Hi guys I am in the process of upgrading my storage solution. Currently I have an Intel Atom server with 4 250gb drives in software Raid5 along with a 250 gig 2,5" drive with Windows Server 2008 R2 on it. I will soon be moving to a place where I have to pay the power myself, and with the current 50 watt pull of the Atom server it will get quite expensive to run it 24/7 when you pay 0.26 pounds pr kwh. I am looking for an upgrade in storage, and a downgrade in power consumption. The current requirements are the following: At least 3x3tb drives Space for 3 more drives, making a total of 6 Able to stream fullHD movies over gigabit network Not more than 20-30 watts of power consumption Able to do software Raid5 in OpenMediaVault The current plan is to run OpenMediaVault on it from a USB drive and just chuck it in a closet somewhere. I was looking at using an RPi, but that is just a tad too low power. I don't know whether a 1155 mITX board and the most economical of the processors would be good or if it can be done "greener"?
I think bindi recently looked into this with his HTPC/NAS As far as I know that's almost doable with 3x3Tb but not any more than that. I've been considering offsetting my Microserver consumption with a UPS modded with a solar panel mounted in the window.... but that's a work in progress...
hmm having a look at Bindi's and one of his requirements is 1080p playback. I don't even need enough power for that! And I have a 4 port SATA PCIe card which I could plug in to a spare slot on the motherboard to get all 6 SATA ports. There must be some good low power alternative.
Picarro, you do realize that three 3.5" hard drives idling by itself will use up around 12-15W of your "20W" idle power budget, right ? With 6 drives, we talk about 24-30W of idle power just for the hard drives and nothing else. You could try http://www.msi.com/product/mb/C847MS-E33.html , but this is still in the range of 10-20W power consumption for the board itself.
+1 On power up he'll more than likely peak at ~60W but idle with the drives spun down would be close to his target. One problem I can see is RAID arrays, as realistically your spinning up multiple drives regardless of the RAID configuration. I've been running 2x WD 2Tb Green drives in my Mircoserver, and use software backup in insure my data is safe periodically as one the fly data security just saps power. RAID is fine with battery back up supply to help with a safe power down, as a power cut is more likely than a drive failure RAID is pointless for most people unless you like one BIG volume such as RAID 0,5 or 6 offers. (just thought most people don't get brown outs, we get a brief loss every few weeks which is as fast as a blink of an eye but enough to trip the power on and off which spazes my server, my consumer unit just says "meh")
How so? Surely not for file serving purposes..? Though I imagine that the 2x USB 2.0 ports could be a limitation, but depends what you're doing. For streaming 1080p this shouldn't be an issue. Neither should the 100Mb port. It also looks fairly simple to port OMV to RPi. This is interesting if you want some extra functionality When it comes to power bills: there's other ways in which to save the money. Eg if you're running an electric shower, that's almost 2kWh in a 10 minute shower.. Costing ~25p a time / ~£100 a year. By cutting my shower times by a minute each time I was saving more than enough power to cover my 300W graphics card
I know the drives will consume a couple of watts in "on" mode, but idling they shouldn't suck more than 0.1 watt or so. I would preferably want the Raid5 setup because I have before lost a drive in a JBOD config which cost me all of the 300 ripped DVD's on that one, and I don't have the time to rerip those DVD's whenever a drive gives up. The RPi is supposedly too low power for Raid5 as it cannot process it fast enough, and the 100mbit port is shared on the USB bandwidth so it might get a tad hairy streaming some of my uncompressed bluray rips. As for the WoL, that is a great option, and I was also thinking along the lines of having an auto-shutdown so it goes off in the morning when I go to work, and then have some form of trigger to power it up when I get home. Should save me around 8 hours of power every day. As for saving in the rest of the house, I already have LED lights planned along with physical off switches for anything that might be on standby (I'm looking at you 42" tv and projector!).
Well, no : http://www.wdc.com/global/products/specs/?driveID=1087&language=1 It's 0.6W. That is 1.8W for 3 drives, or 3.6W for 6 drives. Then add to that memory power consumption of about 2.5W per memory module (if you intend to use DDR3), then add the power consumption of the base system (about 19W with a Celeron 847 based system, the lowest you can go without hardware mods on motherboard and with performance above Atom; or about 22-25W with any Sandy/Ivy bridge desktop CPU, no matter if single or quad core). That brings you to the 30W mark at best, with all hard drives in standby mode, idling, doing absolutely nothing. And of course no RAID, as most RAID controllers don't allow you to send hard drives to standby mode if they are part of the RAID setup. With RAID, you are back to 3.5-4W power consumption per hard drive. And if you put in an extra HW RAID controller, count with 8-20W extra power consumption just for the RAID controller. Your primary issue with anything else but x86 Intel/AMD system is lack of SATA or PCI-E ports and very limited performance with everything running through one USB2 as you said. Wake On Lan is a good option, if it works on your network. If not, then you have a problem . Automated shutdowns shouldn't be a problem - just create a batch file which is running ever few minutes and which pings the IP of your desktop computer - if it can be pinged, it is online, keep running, if not, then put the server in sleep. Automated wake up could be done too, just add a WoL utility to your desktop computer startup.
Hmm well the idle draw should preferably be below 20. I can live with an action load of 30-40w as it wouldn't be on for more than a couple of hours a day. I just hate to wait for something to boot.
What about standby? That should be around 5-10W power consumption no matter what kind of hardware you have, plus instant power on of course.
I was thinking about using RPi to trigger the power button on my microserver every time our phones drop off the wireless network, with a 10-15min delay on event triggers. As well as getting RPi to do some other automation.. I've said too much already..
Hmm, you could technically use Tasker to send a WoL package when entering the appartment. Would be able to wake it from S3 sleep which doesn't take much power. And then have it on a timer that would shut it down for good during the late night early morning.. Hmm, decisions decisions. You could also use it to wake up the server when pressing the XBMC remote button on the phone. Oh. This creates so many possibilities. Edit: Jut found a link for it. Looks like a piece of cake. Need to try this when I get home. Edit2: Forgot to add the link. Silly me. Go HERE for WoL goodness.
UnRaid/SnapRaid/FlexRaid (there are others) offer redundancy and parity without needing to spin up every drive every time you use the array.
