Kill-a-Watt results for my filer

[survive]

Hi guys,

I'm in the market for a new PSU, so I got a hold of a Kill-a-Watt meter and hooked my filer up to it to see what sort of power it really draws.

My filer consists of the following parts:

Supermicro X9SCL-F
Intel i3-2100
16GB DDR3-1333 ECC
8 x Samsung F3 HD103SJ 7200RPM Drives
IBM BR10i SAS Controller (LSI 1068 chip)
Intel "PT" Quad-Port Gig-E NIC

Plugged in but not powered on the system draws ~7.7 watts (so *always* unplug your system if you are going to go poke around inside!)
Power on the system and the power draw spikes to ~220 watts as the BIOS is loading & the drives are spun up.
Once FreeNAS starts booting & powerd is loaded the draw settles down to ~130 watts.
After FreeNAS is done loading & the system is idle it draws ~109 watts.
Running "iozone -a -s 20g -r 4096" on one of my datasets will increase the power draw up to ~145 watts.

Based on these numbers it appears that even a 350 watt PSU would provide me with plenty of headroom when I start the box but not be so much overkill that I'm way out of the efficiency "sweet spot".

-Will

 

[titan_rw]

Plugged in but not powered on the system draws ~7.7 watts (so *always* unplug your system if you are going to go poke around inside!)

That's probably with the power supply switch on. There's standby power supplied to the MB for WOL, and other stuff I'm unaware of. Try flicking the ps switch to off.

I have no problem working on computers when them plugged in. I just make sure the switch on the PS is toggled off. This disconnects power very early on in the PS, but doesn't disconnect ground. So the PS / computer remain grounded, but powered off.


Anyway, I have previously measured my freenas machine as well. I'm running an i5-3570 with 32 gigs ram, and 10 7200 rpm disks. Idle, once freenas boots up is around 130 watts if I remember right. I don't believe in spinning down disks, so this stays pretty constant.

My backup nas, which is a core2quad, with 9 assorted disks uses about 100w I think. It also runs all the time.

On the other hand, my dedicated esx box is an i3-2100. It only draws about 60w last time I checked it. It's got 4 disks in it or local storage.