot
Come to thing of it, my question was stupid as I already know about all of those solutions. I just... hem... I'm just lazy as hell I have a second PC that's been waiting to be fixed for months now. Maybe I could do something with it
Yeah I recommend it. Old PCs are good to recycle as servers, especially if you whack a RAID card in there then underclock and undervolt them. Nice low power solution with more options available than a NAS box. NAS boxes are always slow. [server update] It's now underclocked at 1.2GHz and using only 1.0v Vcore. Tested linpack stable for 48 hours. CPU usage still only 18% when writing to RAID. May try for sub 1GHz and sub 1v for sh1ts and giggles
Any idea of the draw from the wall vs clock speed yet pooky? Would be interesting to see that. Also if the findings turn out its pointless, then could you please put the spare speed to use by folding@home.
That's a great idea! Hmmm... However... although if there is no great difference between 2.4GHz and 1.2GHz... running it at 100% 24/7 certainly will make a difference. I shall ponder.
Ummh thanks for reminding me to underclock my NAS.. E2160 at stock speed is hardly required when it's basicly just all my extra drives slapped into one case. (and don't get lured in by the f@h-mob)
alright Pookey, you won I rebuilt my backup PC. The Pentium M740 (1.73Ghz) used to be clocked at 2.7 (what a cpu that was...it was just insanely fast). I dropped it to 800mhz now with the fan at minimum speed. The videocard is fanless and so is the motherboard. The powersupply has two very slow fans so the whole PC is very silent apart from the temporary hard drive (an old 40gb) which sucks there is another noise however.. I think a capacitor on the motherboard has swollen and now it makes a stirring noise which is kind of annoying. It doesn't really matter however because for now all I want is to test the stability of the thing and if it doesn't crash after a few days of full load then I might consider buying a 1TB drive to backup the most important stuff It's cool to use old parts that were once my main PC Pentium M 740@800mhz 2x512MB DDR400 Asus P4C800-E Deluxe (with onboard 1Gbps LAN) ATI Radeon 7500 (I decided not to use the X850XT) Antec 500W 40GB (temporary)
Yeah!... looking good. The advantage of a server is that you can easily just add more disks should you need them. I'd consider a crappier GPU to save even more power. You just going to stick one disk in, or going for RAID5? BTW: If anyone reading this thread is thinking of a low power home server build, I can recommend this Gigabyte G31 board. It's bombproof, small, costs £28, and the damned thing will absolutely NOT crash no matter what you do with it... even running Vista I'm currently at 0.95v with a Celery E3200 (also only £28).. now 56 hours Intel burn stable.
Wow, intel burn is... quite hot My file server is an old E6300 on an intel 965LT board (one of the links in my sig). As of today, it's uptime is 105 days. Would be 200, but we lost power for a day Anyway, running ubuntu 9.04, but tested the hardware with 70 hours worth of prime95. I'd say it was stable Not sure about low power, and since I have no voltage or clock options on the board, it's running stock... But, I must say, pookeyhead, I really like your build
I must say i was stunned with my gigabyte P35C-DS3R, I never managed to crash it even when taking my Q66 up to 3.8GHz. Gigabyte and intel chipsets are full of win! It was a change from nforce 4 joys at the time!
51 watts idle with boot disk spun down, and screen in standby mode. Ooooh yeah!!!.. I'm still struggling with the router bringing it out of S3, so can't give figures on that, but in S3 it should really be in single figures. Still.. 51 watts!... I can only surmise that my original figure of around 100watts was wrong, because there's no way i've saved nearly 50 watts by underclocking/volting. This was measured with the GPU inactive, but even so... I suspect my initial figure was wrong, as I've tested this twice now and it's within a couple of watts each time. So that's only around 10 watts more than my NAS box with it's crappy Geode processor. When in use... i.e, GPU active, and boot drive spinning and delivering files to the LAN, it draws just over 70 watts from the wall. Looks like even spinning drives down, and having the screen drop into standby makes some significant savings over time. Max temp while stressing was 49 degrees It idles at 24 degrees with a room temp of 20. Thanks I'm really pleased with it. I love the way I can write files across the LAN as fast, or faster than I can write to the local Samsung F1s
The 7500 was crappy even new back in 2001. I doubt it draws much power as for the disks well I don't know...I might not even need raid. If I use the thing only for backup and if it dies, I can simply replace the disk and re-copy everything back onto it or the other way around if a disk dies in my PC. Of course this is a crappier solution but it's also much cheaper
Good point. Just having your stuff backed up is way more than half the battle. I'm just paranoid I'm a great evangelist for the cause of back up. I find it very, very hard to have any sympathy for anyone, especially those who profess to be computer enthusiasts, who don't have a back up strategy. In reality, the chances of your back up disk failing in the time it takes you to replace the main rig's faulty drive are very, very slim. I just like the idea that a drive can go down, and the RAID carries on albeit it a reduced performance level while I slot in a new disk and rebuild it. Don't become as obsessed as me... you'll end up at least £1000 lighter If I can make one recommendation though, it would be some kind of offsite back up. Houses burn down... thieves break in and steal your stuff. A cheap £20 e-SATA enclosure with a fast drive in it. Sync it with your server using Allway Sync once every few days, and keep it elsewhere. I'll stop lecturing you now BTW: Your Scooby windows etch rocks
If your planning ultimate powersaving, swap the boot/os drive for a usb thumb stick then put open-ssh on it and when checked as stable. Pull the gfx card and monitor and ssh in from other machines.
I prefer the drop into S3 and use WOL solution. You can still use the thing as a real, everyday computer then, should you end up needing it for some reason. Nothing wrong with your idea... I did consider all these options... but I like the idea of being able to use it as a viable computer should the main rig blow up one day... as it's sitting here underneath the desk, and uses the VGA input to my Dell 2450, and the main rig uses the DVI... so at a press of a button on the monitor, I'm at the server's desktop. I used to use a VCN connection and ran headless, but I was only really doing that for the sake of it. I prefer this solution now. ....plus, I can't pull the GFX card... I'm using on-board uber-pants GFX [edit] Hang on.... how can you pull the GFX card? How do you get a PC to boot without a GPU? Running headless and having the monitor shut off almost instantly is one thing, but booting with no GPU present at all? Enlighten me
Most motherboards will boot with no gfx card......................well all mine have......ok i know thats not a massive set of data to come to a conclusion from but i am...... so there im thinking of using a itx board with a raid card 3*1tb and a usb thumb drive for os(debian). then lob the thing into my loft and forget about it until it breaks
Ironically, I understand your paranoia. As i said though, I'm still not sure I want to invest any money in this yet (I challenged myself not to spend any money until march) Thanks for Allway sync, it looks promising and thanks for Scooby Doo,too This window was installed 8 years ago and it's still in perfect condition. It's made of real glass and it actually makes the side panel more solid than the original
