I've been meaning, for some time, to provide some sort of storage 
server for the motley collection of computers -- some Windows and some 
linux based -- that lurk around here. The primary requirement is that 
it be able to run headless, and that it support both samba/cfs and NFS 
from a RAID-1 array (probably 2x750GB SATA), but it'd be nice to be 
able to do some other things with it too.

I'm torn between opting for an easy off-the-shelf NAS solution that may 
not offer all the facilities that I'd like and setting up an actual 
server. An actual server has some attractions in that I'd like to run 
some sort of version control server (probably CVS or svn) on it, and 
possibly also use it as a distccd server to help with big builds on my 
linux development box. Neither of these is likely to be available as 
standard on any NAS appliance.

So, I'm toying with four options.

1. A NAS appliance. There are some that support samba and NFS and would 
meet my minimum requirement. These things generally run low-power CPUs 
(often ARM or PPC) so run at quite low power, which is good for 
cost/greenness but makes it harder to customize them. 

I might possibly, at some later date, play around with running modified 
firmware (these things mostly run some sort of linux, with a web 
interface for admin and some sort of bundled backup application) but I 
don't want to get into trying to cross-compile unfamiliar distros and 
reflashing unfamiliar hardware (possibly irreversibly) at this stage 
.. so realistically the NAS appliance route offers me just the minimum 
requirement.

2. Small format PC -- new build, mini-ITX, or similar -- running either 
a standard Linux distro or (say) FreeNAS (I don't know of any support 
for NFS from Windows-based servers). I could easily set up the file 
server side, and would also be able to set up a VCS server. It wouldn't 
have the power to be much use as a distccd server, though. There's a 
nice intel ATOM 1.6GHz mini-ITX board for around £50 (including CPU) 
that I might use ... but a big problem is that there seems to be a 
dearth of small cases for this sort of setup -- and those that do exist 
are expensive.

3. An old PC running linux or FreeNAS (as above). This would give 
similar power to a SFF box (less than the ATOM -- they're 450MHz PIIIs) 
so I still wouldn't have much joy with distccd but it would be cheap to 
set up (I'd just need a SATA controller card and a couple of drives -- 
the motherboards have on-board SCSI but SCSI drives are nothing like as 
cost-effective as they used to be). Downside here is that the old boxes 
I have are big and noisy, and possibly not very economical to run.

4. New full-size PC. I'm thinking of something like a low-end EE AM2 
A64X2 with everything on-board in a quiet case and an efficient PSU. 
This would run linux with samba/cifs and NFS networking and anything 
else I felt like -- there would be plenty of oomph for distccd. It 
could easily be quiet enough, but would be big (not as big as my spare 
PIII boxes) but would use more power -- I'm guessing about 80W idle 
whereas I'd hope a NAS appliance could manage 20-30W.

On the side of the NAS box are:
- Ease of setup and use
- Small size
- Low power consumption
- Low noise

On the side of a SFF box are:
- Flexibility
- Small size -- if I can find a small case
- Low power consumption (but how low?)
- Low noise (I hope)

On the side of the old PC are:
- Flexibility
- Low cost

On the side of the new PC build are:
- Flexibility
- Speed
- Low noise

TBH I'd really love to reuse one of the PIII boxes because I hate 
seeing kit that still has life in it lie idle, but they're huge and 
slow (though good enough for fileserving) and roar like a train ... The 
energy consumption is an unknown, too.

Resolving this quandry would be easier if I knew more <sigh>.

Does anyone have hands-on experience of any of the (2-drive) NAS 
appliances that might help? I know that the relatively cheap Icy-Box 
NAS4220 supports samba and NFS and RAID1, so that would be a 
possibility. The Qnap TS-209 Pro also does all this (and has Gbit net) 
but costs more than twice as much, is it worth it? Do any other 2-drive 
NAS appliances support NFS out of the box, and can they be recommended?

How much power do these NAS boxes actually use? Anyone put a meter on 
one? I'm guessing about a bit more than 10W for the logic board plus 
around 7-10W per drive (when spinning). How noisy are they? Do NAS 
boxes spin their drives down when inactive? Does the delay when they 
spin back up again cause problems for network clients?

The intel ATOM CPU is said to use no more than 4W ... but the spec for 
the ATOM mini-ITX board quotes power use up to 50+W -- I suppose the 
supporting circuitry is responsible for that. That seems a lot ... how 
does it compare with the VIA C7 boards from the likes of VIA and 
Jetway? The C7 can use IIRC around 7W, but the support circuitry might 
be more frugal. You can get a fanless 1.2GHz C7 board for not too much 
more than the ATOM board (which has a fan) ... would that save me 
power?

I really do want to run this thing headless. I know that the NAS 
appliances come with web apps for setup/admin and can operate without a 
keyboard or screen (and, indeed, have no means to drive them) ... and I 
know that I can drive a standard linux distro via shhd once it is set 
up, but is there a distro that's designed to be installed and run on 
normal PC kit that has no keyboard or monitor connected? Something that 
will install from a LiveCD that boots with shhd support, perhaps? I've 
run out of ports on my KVM switch and I really don't want the hassle of 
disconnecting one of the other PCs to set this thing up (especially as 
I managed to break one of the PS/2 connectors last time I did that -- 
elderly cheap Belkin cable with deteriorating plastic).

Sorry to ask so many questions in one post .... any thoughts or 
comments on any of the above will be gratefully received.

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In message , Daniel James 
 writes


>2. Small format PC -- new build, mini-ITX, or similar -- running either
>a standard Linux distro or (say) FreeNAS (I don't know of any support
>for NFS from Windows-based servers). I could easily set up the file
>server side, and would also be able to set up a VCS server. It wouldn't
>have the power to be much use as a distccd server, though. There's a
>nice intel ATOM 1.6GHz mini-ITX board for around £50 (including CPU)
>that I might use ... but a big problem is that there seems to be a
>dearth of small cases for this sort of setup -- and those that do exist
>are expensive.

I acquired a mini-ITX board and put it into an old ATX case. There's a 
lot of fresh air inside the case but that's no real problem. It's got a 
whisper-quite 170W PSU and with an old disk makes a usable web-server.

>
>3. An old PC running linux or FreeNAS (as above). This would give
>similar power to a SFF box (less than the ATOM -- they're 450MHz PIIIs)
>so I still wouldn't have much joy with distccd but it would be cheap to
>set up (I'd just need a SATA controller card and a couple of drives --
>the motherboards have on-board SCSI but SCSI drives are nothing like as
>cost-effective as they used to be). Downside here is that the old boxes
>I have are big and noisy, and possibly not very economical to run.

Have you considered recycling a laptop?


-- 
Bernard Peek
London, UK. DBA, Manager, Trainer & Author.

Daniel James  writes:

[...]

> Does anyone have hands-on experience of any of the (2-drive) NAS
> appliances that might help? I know that the relatively cheap Icy-Box
> NAS4220 supports samba and NFS and RAID1, so that would be a
> possibility. The Qnap TS-209 Pro also does all this (and has Gbit
> net) but costs more than twice as much, is it worth it? Do any other
> 2-drive NAS appliances support NFS out of the box, and can they be
> recommended?

No, but I recently bought the 4-slot ReadyNAS NV+, and I believe
that's basically like the 2-disk Duo, only more than twice as
expensive (the workings of market segmentation, I presume).

It feels reassuringly heavy and carefully engineered and (so far, at
least) just works.  It supports NFS and a bunch of streaming protocols
for audio and video files (and images, probably).  It's also
Linux-based, so with enough fiddling you can probably get lots of
things working on it.  There's a HOWTO for running a subversion server
on it, for example.

Sure, it's expensive for what's basically a small wimpy
special-purpose machine, but it does seem to do what it's supposed to,
and did it straight out of the box.

A possibly relevant factor is that many of these devices (even those
based on Linux and supporting NFS) for some bizarre reason require a
Windows or Mac to configure them.  The ReadyNAS range seems to be an
unusual exception.

[...]

In article news:, Bruce Stephens 
wrote:
> I recently bought the 4-slot ReadyNAS NV+

Netgear? A friend had the earlier/cheaper SC101 and hated it ... The 
ReadyNAS is apparently quite different from that, but his experience 
makes me cautious.

> It feels reassuringly heavy and carefully engineered and (so far, at
> least) just works.

Not at all like the SC101, then!

> There's a HOWTO for running a subversion server
> on it, for example.

Interesting ...

> Sure, it's expensive for what's basically a small wimpy
> special-purpose machine ...

The Duo only costs about the same as the Qnap 209 Pro (only the Pro has 
NFS support, unfortunately) ... I wasn't expecting anything much 
cheaper (the Icy-Box is about half as much, but does less and doesn't 
have Gb Ethernet).

Did yours come with a drive? What make? It seems strange that you can 
only buy it with one drive installed -- not zero or two!

> A possibly relevant factor is that many of these devices (even those
> based on Linux and supporting NFS) for some bizarre reason require a
> Windows or Mac to configure them.  The ReadyNAS range seems to be an
> unusual exception.

I do have Windows boxes ... and IME many pieces of kit claim to require 
Windows to set them up but when you get them you find it isn't true. 

For example: I recently got a Buffalo wireless router -- I chose the 
Buffalo because it was cheap and because I knew the router 
functionality could be disabled so it would act as a 4-port wired 
switch and wireless access point. It comes with an installation and 
setup application for Windows only ... but -- as long as your network 
can talk to its default IP/subnet -- you can just point a handy browser 
at it and configure it using the web interface.

All these NAS boxes have ethernet, all that I've looked at have some 
degree of web configuration, I really can't imagine that any would 
require a specific Windows-based app to get them started!

I'll bear what you say in mind, though.

