<p>Be careful with drive spindown especially on 2.5" drives. They're not built to take the potentially regular and long term on/off abuse and they die quickly in my experience.</p>
<p>A drive takes twice the current during spin up as it does just running; on spin down they cool down as well and this te,perature change cycle has been shown to cut drive life significantly.</p>
<p>Don't believe the hype, saving power at the expense of life expectancy of the drive is NOT environmentally friendly or cost efficient</p>
<p>R</p>
<p>Please excuse brevity and mistakes, this email was composed on a mobile phone.</p>
<p>Thanks and regards,<br>
Richard Morton<br>
07899750400<br><br><br><br></p>
<p><blockquote type="cite">On Oct 20, 2009 12:44 PM, "Greg Cope" <<a href="mailto:gregcope@gmail.com">gregcope@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><br>Hi,<br>
<br>
If you are running DVB Nova-T's I assume you are not doing Commerical<br>
skipping or transcoding.<br>
<br>
IF the above is correct, you need sod all processing power, just<br>
enough to cope with the IO (network or otherwise).<br>
<br>
Any atom based board/system would work fine (20w ish) (think nettop).<br>
Or a via based board (I use an SP13000 as a front/backend).<br>
<br>
To get a little over the top you will notice that the thermal (and<br>
hence power requirements) of systems these days are as much driven by<br>
their system board chip sets as the CPU - ie early atom boards had a<br>
low power cpu (5w?) combined with a heater, sorry, chip set that<br>
struggled to draw less than 15W.<br>
<br>
You can aim to get the board+disk to consume around 30W (20W for the<br>
system+cpu, 5w for each of disk+Nova-T YMMY).<br>
<br>
Thus do NAS'es - I believe (But could be wrong) that all the small<br>
NAS'es run linux or freebsd underneath. Although you will find it<br>
hard to find, you need to be carefully about the power draw of a<br>
NAS/always on thingy - see below for my USB/ESATA enclosure power<br>
draw.<br>
<br>
To give you a benchmark my FEBE draws 60W and includes;<br>
<br>
SP13000 board+CPU<br>
2xNova-T PCI cards<br>
2x400 SATA drives<br>
1x750 GB PATA drive<br>
<br>
Sadly the age of the chip set/OS release means it cannot do drive spin<br>
down as that would save another 15w average.<br>
<br>
I am planning a replacement with a Acer Revo (20w-30W), USB twin Tuner<br>
dongle (5w?), and a 1.5TB ESATA drive (5-7w). This should drop to<br>
around 40W, less at idle. Presently strugging to get my ESATA<br>
enclosure to draw less than 7w when the drive inside (1.5TB Samy green<br>
power) should only be drawing 4W (ie the transformer/chipset<br>
efficiency is rubbish at nearly 50%).<br>
<br>
Why am I so anal about this? Simple - dropping 20W of continuous draw<br>
saves around £20 a year (at present prices), or £80 over a 4 year<br>
life. Also lower power means low heat, low noise, and hopefully<br>
better reliability (due to less heat issues).<br>
<br>
Greg<br>
<br>
2009/10/20 Vitani <<a href="mailto:vitani-mythtv@tfxsoft.com">vitani-mythtv@tfxsoft.com</a>>:<br>
<p><font color="#500050">> Good morning all,
>
> I currently have an old desktop PC running Mythbuntu (backend-only), using a...</font></p>> _______________________________________________<br>
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