[mythtv-users] Spin up delay for HDDs

[Ramon Hofer]

On Tue, 27 Sep 2011 04:39:35 -0500
digid myth <digidmyth at gmail.com> wrote:

> PXE is pretty fast. I have tried hard drives, thumb drives, small
> cheap SSD's etc in the front ends and overall PXE is a better
> solution for me. It also makes managing and updating the front ends
> very convenient. I have some notes on my web page at
> www.wentztech.com/radio on getting it to work. Some of the info is
> dated based on my version of ubuntu on the server, and is more of a
> notes page for what I had to do to get it working for future
> reference. I recently upgraded to the latest .24 and it was very easy
> to apply to all the front ends, just had to upgrade my image on the
> server with apt-get and reboot all the FE's. Final tweaks/configs
> based on the FE's all being different hardware were done on the FE's
> which are automatically saved to the server. I am very happy with
> this solution for multiple reasons. Power usage, heat gene ration is
> down on the FE's as the hard drives etc have been removed. Fans could
> be slowed down or removed as a result. Adding a new FE is quick and
> painless. I only have to make changes in one place, and simply reboot
> the FE's for the changes to take place. The other nice thing is that
> you can see what files on each FE have changed from the master
> image.  As stated the only down side is that I have not been able to
> suspend the FE's reliably due to their file systems being NFS shares
> etc. One of my hobbies seems to have become getting my myth system as
> power efficient as I can, and when I have time I will peruse this
> more. I have figured that it cost me about 1.00 per watt per year in
> power on things that are on 24x7. My backend is averaging about 85
> watts of power so is costing me $85.00 per year in power to run. (It
> does lots of other things besides being a back end for Myth) The
> front ends idle out at about 15 watts or so with the hard drives
> removed so there is not a lot if incentive to try and reduce their
> power usage too much, from a financial standpoint.
> 
> Dale

That's a great page you have there!
Thanks for the link.

I'm trying to lower my server's power consumption too.
That's why I wanted to delay the spin up and therefore wouldn't need a
strong PSU just to let the discs turn.
But what backing up video files is concerning I still think RAID is a
good choice. Maybe instead of adding a RAID 6 with 8 x 2 TB I add two
RAID 5 with 4 x 2 TB. Like that I will still be able to put most of the
discs to sleep.
I don't want to keep the content forever but there won't be big pain if
I loose a disc.

I wasn't worrying about the FE power consumption because it's not
running as often as the server. But when it boots faster and uses less
power at the same time that's really cool!


Ramon