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In article news:, Bernard Peek wrote:
> I acquired a mini-ITX board and put it into an old ATX case. There's a 
> lot of fresh air inside the case but that's no real problem. It's got a 
> whisper-quite 170W PSU and with an old disk makes a usable web-server.

I've got a VIA EPIA M10000 board in a Morex Venus 6... er ... the one 
before the current 669 model. It was built as a MythTV box but it actually 
gets used as a spare linux desktop and occasional TV - I never found the 
time to set up MySQL and MythTV on it. Nor could I ever work out why a PVR 
application needs an industrial-strength RDBMS ...

It certainly has the power to run a simple server apps ... but it really 
struggles to rebuild its Gentoo system from source when there's been a 
major upgrade. I think the initial build took about a week, and it can 
take a day or two to update now even with a 3GHz P4 machine helping with 
distcc. I don't think using a mini-ITX system as a distcc /server/ will 
make much impact on compile times on other machines.

The Venus case is bigger than I'd want for a server/NAS box, and there's a 
good bit of fan noise -- from the PSU especially. If I go down the 
mini-ITX route for the fileserver I'd want to use a fanless CPU in a 
smaller case with one large slow fan ... and an external PSU brick.

> Have you considered recycling a laptop?

Yes ... but I don't know of a laptop that can take two 750GB drives ...

Cheers,
 Daniel.

Daniel James  writes:

> In article news:, Bruce Stephens 
> wrote:
>> I recently bought the 4-slot ReadyNAS NV+
>
> Netgear? A friend had the earlier/cheaper SC101 and hated it ... The 
> ReadyNAS is apparently quite different from that, but his experience 
> makes me cautious.

IIUC the ReadyNAS things were developed by Infrant which Netgear
bought.  So it's quite possible that the ReadyNAS things are entirely
different to other storage things sold by Netgear.

[...]

Daniel James  writes:

[...]

> All these NAS boxes have ethernet, all that I've looked at have some 
> degree of web configuration, I really can't imagine that any would 
> require a specific Windows-based app to get them started!

Yeah, you'd have thought so.  However, my impression is that they all
do.  Not a big deal, since most of us have access to a Windows or Mac
box (or can borrow one), but it's an annoyance, especially since most
of them seem to be Linux-based.

All the ones I looked at had manuals and things downloadable, so it's
possible to check before buying.

Daniel James wrote:

> I've been meaning, for some time, to provide some sort of storage
> server for the motley collection of computers -- some Windows and some
> linux based -- that lurk around here. The primary requirement is that

bla

> 
> Sorry to ask so many questions in one post .... any thoughts or
> comments on any of the above will be gratefully received.
> 
> Cheers,
>  Daniel.


FreeNAS

In message , Daniel James 
 writes


>> Have you considered recycling a laptop?
>
>Yes ... but I don't know of a laptop that can take two 750GB drives ...

External caddies, USB2, done.



-- 
Bernard Peek
London, UK. DBA, Manager, Trainer & Author.

In article ,
Daniel James   wrote:
>In article news:, Bernard Peek wrote:
>> I acquired a mini-ITX board and put it into an old ATX case. There's a 
>> lot of fresh air inside the case but that's no real problem. It's got a 
>> whisper-quite 170W PSU and with an old disk makes a usable web-server.
>
>I've got a VIA EPIA M10000 board in a Morex Venus 6... er ... the one 
>before the current 669 model. It was built as a MythTV box but it actually 
>gets used as a spare linux desktop and occasional TV - I never found the 
>time to set up MySQL and MythTV on it. Nor could I ever work out why a PVR 
>application needs an industrial-strength RDBMS ...
>
>It certainly has the power to run a simple server apps ... but it really 
>struggles to rebuild its Gentoo system from source when there's been a 
>major upgrade. I think the initial build took about a week, and it can 
>take a day or two to update now even with a 3GHz P4 machine helping with 
>distcc. I don't think using a mini-ITX system as a distcc /server/ will 
>make much impact on compile times on other machines.

I've built lots of stuff out of the VIA boards (including NAS boxes) -
the trick is the do the actual compilation on a separate PC, the migrate
it over...

(But when I wur a lad, my 1st Linux box was a 66MHz AMD chip - ye gods
it was slow compiling stuff compared to todays CPUs!)

>The Venus case is bigger than I'd want for a server/NAS box, and there's a 
>good bit of fan noise -- from the PSU especially. If I go down the 
>mini-ITX route for the fileserver I'd want to use a fanless CPU in a 
>smaller case with one large slow fan ... and an external PSU brick.

I've built a few NASes in a Venus case - 

  http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=10542

It has enough room inside and a nice big, but quiet fan at the back. I
use Western Digital drives, and while they're not the fastest, they run
very cool. Mobo's I use is usually the VIA CN1000's which have both IDE
sockets and SATA, so I boot them off IDE flash (which then runs from ram),
which then leaves all the SATA drives for storage.

Eg:

  # df -h
  Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/ram0             124M   91M   34M  73% /
  tmpfs                 245M     0  245M   0% /dev/shm
  /dev/md1              111G   66G   40G  63% /data
  /dev/md2              120G   41G   73G  37% /archive

  # uptime
   07:36:33 up 396 days, 22:13,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

  # cat /proc/mdstat 
  Personalities : [raid1] 
  md1 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0]
        117185984 blocks [2/2] [UU]
      
  md2 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0]
        127009792 blocks [2/2] [UU]



>> Have you considered recycling a laptop?
>
>Yes ... but I don't know of a laptop that can take two 750GB drives ...

If it has a USB port, it'll take a Drobo...

  http://www.drobo.com/Products/Index.html

Drobo box which can take up to 4 drives - USB connection, and the "share"
box which sits under it with an Ethernet connection... Painless, but I
don't think the share supports NFS, just sambaystuff...

However the Drobo itself does support ext3 over USB, so use it as a
"disk drive" to your own NAS platform rather than the drobo share - which
might seem like overkill, but it's one advantage is that from initial
turn-on it looks like a 2TB drive regardless of how many (or few) drives
it physically has. So start with 2 x 750 drives and when these fill, just
pop another in, and another and the box will manage the drives and you'll
still see the same, original disk size - no need to resize partitions,
or hope that you can resize the mirror/raid system and extend ext3 ....

Personally, I'd go down the miniITX + drives route myself though, but
the Drobo does seem like the solution for people who don't want to open
the lid...

Gordon

Gordon Henderson <gordon+usenet@drogon.net> writes:

[...]

> I've built a few NASes in a Venus case - 
>
>   http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=10542
>
> It has enough room inside and a nice big, but quiet fan at the back.

The web page says "2 x 40mm rear mounted cooling fans" which doesn't
sound encouraging.  I guess you just don't use those, relying on the
rather larger looking PSU fan?

[...]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 06:45:14 +0000 (UTC), 
   	       	    Gordon Henderson <gordon+usenet@drogon.net> wrote:
> (But when I wur a lad, my 1st Linux box was a 66MHz AMD chip - ye gods
> it was slow compiling stuff compared to todays CPUs!)

Sheer luxury - my first was a 486sx25 with a tiny amount of RAM.  Just
installing (from about 50 or so floppy discs) took hours.

-- 
Andy Leighton => andyl@azaal.plus.com
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials" 
   - Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_

On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:03:43 +0100, Daniel James wrote:

> I've got a VIA EPIA M10000 board in a Morex Venus 6... er ... the one
> before the current 669 model. It was built as a MythTV box but it
> actually gets used as a spare linux desktop and occasional TV - I never
> found the time to set up MySQL and MythTV on it. 

The Debian packages make it easy enough. I would caution, however, that 
MythTV can be a disappointment after the 'just works' functionality of 
Kaffeine. The major advantage it's got over Kaffeine, IMO, is the ability 
to schedule a recording through the web interface.

> Nor could I ever work out why a PVR application needs an industrial-
> strength RDBMS ...

MythTV is designed as a client/server app, so you stick tuner cards and 
storage on the server node, and multiple clients can access them. 

-- 
 <http://ale.cx/> (AIM:troffasky) (UnSoEsNpEaTm@ale.cx)
 11:54:44 up 35 days, 14:31,  2 users,  load average: 0.10, 0.09, 0.04
 Convergence, n: The act of using separate DSL circuits for voice and data

In article ,
Bruce Stephens  <bruce+usenet@cenderis.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>Gordon Henderson <gordon+usenet@drogon.net> writes:
>
>[...]
>
>> I've built a few NASes in a Venus case - 
>>
>>   http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=10542
>>
>> It has enough room inside and a nice big, but quiet fan at the back.
>
>The web page says "2 x 40mm rear mounted cooling fans" which doesn't
>sound encouraging.  I guess you just don't use those, relying on the
>rather larger looking PSU fan?

You know what - it's been about 8 months since I last built one in that
box, and I can't really remember now. I've a funny feeling it just had
the one fan in it, however I may well have removed the 2 smaller fans
(I sometimes do and block the holes to force ventilation from front to
back) Just checked the order and it was definately a Morex Venus 669
case... They are quiet though and using WD drives they're almost cold
to the touch which always helps.

Gordon

Gordon Henderson wrote:

> (But when I wur a lad, my 1st Linux box was a 66MHz AMD chip - ye gods
> it was slow compiling stuff compared to todays CPUs!)

Oh no. Here we go...

I remember compiling a kernel on a 386 (in about 1996). It took over 24 
hours and the kernel was tiny in those days compared to what it is now!

I'm so glad those days are long gone! ;-)


-- 
http://SnapAndScribble.com

Poking about one of my favourite hardware sites, I've just seen this:

  http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12131

If it does what it says on the tin ...

Gordon

In article news:<jF$TDkJnyfpIFwn2@shrdlu.com>, Bernard Peek wrote:
> >Yes ... but I don't know of a laptop that can take two 750GB drives ...
> 
> External caddies, USB2, done.

You are joking?

