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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>just in case anybody was curious, i measured the
power usage of the following storage system with the Kill-A-Watt
device:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3>Storage
system:<BR>-1GHz PIII System<BR>-512MB Ram<BR>-Intel Desktop Board with
integrated video<BR>-Intel Pro1000 Desktop Card ($15 craigslist)<BR>-3Ware
7508-12 PATA RAID controller ($219 ebay)<BR>-11x200GB Seagate 7200.8 PATA HD
($43/ea total after rebate)<BR>-2x250W powersupplies (connect green leads from
each ATX connector to have both support auto-on/off.<BR>Mobo+4HDs on one, 5 HDs
on the other)<BR>-Openfiler NAS/SAN appliance software (</FONT><A
href="http://openfiler.com"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=3>http://openfiler.com</FONT></A><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=3>)</FONT><BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>And at IDLE it pulls a solid 173W. At full-on
disk random IO (turned on playback on two Myth front-ends, as well as ran a "tar
cfz /tmp/test.tar.gz /storage" on the box, plus a session of Clone Spy on a
mounted windows share, and a "find /" from an NFS client on the same exported
share as the Windows share.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Total at this max load hovered between 218W and
228W</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>For fun I tested my D940 D945GNTLKR desktop and it
used 180-210 at idle and 240 with two sessions of winrar trying to compress the
C:\WINDOWS directory. My DFI LAN Party board with X2 3800+ system by same
contrast used 110W at idle and 140-150W at full load. My PII 266 Dell
Inspiron Windows domain controller and various other Win utils used an idle 18W
and 32W at full load.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>So to recap:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Storage system: approx 195W</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>D950 3.4x2 Intel system: approx 200W</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>X2 3800+2.2x2 AMD systrem: approx 120W</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>PII 266Mhz laptop system: approx 25W</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Toshiba Tecra 8200 750MHz laptop: 34W</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Now I need to grab a Goede system and see what it
comes in at but from the looks of it :)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>-=dave</DIV></FONT>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=dj4904@hotmail.com href="mailto:dj4904@hotmail.com">Dave Johnson</A>
</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=mythtv-users@mythtv.org
href="mailto:mythtv-users@mythtv.org">Discussion about mythtv</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Sunday, July 16, 2006 9:24 PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Re: [mythtv-users] Backend
hardware advice - Power usage</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV><FONT face=Arial><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12px">Out of
curiosity, I’ll get my Kill-a-Watt out and check the total power usage of my
storage system. For those interested in how much their equipment is
costing them, this baby is well worth the 30 bucks:<BR><BR>Kill-a-Watt:
</SPAN></FONT><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12px"><FONT color=#aa660b><FONT
face="Andale Mono"><A
href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001EY6P0/104-0010433-4125511?v=glance&n=228013">http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001EY6P0/104-0010433-4125511?v=glance&n=228013</A><BR><BR></FONT></FONT><FONT
face=Arial>I bought it at work because we have a “wiring closet” doing
double-duty as our server room and we are very constrained by both power and
cooling capacity and needed to balance all the UPSs (1500va is max for
“wiring closet” use in San Francisco) across the circuits as well as consider
ditching any inefficient equipment if it didn’t give us the bang/kWh we needed
and anything we could do to lower the 85-deg temp in the room couldn’t be bad.
This sucker made it a breeze to measure
everything.<BR><BR>Interestingly, our three single-cpu 3.0 Xeon Dell PE1850
servers from a year ago with 2x10kRPM 36GB drives each consume about the same
power as while our three Opteron 275 dual-cpu BL35p blade servers (1x
60GB PATA 2.5” drive ea), while these three Opteron dualies do about 4 times
the work each (!)<BR><BR>Speaking of power savings, we recently purchased two
of the Nexsan SATABeast’s for our SAN storage and d2d backup and they support
both full spin-down of drives as well as a unique feature that allows the
drives to spin to approx 1/2-speed with less than 2 seconds recovery time.
Pretty sweet. Yeah, like I said, bang/kWh is the new buzz for
everyone. It’s about time.<BR><BR>I’ll post when I get those numbers.
It would be interesting to see what numbers others out there have for
their systems. If there’s enough interest, I can put a wiki up for
people to post their power consumption numbers... we’ll
see.<BR><BR>‘Nite,<BR><BR>-=dave<BR><BR>
<HR align=center width="95%" SIZE=3>
<B>From: </B>John Drescher <drescherjm@gmail.com><BR><B>Reply-To:
</B>Discussion about mythtv <mythtv-users@mythtv.org><BR><B>Date:
</B>Sun, 16 Jul 2006 23:42:02 -0400<BR><B>To: </B>Discussion about mythtv
<mythtv-users@mythtv.org><BR><B>Subject: </B>Re: [mythtv-users] Backend
hardware advice - RAID suggestions<BR><BR>I see a big problem with these
calculations. You are assuming that the system is not running any type of
power saving mode. For current athlon64/opteron processors with cool and quiet
running the processor will consume around 25W. <BR><BR>Also at work I have an
opteron 248 server with 4GB of PC3200 ECC DDR, dual processor board, 2 power
supplies and 18 X 250 GB WD SATA drives and the entire system draws
~300W under full load as reported by the apc ups that it is connected.
<BR><BR>John<BR><BR>On 7/16/06, <B>Brad Templeton</B>
<brad+myth@templetons.com> wrote:<BR></FONT></SPAN>
<BLOCKQUOTE><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12px"><FONT face=Arial>On Fri, Jul 14,
2006 at 08:03:08PM -0700, dave johnson wrote:<BR>> -11x200GB Seagate
7200.8 PATA HD ($43/ea - massive tripple-rebate coupon-hell at Fry's and a
lot of<BR>> trust-worthy friends. It took almost 3 months to get
the rebates and one was denied because I <BR>> probably filled one out
wrong, so add $70 for "my mistake." ;)<BR><BR><BR>How many watts are these
drives? Typically one sees 7 to 15w for such drives
(slower<BR>drives, 4500 or 5400 rpm are usually better - quieter, cooler,
lower power, longer life). <BR><BR>With your two PSs how much power are you
drawing for the whole system? 200 to 300<BR>watts?
More?<BR><BR>In California (you said you went to Fry's) incremental
power has gotten up to 19 cents/kwh.<BR><BR>That means 300 watts, running
24/7 costs $500 per year. (In winter you save a bit <BR>from the
heat it gives you, but not a lot. In summer you may be paying it
back<BR>in AC costs if you need AC.)<BR><BR>Even in places with cheaper 10
cent/kwh power, it's still almost $250 per year for<BR>the
power.<BR><BR>Forget about the damage to the environment, 11x200gb is just a
bad way to do it<BR>from an economic standpoint. They have
500gb drives in Fry's for $175 I think.<BR><BR>So 5x500gb could do 2 TB
RAID-5 if you really need RAID (you don't in my view, this is <BR>not a
system that needs 100% availability) for a bit more money ($875 for drives
vs.<BR>$540 for the 11x200gb without doing rebates, and without 2 power
supplies.<BR><BR>But more to the point it would draw a lot less power, and
make up the difference <BR>in a year or so. Quieter and smaller
too.<BR><BR><BR>> Never under estimate the power of the K.I.S.S. method
:)<BR><BR>Never forget that power is becoming the most expensive component
of any always-on PC,<BR>especially in California and other places with
expensive power.
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