[mythtv-users] power usage

[Marco Nelissen]

Since I sort of started a thread about power-usage a while ago, I
thought I'd share the power-related results of my RAID-adventures.

The RAID I built uses 90 Watts when idling (rather than the 200
Watts I'd guestimated). That's for an nForce4 motherboard, AMD
Sempron 3100+ and 5 300G disks. One of the disks is a spare, so
could be put in standby for a savings of about 8 Watts.

For comparison: another server I was using had a Pentium-II at
266MHz and a single 30GB disk. It used 30 Watts when idling.
I moved the functionality of the old server onto the new server,
so I've really only increased my total power usage by about 60
Watts, assuming I leave it running all the time like I did with
the old one.

If I had known about the AMD Geode processor before starting to
build this machine, I would have seriously considered using that
instead though: 6W at 1GHz looks pretty good.