Quite apart from the general crapness of USB for connecting disks and the 
fact that my available spare laptop(s) have only one USB 1.1 port each 
(but I believe you can get PCMCIA USB2 cards) ... I don't think a laptop 
and a couple of external drives makes for a particularly neat or tidy 
setup ... and I'd end up with three wall warts to feed it all instead of 
one ...

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In article news:<g85t1q$dbo$1@energise.enta.net>, Gordon Henderson wrote:
> I've built lots of stuff out of the VIA boards (including NAS boxes) -
> the trick is the do the actual compilation on a separate PC, the migrate
> it over...

Indeed ... or use a distro that doesn't need compiling (I use Debian on my 
laptop for that reason, though in general I prefer Gentoo).

> (But when I wur a lad, my 1st Linux box was a 66MHz AMD chip - ye gods
> it was slow compiling stuff compared to todays CPUs!)

I'll bet! I've never run linux on anything slower than a 233MHz MMX 
Pentium(I) ... and that wasn't speedy.

> I've built a few NASes in a Venus case - 
> 
>   http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=10542
> 
> It has enough room inside and a nice big, but quiet fan at the back.

Really? They've changed the design more than I though since the one I have 
which is this one (Venus 668, that was it) 
http://www.morex.com.tw/products/productdetail.php?fd_id=28 (but in black) 
.. as that page says it has 2x4cm fans plus the PSU fan (which rattles 
somewhat) ... 

I'll have to take a look at the new design. I had thought the changes were 
just cosmetic.

Mind you it says 2x4cm fans here too: 
http://www.morex.com.tw/products/productdetail.php?fd_id=31

> Personally, I'd go down the miniITX + drives route myself though, but
> the Drobo does seem like the solution for people who don't want to open
> the lid...

The Drobo looks like a slick solution for a problem that isn't quite the 
same as the one I'm trying to solve ... but then so do quite a lot of the 
NAS boxes I've looked at.

I /like/ mini-ITX solutions, but if I'm going to have to go for a 
Venus-sized case to fit the drives in I'll be tempted to go for a 
mini-tower and a uATX board with a bit more CPU power ... but that pushes 
the electricity consumption up and I'm trying to be green about this.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In article news:, Bruce Stephens 
wrote:
> IIUC the ReadyNAS things were developed by Infrant which Netgear
> bought.  So it's quite possible that the ReadyNAS things are entirely
> different to other storage things sold by Netgear.

Yes, the Irfant heritage of the boxes does come out in the online 
reviews.

I had a look at the notes on getting subversion running on the ReadyNAS 
.. it's just a matter of setting up SSH access and APT and then 
getting the code from a server. Not too arduous (even if there is some 
question as to the validity of the warranty after doing so).

I also see that some dealers are giving away an iPod shuffle with the 
Duo at the moment ... I don't want one but it might make a good xmas 
prezzie for a nipot.

What's your opinion of the X-RAID thing that ReadyNAS does? It's 
attractive on the face of it ... that you can just swap in bigger 
drives, one at a time, and have the box automagically resize your 
volume to fill the smallest drive currently installed ... but is it a 
proprietary format? What happens when the box itself fails? Can the 
data be read by anything other than another ReadyNAS box?

I read the FAQ ... there's some weasel-wording about NetGear recovering 
your data from disks for a fee ...

There's a lot to be said for a simple linux software RAID-1 and being 
able to use either drive in another machine if disaster strikes.

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In article news:<48a5fae1$0$15508$426a34cc@news.free.fr>, F8Boe wrote:
> FreeNAS

I've certainly looked at FreeNAS.

FreeNAS is based on M0n0wall, which in turn is based on FreeBSD, and I 
know less about that than I do about linux.

The FreeNAS site has a lot about what FreeNAS can and can't do ... but 
it doesn't say anything about whether it's possible to add packages 
that aren't part of FreeNAS itself -- such as a version control server. 
Can that be done (without extraordinary effort)?

The FAQ entry:

  First and foremost FreeNAS was developed as a Network Attached
  Storage application, not a router, media server, etc. There may
  be future development streams, plug-ins, modules or patches to
  FreeNAS to make some other functions work, but not until the
  basic NAS functions are stabilised. If you have skills to do
  this, share your expertise, please.

rather suggests I shouldn't hold my breath.

Cheers,
 Daniel.

Daniel James  wrote:
> I've been meaning, for some time, to provide some sort of storage 
> server for the motley collection of computers -- some Windows and some 
> linux based -- that lurk around here. The primary requirement is that 
> it be able to run headless, and that it support both samba/cfs and NFS 
> from a RAID-1 array (probably 2x750GB SATA), but it'd be nice to be 
> able to do some other things with it too.

I've been thinking similar thoughts.  I currently have an old-ish desktop PC
doing the job (Athlon XP 2600+).  As far as power consumption goes:

Drives spundown 60W
Idle 80W
Peak 90-100W

It has two 3.5" hard drives, so I'd budget 10W per drive.  There's a third
3.5" drive in a USB case.

I'm quite surprised that this hefty great lump is actually considered
relatively low power these days.  Which is going to make beating it a bit
tricky.

> 1. A NAS appliance. There are some that support samba and NFS and would 
> meet my minimum requirement. These things generally run low-power CPUs 
> (often ARM or PPC) so run at quite low power, which is good for 
> cost/greenness but makes it harder to customize them. 

I don't have a NAS, but I have a wireless router (Netgear WGT634U, 233MHz
MIPS, 32MB RAM, runs Debian).  The filesystem is on USB flash which doesn't
help, but it's dog slow.  It takes 9W though, including wireless and USB
flash.

I wouldn't want to inflict something on my drives that couldn't get near
their throughput.  My box spends a fair time doing backups, shuffling data
from one disc to another.  If you intend to use rsync for backups (as I do),
note that it eats CPU and RAM for breakfast.  I'd hate to think what it
would do to a little NAS box.

> 2. Small format PC -- new build, mini-ITX, or similar -- running either 
> a standard Linux distro or (say) FreeNAS (I don't know of any support 
> for NFS from Windows-based servers). I could easily set up the file 
> server side, and would also be able to set up a VCS server. It wouldn't 
> have the power to be much use as a distccd server, though. There's a 
> nice intel ATOM 1.6GHz mini-ITX board for around ?50 (including CPU) 
> that I might use ... but a big problem is that there seems to be a 
> dearth of small cases for this sort of setup -- and those that do exist 
> are expensive.

This is the sort of thing I'm considering right now.  But I wouldn't use a
SFF PC, I'd use a low power board and put it in a normal case.  That means
there's plenty of cooling for the drives, you can put them in caddies to
make swapping them easier, and if you want to put in another drive it's
easy.

From what I've seen of the Atom is that the CPU's power consumption is
great, but the northbridges used on the motherboards haven't caught up and
need chunky great fans:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/757/2/
However this isn't actually a problem in a desktop case but it does take the
edge off the power savings.

> 3. An old PC running linux or FreeNAS (as above). This would give 
> similar power to a SFF box (less than the ATOM -- they're 450MHz PIIIs) 
> so I still wouldn't have much joy with distccd but it would be cheap to 
> set up (I'd just need a SATA controller card and a couple of drives -- 
> the motherboards have on-board SCSI but SCSI drives are nothing like as 
> cost-effective as they used to be). Downside here is that the old boxes 
> I have are big and noisy, and possibly not very economical to run.

I'd quite like to do that because the ITX route is expensive and slow, but
haven't a clue of the power usage of old PCs.  I suppose I ought to trawl
the small ads armed with a power meter.

Anyone recommend an economical quick-ish desktop board/processor range that
I might be able to find secondhand?  A bit slower than my Athlon is fine,
but not 486 territory :)

> 4. New full-size PC. I'm thinking of something like a low-end EE AM2 
> A64X2 with everything on-board in a quiet case and an efficient PSU. 
> This would run linux with samba/cifs and NFS networking and anything 
> else I felt like -- there would be plenty of oomph for distccd. It 
> could easily be quiet enough, but would be big (not as big as my spare 
> PIII boxes) but would use more power -- I'm guessing about 80W idle 
> whereas I'd hope a NAS appliance could manage 20-30W.

I don't see power usage dropping on new machines, so if a PIII450 does the
job it might end up taking the same power as the new machine.  But having a
compile server is always useful :)  Personally I'd like something that's
about as fast as my 5-year-old board but lower power.

> How much power do these NAS boxes actually use? Anyone put a meter on 
> one? I'm guessing about a bit more than 10W for the logic board plus 
> around 7-10W per drive (when spinning). How noisy are they? Do NAS 
> boxes spin their drives down when inactive? Does the delay when they 
> spin back up again cause problems for network clients?

From experience of similar ARM boards I'd suggest 10W is probably the right
sort of ballpark for the logic board.

There's nothing to stop the drives from spinning down, but perhaps the
software doesn't have that setting (if it's Linux you can probably get in
and run hdparm).  But I don't know whether the wear on the drives would be
worth it.

> The intel ATOM CPU is said to use no more than 4W ... but the spec for 
> the ATOM mini-ITX board quotes power use up to 50+W -- I suppose the 
> supporting circuitry is responsible for that.

Ah yes, that's what I mentioned above.  Be aware, though, that the max power
rating probably includes a full load of PCI and USB devices taking their
maximum draw (25W per PCI slot, 2.5W per USB device) - probably you can only
tell by measuring what the actual currents are.

> up, but is there a distro that's designed to be installed and run on 
> normal PC kit that has no keyboard or monitor connected? Something that 
> will install from a LiveCD that boots with shhd support, perhaps?

Perhaps.  You could also swap out the discs to another machine and install
from there (onto a USB case?).  When I did this the only thing that broke
was the X11 video driver - one machine had an NVidia, the other an SiS or
something - I had to tweak xorg.conf to use the right driver (the console
worked, but Ubuntu put X11 in 'safe' 640x480 mode).

