[mythtv-users] 30 minute freezups

[Carl Fongheiser]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Jan Ceuleers
<jan.ceuleers at computer.org> wrote:
> While your approach is sensible and rational, I think that the price of
> electricity does not reflect the true cost, mostly because much of it is
> based on "commodities" that we cannot replace, such as coal, oil and
> uranium. Only the cost of recovering those commodities and turning them
> into electricity is reflected in the price we pay. We have an obligation
> to use as little power as possible.

My previous reply got sent prematurely.  Anyway, there are lots of
other ways to save energy that don't cause nearly as much hassle.  As
I mentioned earlier, technologies like SpeedStep and Cool'n Quiet can
yield much bigger returns, and don't impact system stability much at
all.  For really low power utilization, you can use notebook hard
drives.  They're actually designed for the spin-up/spin-down cycles
we're talking about here, and they use about 1 watt at idle.  The only
catch is they're relatively small capacity-wise.

> On top of the above argument (which I'm not trying to convince you of),
> I prefer to spin unused drives down for reasons of reduced heat
> production and security (I also unmount them).

I can't believe you actually do this on a production MythTV system.
That's a whole world of hassle.

Carl Fongheiser