Best Power Saving settings??

[tmacka88]

Ok, so i just got my power bill this month and it seems my gadgets are drawing a little too much power than the misses likes. I have two options reduce my spending or get a new misses. Whilst considering both haha i think I need to do something about my power usage. I have 5 HDDS with these settings, HDD Standby = 10min and Advanced Power Management = Level 64.

Is there anyway I can further do to reduce power? Obviously I can set to Level 1 and 5min.
any more ideas??

cheers

 

[StephenFry]

You're not telling us how much power your NAS is pulling. Then we could compare it to our own and see if we have any kind of authority on the subject or not.

Do you use the internal VGA of your motherboard or a PCI(e) card? I accidentally bought a board without built-in VGA and then added a fairly recent PCI-e 16x graphics card I had left. That was a mistake, even doing nothing it used quite a lot of power. Since then I've switched it for a 1997 PCI card.

 

[tmacka88]

not exactly sure how much power its using exactly. I have a 450w psu, intel core 2 duo cpu, 4 port sata expander PCIeX1 card, 5 hdds, and another pci gigabyte card. I know its prob not the best info but i dont have anything to test the power usage yet.

 

[StephenFry]

Our setups are quite similar. Not exactly the best kind of builds for powersaving. I think you should be able to use less than 100W during normal operation. That's about what I use, and that theoretically costs me roughly €0.60 per day. If you've got the drives spinning down, take off about 7W per drive and all of a sudden you've halved your usage.

Unless you have a desire to do a full rebuild with ITX board, Atom chip, Pico PSU etc etc -which would take a while to pay itself back- I don't think you could do a whole lot.

Wait, you can do at least one thing: check your PSU specs and see if you're hitting the sweet spot. It might not be very efficient for the 90-120W you're pulling and it's not too expensive to swap it for a more efficient PSU. Mine is a 550W Corsair, which is total overkill, but it is very efficient at 100/120W.

It's an interesting topic, I'm curious if others have ideas on this.

 

[tmacka88]

yeh thanks mate, i prob would mind thinking about going down a atom chip way but not sure if it would deminish performance of system when its running transfers. Im getting between 70-80MB atm with a max of 90-100MB and im upgrading some network components soon so im hoping that i can max out my giga lan and im not sure if a Atom ITX MB would be able to couple with these transfers. Also the fact of having alot of HDD's and I will be adding more soon therefore an atom will not have enough PCIe PCI spots. But I think I should look into my PSU at least and see if I can find out if it is efficent. Its actually a Thermaltake 600W Litepower so it seems to be quite efficent by looking at the box, just depends on where the sweat spot is i guess.

thanks though

 

[survive]

Hi tmack88,

Take a look at this thread:

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?6273-PSU-sizing-for-home-file-server&highlight=power+supply

post #4 has a link to the "80 Plus" people who certify PSU's. Their website has results for different load ranges for each PSU they test and might prove useful.

-Will

 

[ProtoSD]

Im getting between 70-80MB atm with a max of 90-100MB and im upgrading some network components soon so im hoping that i can max out my giga lan and im not sure if a Atom ITX MB would be able to couple with these transfers.

You'd be really surprise what you can get out of Atom MB... I have the Supermicro with the D510 1.6Ghz CPU, right now I'm getting peaks of 80MB+ and averages of 60MB on 20GB files as well as batches of varying sized files.

Other users here with the D525 1.8Ghz CPU are getting the same as you. I could probably do better on mine IF I didn't have a 5 disk raidz2 array, and maybe even better if I used LAGG. I have a 160W PicoPSU that idles around 45w and peaks during a scrub around 60w, that's with FIVE disks (2TB each).

I have 6x SATA ports and a PCIe slot I could easily put another controller into.

 

[Visseroth]

Yea, I'm looking at what I can do to reduce my power consumption as well. Is there a way to set the power management on the drives so they don't park the heads all the time? Last time I tried to use the power management it was parking the heads on my drives every 3 seconds.
See my signature for my machine specs.