Theo

Daniel James  writes:

[...]

> Mind you it says 2x4cm fans here too: 
> http://www.morex.com.tw/products/productdetail.php?fd_id=31

Yeah, but I guess the PSU fan would be sufficient presuming you don't
have too powerful a system inside (so you could just not connect up
the stupidly small fans).  OTOH I guess if you stuck 4 disks in they'd
generate some amount of heat.

[...]

In article ,
Daniel James   wrote:

>I /like/ mini-ITX solutions, but if I'm going to have to go for a 
>Venus-sized case to fit the drives in I'll be tempted to go for a 
>mini-tower and a uATX board with a bit more CPU power ... but that pushes 
>the electricity consumption up and I'm trying to be green about this.

Micro tower?

http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11930

CN 1000 mobo:

http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11318

(You'll need memory for it too)

Pair of 1TB drives:

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Hard+Drives/Serial+ATA/Western+Digital+Caviar+1000GB+-+Green+Power+-+SATA2+-+16MB+%28WD10EACS%29+?productId=29771

These are WDC's green drives - They're not the fastest, but run cool and
use less power than just about anything else...

Should be able to get the whole unit down to 35W or less.

Those mobos will run Debian - that's what I base my flash booting
systems on. (Although I compile a custom kernel)

And don't forget - most of these mobos only have 10/100 ethernet ports -
that's ~10M Bytes a sec maximum data transfer... Which is about 20% of
what the drives can do, so unless you're going for a mobo with Gb
Ethernet (and you feel you really need it!) don't be overly concerned
about drive speed. The box will soak up any unused memory as disk cache
anyway.

Good luck!

Gordon

Daniel James  writes:

[...]

> What's your opinion of the X-RAID thing that ReadyNAS does? It's 
> attractive on the face of it ... that you can just swap in bigger 
> drives, one at a time, and have the box automagically resize your 
> volume to fill the smallest drive currently installed ... but is it a 
> proprietary format?

Yes.  I doubt the "swap in bigger disks" feature is of particular
benefit at present (I think they only support up to 1TB disks, so
you'd just buy those).  And for a 2-disk thing adding an extra disk
isn't going to be a problem (if you start with one disk, then adding
another one just turns it into RAID-1, and presumably any system can
do that without losing data).  For the NV+ it seems like an advantage
(they only support 3 models of 1TB disks, so I've got one of each; at
some point I'll buy another one (with any luck from a different
batch)).

> What happens when the box itself fails? Can the data be read by
> anything other than another ReadyNAS box?

I doubt it.  Though X-RAID is "patent pending", so maybe the patent
application gives enough information to recover the data?

[...]

> There's a lot to be said for a simple linux software RAID-1 and being 
> able to use either drive in another machine if disaster strikes.

Indeed.  Or RAID-5, for that matter.  For a 2-disk machine with disk
prices as they are, I doubt X-RAID makes much sense.

I like the look of the ICY BOX, BTW.  The reviews I could find seem
positive, and it's about half the price of the Netgear Duo.  Shame
they don't do 4, 5 disk ones.

Or 3 disks, I guess---that would seem a fairly attractive option,
presuming they could work out a not too sucky way to go from 2-disk
RAID-0/1 to 3-disk RAID-5.  Come to think of it, that should be easy
enough.

I wonder why the popular ones are 1, 2, 4, 5 disks?  I guess it must
be market segmentation.

In article <3eA*IuBks@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>,
Theo Markettos  <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>Daniel James  wrote:
>> I've been meaning, for some time, to provide some sort of storage 
>> server for the motley collection of computers -- some Windows and some 
>> linux based -- that lurk around here. The primary requirement is that 
>> it be able to run headless, and that it support both samba/cfs and NFS 
>> from a RAID-1 array (probably 2x750GB SATA), but it'd be nice to be 
>> able to do some other things with it too.
>
>I've been thinking similar thoughts.  I currently have an old-ish desktop PC
>doing the job (Athlon XP 2600+).  As far as power consumption goes:
>
>Drives spundown 60W
>Idle 80W
>Peak 90-100W
>
>It has two 3.5" hard drives, so I'd budget 10W per drive.  There's a third
>3.5" drive in a USB case.
>
>I'm quite surprised that this hefty great lump is actually considered
>relatively low power these days.  Which is going to make beating it a bit
>tricky.

You think so? Check...

http://unicorn.drogon.net/power.jpg

So that's an EK1000 motherboard with a flash-drive, (and a 4-port PSTN
interface card - this is a Linux box running asterisk) but add in 2 x
low power (sub 10W drives) and you're still under half your box...

>There's nothing to stop the drives from spinning down, but perhaps the
>software doesn't have that setting (if it's Linux you can probably get in
>and run hdparm).  But I don't know whether the wear on the drives would be
>worth it.

Don't spin down until about 2 hours of idle time. You'll need to change
the ext3 mount parameters too, or use ext2.

Check http://www.samwel.tk/smart_spindown/index.html


>> up, but is there a distro that's designed to be installed and run on 
>> normal PC kit that has no keyboard or monitor connected? Something that 
>> will install from a LiveCD that boots with shhd support, perhaps?
>
>Perhaps.  You could also swap out the discs to another machine and install
>from there (onto a USB case?).  When I did this the only thing that broke
>was the X11 video driver - one machine had an NVidia, the other an SiS or
>something - I had to tweak xorg.conf to use the right driver (the console
>worked, but Ubuntu put X11 in 'safe' 640x480 mode).

Any distro that allows you to not install the GUI - Eg. Debian..

Gordon

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 14:17:44 +0100, Daniel James wrote:

> The FreeNAS site has a lot about what FreeNAS can and can't do ... but
> it doesn't say anything about whether it's possible to add packages that
> aren't part of FreeNAS itself -- such as a version control server. Can
> that be done (without extraordinary effort)?

ISTR m0n0 has a single XML file for every aspect of system configuration, 
so it's not exactly 'standard'.

-- 
 <http://ale.cx/> (AIM:troffasky) (UnSoEsNpEaTm@ale.cx)
 15:12:51 up 35 days, 17:49,  2 users,  load average: 0.02, 0.06, 0.03
 Convergence, n: The act of using separate DSL circuits for voice and data

On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:54:24 +0100, Daniel James wrote:

> I'm torn between opting for an easy off-the-shelf NAS solution that may
> not offer all the facilities that I'd like and setting up an actual
> server.
>
I've also been thinking about this too, and am leaning toward a home 
built system - miniITX, RAIDED disks and bog standard Fedora. Like you, 
I'd want to run a few services - DNS, Apache, Samba, NTP, Postfix and 
cvs. I thought about hanging a NAS box off the back of my current server, 
but that doesn't really fix the backup issue. RAID is all very well but 
doesn't replace offline backups: a decent nearby lightening strike or a 
house fire and all RAID plexes are toast. Current thought is to keep the 
old box plugging along (with a bigger disk if necessary) and with the 
current offline backup (rsync to a USB drive).

In due course this will be replaced by laptop technology - say a dual 
core miniITX board and either 'enterprise' 2.5" disks or 3.5" low power 
disks. I'd retain the current offline backup strategy. 

> 2. Small format PC -- new build, mini-ITX, or similar -- running either
> a standard Linux distro or (say) FreeNAS (I don't know of any support
> for NFS from Windows-based servers). I could easily set up the file
> server side, and would also be able to set up a VCS server. It wouldn't
> have the power to be much use as a distccd server, though. There's a
> nice intel ATOM 1.6GHz mini-ITX board for around £50 (including CPU)
> that I might use ... but a big problem is that there seems to be a
> dearth of small cases for this sort of setup -- and those that do exist
> are expensive.
> 
El Reg (www.theregister.co.uk) recently reviewed the ATOM reference 
miniITX board. They concluded that it was little better than the VIA 
device and said its using old desktop support chips which mainline 
electricity.

As I said above, personally I'd look at using a relatively slow coreDuo 
chip on a miniITX along with laptop support chips. The power consumption 
isn't entirely minimised but should be a lot reduced. I'm writing this on 
a Lenovo R61i (1.4 GHz coreDuo) and its power brick is rated at 65 watts, 
so the miniITX equivalent in a small case is fairly good on power.

Thinking of power supplies, it seems a waste of energy to have the house 
sprinkled with bricks. I have one each for ADSL modem/router, USB drive, 
laptop, iPAQ. Does anybody sell multiple output bricks that could drive 
two or more of these devices, saving power, space and wiring in the 
process?


-- 
martin@   | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org       |

On 16 Aug 2008 14:22:19 +0100 (BST)
Theo Markettos <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

> Anyone recommend an economical quick-ish desktop board/processor range that
> I might be able to find secondhand?  A bit slower than my Athlon is fine,
> but not 486 territory :)

Early (2nd generation?) Athlon64s with the Winchester core were very
efficient, about 30W loaded IIRC, and they have the Cool'n'Quiet feature
so you can reduce the clock speed at idle. But have you read the Athlon
Powersaving Howto and applied it to your Athlon XP?

I'm not sure, but I got the impression VIA chipsets were more economical
than nForce. I had an nForce 4 board and had to replace the stupidly
undersized and noisy chipset cooler with a big passive Zalman heatsink,
and it ran a little on the hot side. IIRC (this is very vague) its VIA
competitors tended to have passive cooling off-the-shelf.

