[mythtv-users] Any advice on cooling down my backend

Owen Townend owen.townend at gmail.com
Sat Sep 20 01:51:47 UTC 2008


2008/9/20 John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com>:
>> The PC is used as a file server which holds music and backups and other
>> stuff so turning it off when myth isn't recording isn't an option, but
>> is there any way of underclocking from software? It is an AMD64 x2 chip
>> and I think from XP this is possible. I could then underclock it in the
>> daytime, when it isn't doing much (and the room is warmer).
>>
> Do you have cool and quiet running? Activate the ondemand governor so
> the system runs at 1GHz most of the time. This will save 20W+
>

Also, depending on the number of disks you have in the backend you can
save a fair bit setting spindown times using hdparm.

The only real downsides are that it takes a few (up to 30) seconds
to spin them back up which can make for noticable lag times when
using a frontend and you may want to add a minute pre-roll for recordings.

On my backend with 7 disks in two software raid 5s plus a system disk
using a kill-a-watt style reader:
~215W reading from all drives... (using dd, so cpu mostly idle)
~130W with all drives spun down (`hdparm -y`)
~185W with drives spun down and CPU at 100%
~240W with all drives reading and CPU 100%

cheers,
Owen.


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