[mythtv-users] Backend machine - Acer Altos G540 Std Server?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 7 Aug 2013 14:16:54 +1200, you wrote:

>Does anyone have experience with this or similar machine
>http://www.trademe.co.nz/a.asp?id=624082220 ? Intended use is as a backend
>using HDHR tuners.
>
>Size (WxDxH)mm: 445 (H) x 212 (W) x 550 (D) mm
>Weight (Est): 32 kg
>Processor: Intel Quad-Core Xeon E5420
>Processor Speed: 2.5GHz
>RAM: 4GB
>Hard Drive:3x 75GB (8 hard drive slots altogether)
>DVD-RW
>SAS
>
>
>I am guessing the CPU and RAM will be sufficient. My main concerns are
>power consumption, heat and noise. I will be stuffing it full of 8 x 2 to 3
>tb hard drives.

32 kg!!!  I hope you have a sack barrow to move it with!

Something of that age would likely be quite a heavy power user.  It
also seems to be PCI/PCI-X, not PCIe.  CPU and RAM should be fine for
just recording, but maybe not if you want to run mythcommflag.  I am
not really sure on how good Xeons are as I have no experience with
them - I tend to work for small companies who do not need a Xeon in
their server.

I upgraded my MythTV box not long ago, and my AMD FX-4100 3.6 GHz CPU
(quad core) is capable of doing real-time mythcommflag on at least 4
recordings at once.  By doing it in real-time, it uses data out of the
buffers for each recording before it is written to disk, and hence
does not cause extra disk accesses all the time to read the
recordings.  I really think that is the level of CPU to aim for in a
backend now.  And it was really quite cheap - the entire new
motherboard, CPU and 8 Gibytes of RAM was only NZ$500.

I was pleasantly surprised by how quiet my new CPU fan is - I have the
box in my bedroom, so noise at night is a real problem.  It seems that
the latest desktop CPUs from both AMD and Intel come with quite quiet
fans.  I would not expect the same from an older Xeon at all, but that
one might be recent enough to be OK as the CPU fans seem to be quieter
with each new generation.  But that might be related to the reduction
in power use with each new generation, and possibly not applicable to
Xeons.  The server boxes I have met like that one have all had quite
noisy case and power supply fans - there seems to be an assumption
that servers will be put in a server room somewhere, or at least a
storeroom, so the noise does not matter.  So they do not bother with
fitting them with more expensive quieter fans.

Eight hot-swappable drive slots is hard to beat though, presuming that
all of them will do SATA as well as SAS.  I have only 3 internal drive
slots on my BE/FE box, so I now have two extra 3 Tbyte recording
drives hanging off cables out the back, and two 3 Tbyte drives for
videos, music and so on on an external USB 3 dual drive mount.

In terms of drives, I am finding 2 and 3 Tbytes is too small and am
now looking at 4 Tbyte ones for my next upgrade:

http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=415674

They are still a little more expensive per Gbyte, but not excessively
so.