-- 
TH * http://www.realh.co.uk

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 14:17:44 +0100, Daniel James wrote:

> In article news:<48a5fae1$0$15508$426a34cc@news.free.fr>, F8Boe wrote:
>> FreeNAS
> 
> I've certainly looked at FreeNAS.
> 
> FreeNAS is based on M0n0wall, which in turn is based on FreeBSD, and I
> know less about that than I do about linux.
> 
> The FreeNAS site has a lot about what FreeNAS can and can't do ... but
> it doesn't say anything about whether it's possible to add packages that
> aren't part of FreeNAS itself -- such as a version control server. Can
> that be done (without extraordinary effort)?
> 
> The FAQ entry:
> 
>   First and foremost FreeNAS was developed as a Network Attached Storage
>   application, not a router, media server, etc. There may be future
>   development streams, plug-ins, modules or patches to FreeNAS to make
>   some other functions work, but not until the basic NAS functions are
>   stabilised. If you have skills to do this, share your expertise,
>   please.
> 
> rather suggests I shouldn't hold my breath.
> 
> Cheers,
>  Daniel.

A fantastic read all of this, has given me something to do with an old 
IBM thinkcentre this weekend.

The big one I spotted with FreeNAS was 'Beta'. I thought 'Really? For so 
long?'. Then I read about some security issues with it (mostly of the 
Upnp variety. Sure it does not affect Linux as such, but if your hooking 
up Doze clients to it, not so sure)

 I'm going to give it a play with CentOS as this has a few other bits and 
pieces I want to include on the box - a choice I would not get with a 
dedicated NAS unit.


-- 
As we travel through life it is best to be like the dog. If you can't eat 
it, or have sex with it, then p*ss on it

On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:54:24 +0100, Daniel James wrote:

> I've been meaning, for some time, to provide some sort of storage 
> server for the motley collection of computers -- some Windows and some 
> linux based -- that lurk around here. The primary requirement is that 
> it be able to run headless, and that it support both samba/cfs and NFS 
> from a RAID-1 array (probably 2x750GB SATA), but it'd be nice to be 
> able to do some other things with it too.
> 
> I'm torn between opting for an easy off-the-shelf NAS solution that may 
> not offer all the facilities that I'd like and setting up an actual 
> server. An actual server has some attractions in that I'd like to run 
> some sort of version control server (probably CVS or svn) on it, and 
> possibly also use it as a distccd server to help with big builds on my 
> linux development box. Neither of these is likely to be available as 
> standard on any NAS appliance.
> 
> So, I'm toying with four options.
> 
> 1. A NAS appliance. There are some that support samba and NFS and would 
> meet my minimum requirement. These things generally run low-power CPUs 
> (often ARM or PPC) so run at quite low power, which is good for 
> cost/greenness but makes it harder to customize them. 
> 
> I might possibly, at some later date, play around with running modified 
> firmware (these things mostly run some sort of linux, with a web 
> interface for admin and some sort of bundled backup application) but I 
> don't want to get into trying to cross-compile unfamiliar distros and 
> reflashing unfamiliar hardware (possibly irreversibly) at this stage 
> .. so realistically the NAS appliance route offers me just the minimum 
> requirement.
> 
> 2. Small format PC -- new build, mini-ITX, or similar -- running either 
> a standard Linux distro or (say) FreeNAS (I don't know of any support 
> for NFS from Windows-based servers). I could easily set up the file 
> server side, and would also be able to set up a VCS server. It wouldn't 
> have the power to be much use as a distccd server, though. There's a 
> nice intel ATOM 1.6GHz mini-ITX board for around £50 (including CPU) 
> that I might use ... but a big problem is that there seems to be a 
> dearth of small cases for this sort of setup -- and those that do exist 
> are expensive.
> 
> 3. An old PC running linux or FreeNAS (as above). This would give 
> similar power to a SFF box (less than the ATOM -- they're 450MHz PIIIs) 
> so I still wouldn't have much joy with distccd but it would be cheap to 
> set up (I'd just need a SATA controller card and a couple of drives -- 
> the motherboards have on-board SCSI but SCSI drives are nothing like as 
> cost-effective as they used to be). Downside here is that the old boxes 
> I have are big and noisy, and possibly not very economical to run.
> 
> 4. New full-size PC. I'm thinking of something like a low-end EE AM2 
> A64X2 with everything on-board in a quiet case and an efficient PSU. 
> This would run linux with samba/cifs and NFS networking and anything 
> else I felt like -- there would be plenty of oomph for distccd. It 
> could easily be quiet enough, but would be big (not as big as my spare 
> PIII boxes) but would use more power -- I'm guessing about 80W idle 
> whereas I'd hope a NAS appliance could manage 20-30W.
> 
> On the side of the NAS box are:
> - Ease of setup and use
> - Small size
> - Low power consumption
> - Low noise
> 
> On the side of a SFF box are:
> - Flexibility
> - Small size -- if I can find a small case
> - Low power consumption (but how low?)
> - Low noise (I hope)
> 
> On the side of the old PC are:
> - Flexibility
> - Low cost
> 
> On the side of the new PC build are:
> - Flexibility
> - Speed
> - Low noise
> 
> TBH I'd really love to reuse one of the PIII boxes because I hate 
> seeing kit that still has life in it lie idle, but they're huge and 
> slow (though good enough for fileserving) and roar like a train ... The 
> energy consumption is an unknown, too.
> 
> Resolving this quandry would be easier if I knew more <sigh>.
> 
> Does anyone have hands-on experience of any of the (2-drive) NAS 
> appliances that might help? I know that the relatively cheap Icy-Box 
> NAS4220 supports samba and NFS and RAID1, so that would be a 
> possibility. The Qnap TS-209 Pro also does all this (and has Gbit net) 
> but costs more than twice as much, is it worth it? Do any other 2-drive 
> NAS appliances support NFS out of the box, and can they be recommended?
> 
> How much power do these NAS boxes actually use? Anyone put a meter on 
> one? I'm guessing about a bit more than 10W for the logic board plus 
> around 7-10W per drive (when spinning). How noisy are they? Do NAS 
> boxes spin their drives down when inactive? Does the delay when they 
> spin back up again cause problems for network clients?
> 
> The intel ATOM CPU is said to use no more than 4W ... but the spec for 
> the ATOM mini-ITX board quotes power use up to 50+W -- I suppose the 
> supporting circuitry is responsible for that. That seems a lot ... how 
> does it compare with the VIA C7 boards from the likes of VIA and 
> Jetway? The C7 can use IIRC around 7W, but the support circuitry might 
> be more frugal. You can get a fanless 1.2GHz C7 board for not too much 
> more than the ATOM board (which has a fan) ... would that save me 
> power?
> 

My mini-ITX box draw 30W at the wall, and about 10W of that is the
horribly inefficient 12V SMPS, that I keep meaning to replace with a
custom lead acid battery backed PSU. This is a VIA EN12000, a PCI ADSL
card and a couple of 100GB 7200rpm 2.5" laptop drives in a software RAID
one. It is totally fan free, has no heat build up problems  and gives me
total flexibility.

With the VIA Padlock crypto acceleration, I get some exceptional
performance out of a 1.2GHz fanless box.

My biggest criticism is that the BIOS does not offer serial redirection.
It would also be nice if there was dual GbE adaptors as well.


JAB.

-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                 Email: jonathan (at) buzzard.me.uk
St. Andrews, United Kingdom.

In article news:, Bruce Stephens 
wrote:
> Yeah, but I guess the PSU fan would be sufficient presuming you don't
> have too powerful a system inside (so you could just not connect up
> the stupidly small fans).

The PSU fan isn't /that/ big either ... I can't easily get to the back 
of my Venus 668 right now -- but poking a small mirror over the top -- 
it looks like 8cm?

One of the two 4c, fans is certainly optional -- I've tried the system 
both with and without having it connected -- but I think the other is 
wired direct to the CPU? You can probably cut the wires ...

> OTOH I guess if you stuck 4 disks in they'd
> generate some amount of heat.

You couldn't fit ... Oh, yes, you could fit 5 3.5" disks in the case if 
you fitted one where the HD is supposed to go, one where the floppy is 
supposed to go, and got one of those cages that let you fit 3 3.5" 
drives into 2 5.25" bays ... You'd need a SATA card in the PCI slot to 
wire them all up.

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In article news:<g86l9k$1ofp$1@energise.enta.net>, Gordon Henderson 
wrote:
> Micro tower?

Yeah, that's a possibility ... but I'd have liked something smaller. 
TBH if I go for a PC-sized case I'll start wanting to put PC-sized 
components in it (and end up with a real server and a fat electricity 
bill) ...

> http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11930

.. but not /that/ micro tower. It's a lot of money for a boring steel 
case which may not be particularly quiet, and has a PSU of unknown 
quality/efficiency.

This looks more interesting: 
http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11999 -- but look at the 
price!

I see they now have this: 
http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12173 which I hadn't seen 
before ... a bit cheaper, but why use cold-swap bays? I wonder whether 
it's acceptably quiet.

> CN 1000 mobo:
> 
> http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11318

Yeah, or Jetway C7 board http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11212 
which has Gb lan and costs less ... or the ATOM board they have which 
is cheaper and faster ... but maybe less efficient? The ATOM CPU is 
only supposed to be 4W but the board has a 945-family chipset and uses 
"20-34W". Intel's datasheet for the board says it may draw up to 52W in 
all -- a lot for a low-power device.

I believe the VIA boards draw less power but can't find a clear 
statement of how much.

> Pair of 1TB drives:
> 
> 
http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Hard+Drives/Serial+ATA/Wester
n+Digital+Caviar+1000GB+-+Green+Power+-+SATA2+-+16MB+%28WD10EACS%29+?pr
oductId=29771
> 
> These are WDC's green drives - They're not the fastest, but run cool
> and use less power than just about anything else...

Hmm. 4W idle ... 
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=385#jump1010 not 
bad. I'm not usually a fan of WD drives, or impressed by their 
reliability, but that's lower power than I've seen elsewhere.

Even the Samsung "EcoGreen" drives only claim 5W -- 
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/productmodel.do?group=72&typ
e=61&subtype=78&model_cd=353&tab=fea#

Those are all 1TB drives, though ... I did say I was thinking of going 
for 500GB or 750GB (now around the £50 mark) as I neither need nor want 
to pay for more just yet.

