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

Richard Morton richard.e.morton at gmail.com
Sat Sep 20 12:02:52 UTC 2008


Hello Everyone,

I am quite new to Linux and MythTV but I have my box setup in the lounge
alongside a humax. it has quite a nice config and it seems to be rocksolid
as I continue to improve it's config...

Asus p5q motherboard
Intel Q6600
Asus Nvidia Geforce 8500 512MB passively cooled with SVideo and DVI / VGA
4GB memory
5 500GB drives in RAID 5
1 40GB drive for OS
DVD-RW
USBUIRT
NovaT500 dual DVB-T tuner card

Nokia N800i remote


anyway, I would also like stuff to shit down on non-use... I'll have a look
at hdparm, is there a coolnquiet and power now equiv for Intel chips?

How is the suspend feature and wakeup, has anyone got it to work so it wakes
up a few minutes before a recording? I take it this sets a wakeup time in
the BIOS settings so the BIOS has to support this feature.

Talking about heat and that stuff... in this day and age I was considering
using the vented heat from the cupboard to warm the house. in the summer
I'll reverse the fans so it vents outside. Two benefits - one I get a warm
house... two I get pre-heated fresh air in the house... during the winter...
just need a dehumidifier for it and i'm done!



Rich





Thanks And Regards,

Richard Morton
07899 750400
AOL IM: richardemorton
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2008/9/20 Edmund <edmund.1 at dial.pipex.com>

> 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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> >
> >
>
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