Server Rebuild Time!

Mark77 · April 6, 2016

Darn, sounds like you would've almost been better off just buying a H67/Z68/H77/Z77/Q77 board and using the embedded graphics on your chip. Especially for server use where you want to keep power consumption down.

AshleyAshes · April 6, 2016

4 hours ago, Mark77 said:

Darn, sounds like you would've almost been better off just buying a H67/Z68/H77/Z77/Q77 board and using the embedded graphics on your chip. Especially for server use where you want to keep power consumption down.

Well, I got what I got. So the HD 5450 will be the solution.

AshleyAshes · April 14, 2016

Okay. After the package took a detour to the wrong post office and such, I have my HD 5450 in, it's great, it WORKS, and most of all the idle wattage is down from 60w to 45w. That's it's state while idle with only the system HDD spinning. If all the disks are spinning It raises to about 75w but that's also down from 90w. So I now have a server running, ready to download, sort, store, torrent, and everything else for an average wattage under that of an old timey incandescent lightbulb.

dalekphalm · April 14, 2016

14 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

Okay. After the package took a detour to the wrong post office and such, I have my HD 5450 in, it's great, it WORKS, and most of all the idle wattage is down from 60w to 45w. That's it's state while idle with only the system HDD spinning. If all the disks are spinning It raises to about 75w but that's also down from 90w. So I now have a server running, ready to download, sort, store, torrent, and everything else for an average wattage under that of an old timey incandescent lightbulb.

Not too shabby - even 75w isn't crazy, since it'll only be running that when you're reading or writing to the main storage pool.

AshleyAshes · April 15, 2016

7 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Not too shabby - even 75w isn't crazy, since it'll only be running that when you're reading or writing to the main storage pool.

Yeah, this is about the bottom end I can expect without swapping for a dual core Ivy Bridge (In retrospect I should have sourced a low end quad core Ivy), and switching all the drives to SSDs. However 45w idle is pretty good for a device that does a lot of services and aquires all of my television. This includes it's main system drive spinning, so torrents running and writing don't cause the storage array to spin up. Basically only writing processed files from usenet or streaming to HTPC clients requires the server to spin up to full speed. On top of that, even when serving data, after 20mins it'll spin down all the drives that it's not serving data from (But it seems to spin all up to START serving any file). But this means 95% of the time it's idle at 45w.

However, consider this: an HDTV cable box -also- sucks down 35w and they basically run 24/7 even if no one is watching TV. They're really not designed to just turn on and off and have pretty long power cycle times. So 2-3 of them in a home add up to the power bill. I have ONLY my 45w server running, it does a LOT more work for me, and all my HTPCs are asleep at about 0.7w when not in use and can wake up in a few seconds.