> Should be able to get the whole unit down to 35W or less.

Some of the NAS boxes based on ARM and other low-power chips claim as 
much as 30W with two drives ... if the EPIA solution can do that well 
I'll be impressed. Then again, this dual-core desktop box I'm typing on 
now only draws around 80W as measured at the mains.

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In article news:<48a6b33a$0$629$bed64819@news.gradwell.net>, Alexd 
wrote:
> > I never found the time to set up MySQL and MythTV on it. 
> 
> The Debian packages make it easy enough.

I'm using Gentoo ...

The problem isn't getting the software installed -- that's all done -- 
but I have some intractable problem with MySQL configuration the 
details of which escape me. I think I had once set up an earlier 
version of MySQL but my config files aren't compatible with the current 
version ... and one component thinks the setup has been done and won't 
redo it while another doesn't recognize the setup that it finds ... or 
something. A reinstall might fix it.

> MythTV can be a disappointment after the 'just works' functionality
> of Kaffeine.

I don't think Kaffeine did DVB when I started ...

> > Nor could I ever work out why a PVR application needs an
> > industrial-strength RDBMS ...
> 
> MythTV is designed as a client/server app, so you stick tuner cards
> and storage on the server node, and multiple clients can access them.

Yeah, I know the supposed reasoning ... I think it really comes down to 
"we had MySQL set up so it was easier just to use it than to actually 
design something -- even though it was monstrous overkill for our 
modest requirement" <shrug>.

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In article news:, Bruce Stephens 
wrote:
> I doubt the "swap in bigger disks" feature is of particular
> benefit at present (I think they only support up to 1TB disks, so
> you'd just buy those).

You might ... but the 1TB version of the box costs about twice as much 
as the 500GB version and only has about £30 extra value (in disk cost).

I would *hope* that when, in about six months time, 8TB disks are ten a 
penny they'll upgrade the firmware to cope ...

> And for a 2-disk thing adding an extra disk isn't going to be a
> problem (if you start with one disk, then adding another one just
> turns it into RAID-1, and presumably any system can do that without
> losing data).

It's not at all clear from their online info that X-RAID in 2-disk 
configuration is actually the same as RAID-1. After all, you are 
supposed to be able to add a disk (in the boxes with more bays) and 
turn it into a 3-disk array with twice the capacity -- you can't do 
/that/ with normal RAID-1.

> > What happens when the box itself fails? Can the data be read by
> > anything other than another ReadyNAS box?
> 
> I doubt it.  Though X-RAID is "patent pending", so maybe the patent
> application gives enough information to recover the data?

Quite. I find that all rather offputting.

> I like the look of the ICY BOX, BTW.  The reviews I could find seem
> positive, and it's about half the price of the Netgear Duo.  Shame
> they don't do 4, 5 disk ones.

The Icy-Box seems quite cheap'n'cheerful -- it gets "good value" rather 
than "good" in an absolute sense in the reviews I've seen, but does 
seem generally quite well received. It does do NFS out of the box, 
which is good, but I've seen nothing to suggest you can run subversion, 
or equivalent, on it. It doesn't help that the community wiki is in 
German!

It does have Gb ethernet, though I thought I'd read that it didn't. The 
datasheet says that the PSU is 57W -- I hope it doesn't actually draw 
that much when idle! (I'm sure it won't -- a HDD spinning up can use 
30W all on its own so with 2HDDs you'd need around that much, even if 
the box staggers the spin-up.)

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In article news:<3eA*IuBks@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>, Theo Markettos 
wrote:
> I currently have an old-ish desktop PC
> doing the job (Athlon XP 2600+).  As far as power consumption goes:
> 
> Drives spundown 60W
> Idle 80W
> Peak 90-100W

Yeah, that idle figure matches my Athlon64 X2 box (4200+, Energy 
Efficient model).

Modern hard drives can use up to about 30W when spinning up, but 
typically around 7-10W running idle (no head movement). The new "Green" 
drives are maybe a couple of Watts better.

This is one of the few pieces of hard info that I /have/ managed to 
find on manufacturers' websites.

> I'm quite surprised that this hefty great lump is actually considered
> relatively low power these days.

Old, slow, memory. Only one core ...

> If you intend to use rsync for backups (as I do), note that it eats
> CPU and RAM for breakfast.  I'd hate to think what it would do to a
> little NAS box.

Good point. At least one of the NAS boxes I've been reading about does 
support rsync OOTB, so I suppose they must be able to cope ... after a 
fashion.

> From what I've seen of the Atom is that the CPU's power consumption
> is great, but the northbridges used on the motherboards haven't
> caught up and need chunky great fans:
> http://www.legitreviews.com/article/757/2

Yes, I'd guessed that the fan on the ATOM board must be for the chipset 
not the CPU. Interesting to have that confirmed, thanks for the link.

> I'd quite like to do that because the ITX route is expensive and
> slow, but haven't a clue of the power usage of old PCs.

Aye, there's the rub.

Actually I don't think the ITX route is necessarily expensive, if it 
achieves real power savings -- you pay a bit more up front and a bit 
less over the ensuing months. They're slower than typical desktop 
systems, yes, but fast enough for the job in hand.

Every PC I've build in the last 2-3 years has cost me about £100 for 
the CPU ... but in the case of the mini-ITX system the motherboard was 
included! I wasn't buying Celery/Sempron class CPUs for that money, of 
course ...

> I don't see power usage dropping on new machines, so if a PIII450
> does the job it might end up taking the same power as the new
> machine.

That is my worry, yes. In fact the PIII/450 boxes I have here have SCSI 
support on the motherboards, so the boards are likely to be quite 
energy-hungry (all of which will be wasted if I don't use SCSI disks).

> There's nothing to stop the drives from spinning down, but perhaps
> the software doesn't have that setting (if it's Linux you can
> probably get in and run hdparm).  But I don't know whether the wear
> on the drives would be worth it.

Most of the NAS boxes have settings to spin the drives down, that's not 
the question. I was wondering what happens when a PC pokes the NAS box 
for some data and then has to wait around for the drives to spin up 
before getting an answer ... how long does it take the OS to get bored 
and time out?

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In article news:<48a6f4e0$0$2920$fa0fcedb@news.zen.co.uk>, A J Hawke 
wrote:
> A fantastic read all of this ...

I admit I was chuffed to have sparked off such a lively discussion. 
It's certainly proving useful to me, and I hope to others as well.

> The big one I spotted with FreeNAS was 'Beta'. I thought 'Really?

Yeah, so did I. People speak of it as though it was a tried, accepted, 
and proven solution.

> I'm going to give it a play with CentOS as this has a few other bits
> and pieces I want to include on the box 

Hmm. I haven't looked at CentOS, for this. It's a solid server-oriented 
distro so it might be a good choice.

> ... a choice I would not get with a dedicated NAS unit.

It's amazing what you *can* do with some of the dedicated units. The 
Qnap boxes even come with PHP and MySQL ... the ones that run fairly 
standard distros behind the scenes can probably do most things.

There's quite a community using the Linksys NSLU2 "slug" (which is sold 
as a NAS but doesn't hold disks ... it uses external USB2 drives) as a 
cheap linux computer to do unusual things with.

Cheers,
 Daniel.

Daniel James  writes:

> In article news:, Bruce Stephens 
> wrote:
>> I doubt the "swap in bigger disks" feature is of particular
>> benefit at present (I think they only support up to 1TB disks, so
>> you'd just buy those).
>
> You might ... but the 1TB version of the box costs about twice as much 
> as the 500GB version and only has about £30 extra value (in disk cost).

Sure.  That's likely another market segmentation thing (driven buy
what they can get away with charging rather than cost).

Personally I'd have thought putting two nearly identical disks in a
RAID-1 would be a bad idea, so I'd have thought that wouldn't be
recommended: better to buy an empty one and put the disks (from
different manufacturers, different batches, etc.) in yourself.

> I would *hope* that when, in about six months time, 8TB disks are ten a 
> penny they'll upgrade the firmware to cope ...

I guess.

>> And for a 2-disk thing adding an extra disk isn't going to be a
>> problem (if you start with one disk, then adding another one just
>> turns it into RAID-1, and presumably any system can do that without
>> losing data).
>
> It's not at all clear from their online info that X-RAID in 2-disk 
> configuration is actually the same as RAID-1. After all, you are 
> supposed to be able to add a disk (in the boxes with more bays) and 
> turn it into a 3-disk array with twice the capacity -- you can't do 
> /that/ with normal RAID-1.

Sorry, I wasn't intending to imply that kind of direct equivalence.

I was suggesting X-RAID doesn't buy you much for two disks, since
JBOD/RAID-0 and RAID-1 provide more or less equivalent utility.

I agree X-RAID lets you upgrade the disks, but I'd guess you could use
a USB-2 disk to back up the data if you went with a standard solution.

Maybe Linux-based RAID also allows you to increase volume sizes in
that kind of way?  Doesn't seem impossible to do.

[...]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:59:41 +0100, Daniel James wrote:

> In article news:<48a6f4e0$0$2920$fa0fcedb@news.zen.co.uk>, A J Hawke
> wrote:
>> A fantastic read all of this ...
> 
> I admit I was chuffed to have sparked off such a lively discussion. It's
> certainly proving useful to me, and I hope to others as well.
> 
>> The big one I spotted with FreeNAS was 'Beta'. I thought 'Really?
> 
> Yeah, so did I. People speak of it as though it was a tried, accepted,
> and proven solution.
> 
>> I'm going to give it a play with CentOS as this has a few other bits
>> and pieces I want to include on the box
> 
> Hmm. I haven't looked at CentOS, for this. It's a solid server-oriented
> distro so it might be a good choice.
> 
>> ... a choice I would not get with a dedicated NAS unit.
> 
> It's amazing what you *can* do with some of the dedicated units. The
> Qnap boxes even come with PHP and MySQL ... the ones that run fairly
> standard distros behind the scenes can probably do most things.
> 
> There's quite a community using the Linksys NSLU2 "slug" (which is sold
> as a NAS but doesn't hold disks ... it uses external USB2 drives) as a
> cheap linux computer to do unusual things with.
> 
> Cheers,
>  Daniel.

