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

[Edmund]

I currently use hdparm -S120 so the hard drives turn off after 10 
minutes. I seem to get about 8W per drive when they spin down, however 
the / drive never seems to spin down. I guess it must be logging things 
or something.

I currently use 2 drives for myth and 1 for file serving and another for 
backing up the pcs. These are spun down most of the time. I am thinking 
of converting all four to a RAID 5 array. I obviously get 25% less 
storage, but I assume that whenever any disc is being accessed all 4 
will be on.

 Owen Townend wrote:
> 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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