I looked at the 'slug' a year or so ago and I forget what it was that put 
me off of it. However, this fella looks much more interesting to me:

Linksys Network Storage System NAS200

I don't want raid, I don't want to have to reformat disc either. I don't 
mind putting a couple of new blank disks in, but I just can't be doing 
with wiping any USB ones I attach just to make them fit the solution - if 
you get my drift.

The FreeNAS thing has inherited an underlying BSD bug where writing some 
file types corrupts them, so that is out.


-- 
As we travel through life it is best to be like the dog. If you can't eat 
it, or have sex with it, then p*ss on it

In article ,
Daniel James   wrote:
>In article news:<g86l9k$1ofp$1@energise.enta.net>, Gordon Henderson 
>wrote:
>> Micro tower?
>
>Yeah, that's a possibility ... but I'd have liked something smaller. 
>TBH if I go for a PC-sized case I'll start wanting to put PC-sized 
>components in it (and end up with a real server and a fat electricity 
>bill) ...
>
>> http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11930
>
>.. but not /that/ micro tower. It's a lot of money for a boring steel 
>case which may not be particularly quiet, and has a PSU of unknown 
>quality/efficiency.
>
>This looks more interesting: 
>http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11999 -- but look at the 
>price!

Swappable drive bays?

Not convinced that's a must for a home server myself...

>I see they now have this: 
>http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12173 which I hadn't seen 
>before ... a bit cheaper, but why use cold-swap bays? I wonder whether 
>it's acceptably quiet.
>
>> CN 1000 mobo:
>> 
>> http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11318
>
>Yeah, or Jetway C7 board http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11212 
>which has Gb lan and costs less ... or the ATOM board they have which 
>is cheaper and faster ... but maybe less efficient? The ATOM CPU is 
>only supposed to be 4W but the board has a 945-family chipset and uses 
>"20-34W". Intel's datasheet for the board says it may draw up to 52W in 
>all -- a lot for a low-power device.
>
>I believe the VIA boards draw less power but can't find a clear 
>statement of how much.
>
>> Pair of 1TB drives:
>> 
>> 
>http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Hard+Drives/Serial+ATA/Wester
>n+Digital+Caviar+1000GB+-+Green+Power+-+SATA2+-+16MB+%28WD10EACS%29+?pr
>oductId=29771
>> 
>> These are WDC's green drives - They're not the fastest, but run cool
>> and use less power than just about anything else...
>
>Hmm. 4W idle ... 
>http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=385#jump1010 not 
>bad. I'm not usually a fan of WD drives, or impressed by their 
>reliability, but that's lower power than I've seen elsewhere.

I've a few dozen WD out in the field in various sizes - not had a
problem yet... They did have a bug in some models where the on-board
temp. sensor was reading about 20C too high though! (compared to an IT
thermometer I have)


>Even the Samsung "EcoGreen" drives only claim 5W -- 
>http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/productmodel.do?group=72&typ
>e=61&subtype=78&model_cd=353&tab=fea#

Hm. Things are getting better...

>Those are all 1TB drives, though ... I did say I was thinking of going 
>for 500GB or 750GB (now around the £50 mark) as I neither need nor want 
>to pay for more just yet.
>
>> Should be able to get the whole unit down to 35W or less.
>
>Some of the NAS boxes based on ARM and other low-power chips claim as 
>much as 30W with two drives ... if the EPIA solution can do that well 
>I'll be impressed. Then again, this dual-core desktop box I'm typing on 
>now only draws around 80W as measured at the mains.

If you go "proper" embedded with something like a 200MHz Arm processor
then it's down to next to nothing for the CPU - you're paying a bit of a
price in Watts for somethng that's more general purpose...

Gordon

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 19:23:00 +0100, Bruce Stephens wrote:

> Maybe Linux-based RAID also allows you to increase volume sizes in
> that kind of way?  Doesn't seem impossible to do.

Pretty sure it can. My server, running SME Server (probably overkill for 
what the OP wanted which is why I haven't mentioned it), started off with 
a single 20GB drive. I then added another 160GB drive and let the software 
RAID1 sync the two disks. Take out the orginal 20GB disc, shift the new 
160GB one to it's position (so you can boot from it), and bung in another 
160GB disc and wait for them to sync. Followed by a few magic incantations 
at the command line and my single disc 20GB server now has 160GB in 
software RAID1.

Magic incantations for SME Server can be found on:

http://wiki.contribs.org/Raid

-- 
Cheers
Dave.

A J Hawke  writes:

[...]

> I looked at the 'slug' a year or so ago and I forget what it was that put 
> me off of it. However, this fella looks much more interesting to me:
>
> Linksys Network Storage System NAS200

Reviews suggest it's a bit slow.  It also doesn't seem to support NFS.

Presumably that can be fixed since you can get the GPLed source for
the thing, but I'm not sure anyone's done so yet?

For whatever reason, I don't get the impression people have hacked
with it as much as with the slug.

[...]

In article news:, Bruce Stephens 
wrote:
> > You might ... but the 1TB version of the box costs about twice
> > as much as the 500GB version and only has about £30 extra value
> > (in disk cost).
> 
> Sure.  That's likely another market segmentation thing (driven buy
> what they can get away with charging rather than cost).

Absolutely ... I was just quibbling with your "they only support up to 
1TB disks, so you'd just buy those". I think they only sell the 500GB 
version at a sensible price, so one might well buy that and upgrade to 
1TB drives when one needed them (if one didn't already, that is) -- by 
which time they'll be cheaper.

> Personally I'd have thought putting two nearly identical disks in a
> RAID-1 would be a bad idea ...

There's certainly a school of thought that says drives from different 
manufacturers (or, at least, different batches) will have different 
failure characteristics, and so are less likely both to fail at once.

Another way to look at it is that you can run your RAID-1 array for 
(say) a month and then swap one drive out for a new one. That gives you 
a backup and introduces a new drive that probably won't fail the same 
month as the one you already have. Repeat as necessary.

This only works with RAID-1, of course.

> better to buy an empty one and put the disks (from different
> manufacturers, different batches, etc.) in yourself.

The ReadyNAS only seems to be available with one drive prefitted. You 
can always buy a second drive of a different make.

> I was suggesting X-RAID doesn't buy you much for two disks, since
> JBOD/RAID-0 and RAID-1 provide more or less equivalent utility.

Oh, right. AIUI 2-disk X-RAID is roughly equivalent in utility to 
RAID-1 -- it provides a mirror.

RAID-0 (striping) buys you a possible speed increase at the cost of a 
very real decrease in data security -- there's no mirror. JBOD doesn't 
even pretend that you might get a speed increase. These are not even 
remotely equivalent to X-RAID.

> I agree X-RAID lets you upgrade the disks, but I'd guess you could
> use a USB-2 disk to back up the data if you went with a standard
> solution.

True ...

> Maybe Linux-based RAID also allows you to increase volume sizes in
> that kind of way?  Doesn't seem impossible to do.

It must be possible to achieve -- manually, at least -- but I don't 
know of tools that will do it on the fly. Not that that's a requirement 
for me.

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In article news:, Bruce Stephens 
wrote:
> > Linksys Network Storage System NAS200
> 
> Reviews suggest it's a bit slow.  It also doesn't seem to support NFS.

I certainly didn't see any mention of NFS. It looks like a typical 
linux-based appliance for Windows users ...

It doesn't seem to offer much in the way of services, either.

> For whatever reason, I don't get the impression people have hacked
> with it as much as with the slug.

I think it's newer, and they haven't had the chance, yet. There's also 
the fact that some uses the slug has been put to don't even require any 
disk storage ... it's /just/ a cheap linux appliance that /happens/ to 
have some USB ports that you can hang disks and things off if you want 
to.

I wouldn't mind playing with one ... but that's not the job in hand.

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In article news:, Jonathan Buzzard 
wrote:
> My mini-ITX box draw 30W at the wall ...

Useful, thanks.

I've been eyeing the EN1200 ... but that is one of the more expensive 
mini-ITX boards. What are you using for a case? (just out of interest)

That's better than any other general purpose system I've looked at, but 
noticeably worse than some NAS appliances.

I've just been reading an article on the Netgear/Irfrant ReadyNAS DUO 
which quotes around 27W at idle with two 500GB drives, and 12W with the 
drives spun down.

> With the VIA Padlock crypto acceleration, I get some exceptional
> performance out of a 1.2GHz fanless box.

What does the incarnation of Padlock on that board do? They version I 
have (on an M10000) has no acceleration for modular exponentiation, 
which you would need for RSA or Diffie-Helmann but they were making 
noises about adding a Montgomery multiplier circuit, or something 
similar. Has that now happened (I've not been monitoring that)?

Is this all working under linux?

Cheers,
 Daniel.

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:59:40 +0100, Daniel James wrote:

> In article news:<48a6b33a$0$629$bed64819@news.gradwell.net>, Alexd
> wrote:

>> The Debian packages make it easy enough.
> 
> I'm using Gentoo ...
> 
> The problem isn't getting the software installed -- that's all done --
> but I have some intractable problem with MySQL configuration the details
> of which escape me. 

That's why I like Debian - dbconfig-common makes this kind of stuff a 
walk in the park.

-- 
 <http://ale.cx/> (AIM:troffasky) (UnSoEsNpEaTm@ale.cx)
 16:53:39 up 36 days, 19:30,  2 users,  load average: 0.33, 0.28, 0.13
 Convergence, n: The act of using separate DSL circuits for voice and data

On Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:57:22 +0000, alexd passed an empty day by writing:

> On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:59:40 +0100, Daniel James wrote:
> 
>> In article news:<48a6b33a$0$629$bed64819@news.gradwell.net>, Alexd
>> wrote:
> 
>>> The Debian packages make it easy enough.
>> 
>> I'm using Gentoo ...
>> 
>> The problem isn't getting the software installed -- that's all done --
>> but I have some intractable problem with MySQL configuration the
>> details of which escape me.
> 
> That's why I like Debian - dbconfig-common makes this kind of stuff a
> walk in the park.

Debian -and- Ubuntu (being Deb based) have done wonders for Linux and I 
applaud them. How easy is it to install software for example. One short 
line of text and your done. apt-get install <program>. That is utter 
genius. 

-- 
powered by Linux - bastardized by Window$ - 
givemespam@wibblywobblyteapot.co.uk

Daniel James wrote:

> In article news:<48a5fae1$0$15508$426a34cc@news.free.fr>, F8Boe wrote:
>> FreeNAS
> 
> I've certainly looked at FreeNAS.
> 
> FreeNAS is based on M0n0wall, which in turn is based on FreeBSD, and I
> know less about that than I do about linux.
> 
> The FreeNAS site has a lot about what FreeNAS can and can't do ... but
> it doesn't say anything about whether it's possible to add packages
> that aren't part of FreeNAS itself -- such as a version control server.
> Can that be done (without extraordinary effort)?
> 
> The FAQ entry:
> 
>   First and foremost FreeNAS was developed as a Network Attached
>   Storage application, not a router, media server, etc. There may
>   be future development streams, plug-ins, modules or patches to
>   FreeNAS to make some other functions work, but not until the
>   basic NAS functions are stabilised. If you have skills to do
>   this, share your expertise, please.
> 
> rather suggests I shouldn't hold my breath.
> 
> Cheers,
>  Daniel.


A "full" install of FreeNAS is an equivalent of a FreeBSD install and with
this config it is possible to add/compile packages as on every other Unix
system.

Ciao @+

In article news:<48a84a62$0$629$bed64819@news.gradwell.net>, Alexd 
wrote:
> That's why I like Debian - dbconfig-common makes this kind of stuff a 
> walk in the park.

I quite like Debian too ... I started to use Gentoo partly as a learning 
experience (as is LFS, but that seemed to require more knowledge of 
linux than I had at the time just to ask the right questions) and 
carried on with it because I liked the way Portage manages dependencies 
/almost/ transparently (apt is pretty good, too) and partly because I 
wanted to optimize my mini-ITX build as much as possible given the 
modest hardware. I had previously used SuSe and Fedora and had run into 
some problems that Gentoo just didn't seem to have.

In fairness to Gentoo I'll say that my troubles with MySQL configuration 
are probably all of my own doing ... I vaguely recall that after a 
system update I got a message telling me about some incompatibility 
between the old and new versions and that I should change some aspect of 
the MySQL setup ... I thought "yeah, later ... too busy now" ... and 
when I actually came back to trying to /use/ MySQL there had been more 
updates and I'd lost the instructions for changing the config and 
couldn't remember what the issue had been anyway.

That's why I say a reinstall will probably fix it ...

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In article news:, Daniel James 
wrote:
> > I doubt it.  Though X-RAID is "patent pending", so maybe the patent
> > application gives enough information to recover the data?
> 
> Quite. I find that all rather offputting.

Though ... reading the manual for the ReadyNAS box online ... it seems 
that you can choose to use real RAID-1 instead of X-RAID.

Decisions, decisions ...

Cheers,
 Daniel.

In  Daniel James  writes:

>So, I'm toying with four options.

>1. A NAS appliance. There are some that support samba and NFS and would 
>meet my minimum requirement. These things generally run low-power CPUs 
>(often ARM or PPC) so run at quite low power, which is good for 
>cost/greenness but makes it harder to customize them. 

>I might possibly, at some later date, play around with running modified 
>firmware (these things mostly run some sort of linux, with a web 
>interface for admin and some sort of bundled backup application) but I 
>don't want to get into trying to cross-compile unfamiliar distros and 
>reflashing unfamiliar hardware (possibly irreversibly) at this stage 
>.. so realistically the NAS appliance route offers me just the minimum 
>requirement.

If you are prepared to reflash a device and build up a system of your own
devising on it, then the Linksys NSLU2 (aka the "Slug") is a good start,
because there is a website http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ full of ready
compiled stuff to put up on it. Though I am sure you would want to invest
in a cross-compiler to add your own stuff later on.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl@clerew.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5

Gordon Henderson <gordon+usenet@drogon.net> wrote:
> In article <3eA*IuBks@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>,
> Theo Markettos  <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> >I'm quite surprised that this hefty great lump is actually considered
> >relatively low power these days.  Which is going to make beating it a bit
> >tricky.
> 
> You think so? Check...
> 
> http://unicorn.drogon.net/power.jpg
> 
> So that's an EK1000 motherboard with a flash-drive, (and a 4-port PSTN
> interface card - this is a Linux box running asterisk) but add in 2 x
> low power (sub 10W drives) and you're still under half your box...

Oh yes, I know you can get boards powered entirely from their built-in
hamster wheel.  I should have put 'for a desktop PC'.  My current options
are:

1. Leave my server switched off half the time (not ideal from a backups POV)
2. Replace it with a secondhand lower power machine
3. Replace it with the bottom end ITX/etc board (because anything else is
too expensive at the moment)

Replacing drives is not an option right now, but I'd only save a few watts
in any case.

1 is what I do at the moment.  3 is probably too underpowered (quick
compiles are useful). For 2 I'm looking at machines in the small ads, which
is why I want to beat the spec of my current machine.  So really I'm
concerned about what the power consumption of machines produced by PC World
(etc) was in about 2005.  Don't forget that 60W idle is also driving a
(non-spinning) DVD-ROM drive and a monitor (with the most basic VGA card I
could find).

> Don't spin down until about 2 hours of idle time. You'll need to change
> the ext3 mount parameters too, or use ext2.
> 
> Check http://www.samwel.tk/smart_spindown/index.html

I'm going to be spinning down two backup drives once a day.  I wonder if
there's any stats on drive lifetimes based on spin up/down cycles?  For
starters I probably ought to find a USB/firewire case that will spin down. 
Any suggestions for a cheap-ish 3.5" case?

Theo

Tony Houghton  wrote:
> Early (2nd generation?) Athlon64s with the Winchester core were very
> efficient, about 30W loaded IIRC, and they have the Cool'n'Quiet feature
> so you can reduce the clock speed at idle. But have you read the Athlon
> Powersaving Howto and applied it to your Athlon XP?

That's useful, thanks.  I have athcool on my machine, and it does noticeably
make a difference (to the fan noise as well as the power meter reading -
think it saves about 10W), but for some reason Debian doesn't seem to run it
on boot (it's in /etc/init.d).  I must chase this up - thanks for reminding
me!

> I'm not sure, but I got the impression VIA chipsets were more economical
> than nForce. I had an nForce 4 board and had to replace the stupidly
> undersized and noisy chipset cooler with a big passive Zalman heatsink,
> and it ran a little on the hot side. IIRC (this is very vague) its VIA
> competitors tended to have passive cooling off-the-shelf.

So an early Athlon64 with a VIA chipset would be worth looking out for?  I
think I have an nVidia at the moment.  That at least is something I can test
in a prospective secondhand machine.

Theo

In article news:, Daniel James 
wrote:
> 1. A NAS appliance ...

I noticed that SCAN were offering a FREE Samsung HD502IJ 500GB drive 
bundled with the 500GB Netgear ReadyNAS box ... then I noticed that the 
bundle was one of their "Toady Only" offers ... so I weakened.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=797762

The factory-fitted drive is a Seagate 7200.10, BTW.

So I now have 2x500GB in a RAID-1 array in a low-power NAS box for 
£189+VAT ... which is only about £25 more than I would have paid to get 
the rather less capable (and rather flaky, according to some reviewers) 
Icy-Box 4220 and the same two drives.

Initial feelings are that it's a very neat little unit - smaller than I 
was expecting - well constructed and sensibly designed ... but it's NOT 
silent by any means. When it starts up and the fan comes on at full blast 
it's positively noisy but it settles down to a mildly irritating hum ... 
I shall have to think of somewhere a bit out of earshot to locate it.

As it sits here chuntering away to itself the Seagate disk is at 50C 
(according to its own SMART data) and the Samsung is at 38C ... I don't 
know whether that's an accurate reflection of the temperatures of the 
drives or whether it reflects greater optimism on the part of Samsung's 
Smart code, but it is possible that it's an indication that the Samsung 
is a cooler-running drive as the two are side-by-side in identical bays.

Thanks to everyone who chipped in with information and advice in this 
thread ... I'm rather sorry I didn't go for the mini-ITX solution in some 
ways, but the NAS solution was pragmatic -- and turned out to be cheaper 
than I had expected.

Cheers,
 Daniel.

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:07:44 +0100, Theo Markettos wrote:

> That's useful, thanks.  I have athcool on my machine, and it does
> noticeably make a difference (to the fan noise as well as the power
> meter reading - think it saves about 10W), but for some reason Debian
> doesn't seem to run it on boot (it's in /etc/init.d).  I must chase this
> up - thanks for reminding me!
>
Have you enabled it? The general distros tend to put lots of boot time 
scripts there but only enable the ones that everybody will want to run on 
almost every host..

I don't know Debian, but in Fedora it would be enabled with the chkconfig 
command.
 

-- 
martin@   | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org       |