Help with energy saving tips?!

[madmax]

I have enable energy saving daemon, also place my hard drives in lowest saving mode and spin down of 10 minutes, I guess I was wondering if there is anything more I could do to help save energy? Is there a way schedule a shut down and start up time each day, thinking about saving 4 hours of ontime? Is there a sleep mode and then a wake on lan when a request is sent from the network b/c there are random periods throughout the day the server isn't being in use.

My build:

JetWay JNF9A-Q67
Intel I3-2120T
GSKILL DDR3 1333
4 x WD BLACK WD2002FAEX
Seasonic 350 Gold PS
Corsair Force 3 SSD

I have the hard drives in ZFZ Raid-Z2.

I been watching Kill-A-Watt meter while in use and non activity and pretty much goes from mid 80 kWatts to 72 kWatts. I would like to see it go down in the 60's if possible, I think I afforded the performance loss if that was the case. I don't want change out for Intel Atom/AMD APU, I been there, just never satisfied.

 

[cyberjock]

You're about as good as you're going to get. Servers aren't cheap. Expensive to build, expensive to run, and expensive to maintain :P

 

[andoy31]

Try to disable the following:
- eist and downclock your cpu to the lowest possible multiplier.
- onboard soundcard

Another thing about your harddisks, if i'm not mistaken are one of highest power consuming 7200rpm drives out there.

 

[cyberjock]

On one of my machines I disabled both onboard NICs, Firewire, and onboard sound and I saved only 2 watts. That's almost within the tolerance of the reading between reboots.

As for downclocking to the lowest multiplier, I think that pointless. For the 90% of the time that the CPU is idle it will sit at the lowest multiplier. All you are doing by forcing it to the lowest is limiting your CPUs ability to minimize latency by clocking up when necessary due to higher load. This is why Intel has been trying to push the boundary of what can be turned off on the CPU when it is idle. Each new generation of CPU has had more and more of the CPU turned off when idle. I'm not too familiar with AMD chips, but I'm pretty sure they're doing the same thing.

7200 RPM disks do draw some juice(and run warmer) than lower RPM drives. But big picture, replacing them all with green drives still isn't cost effective. The "savings" from using green drives versus black drives doesn't exceed the cost of the green drives, so you are most likely better off sticking with what you have. If you weren't using old hardware and buying all new harddisks, lower RPM drives or green drives could/should have been considered when the system was built. It's a little late to fix it now though.

You could turn on the powerd setting. I forget where it is, but I'm sure if you search for powerd in the manual you'll find it. I'm not sure how much that will help. But I would be amazed if you could lower your wattage by even 5watts.

I'm not sure where you live, but 5 watts saved really isn't alot saved even over a year. 5 watts really just isn't alot of power. Even over a year that's 44kwh extra. If you pay something outlandish like 20c/kwh that's only $8 in a year!

 

[andoy31]

From what i noticed with an intel (non-K) cpus-- if you downclock via the multiplier settings then the voltage also follows henced saving a few watts there. Forcing my cpu (g530)to just use the minimum speed gives some sort of a cap to the cpu performance --from 2400mhz to 1600mhz will definitely see some perf drawback. But it's fine with me as i only use my freenas for 5 clients and performance is still ok, still able to max out a gigabit connection. :)

My take on harddisk is not really going to green drives but rather there are other 7200 rpm drives that's more power efficient than the wd black.

 

[cyberjock]

From what i noticed with an intel (non-K) cpus-- if you downclock via the multiplier settings then the voltage also follows henced saving a few watts there. Forcing my cpu (g530)to just use the minimum speed gives some sort of a cap to the cpu performance --from 2400mhz to 1600mhz will definitely see some perf drawback. But it's fine with me as i only use my freenas for 5 clients and performance is still ok, still able to max out a gigabit connection. :)

EIST drops the voltage and frequency. Again I see no benefit from it but you do lose the ability to fully utilize your CPU if it would be necessary.

My take on harddisk is not really going to green drives but rather there are other 7200 rpm drives that's more power efficient than the wd black.

Yeah, but if he's already paid for these disk it's hardly time to try to buy more. You won't save enough in the long run to justify it.

 

[cyberjock]

Let's compare disks. Lets compare the current drives against WD 2TB green drives. Those would provide the "most" power savings. If these aren't cost effective then obviously nothing else will be. After all, they are also the cheapest WD drives on Newegg.

I'll be using WD20EARX ($114.99 on Newegg).

Per WD documentation the current drives use 10.7w when active and 8.2w when idle.
Per WD documentation the green drives use 5.3w when active and 3.3w when idle.

If we just assume both idle 100% of the time you'll save 4.9w per unit time.

Over a year for 4 disks you are saving only 172kwh. At 20c/kwh that's $34.40. Over 5 years for 4 disks you are saving $172 assuming the disks last that long.

Except you paid $459.96 for new disks. So you really paid $287.96 MORE assuming you actually used those disks for 5 years. If you use them for anything less than 5 years you'll be paying more and more.

So replacing the drives is literally more expensive than just paying for the higher electricity.

If you bought and use the green drives for a somewhat realistic 3 years, just to break even you'd need your electricity to cost almost 90c/kwh. I'm pretty sure that's far far more than what you are actually paying ;)

If you bought the green drives for half price right now and still used them for a somewhat realistic 3 years, you'd need your electricity to cost 45c/kwh the entire time.

Adding in any time that the disks aren't idle favors the green drives very very slightly but definitely not enough to make it cost effective.

So I still stand by my comment that buying more efficient hard drives is just NOT cost effective by any stretch of the imagination. If you expected the drives to last for 7+ years AND you got them for 1/2 price AND electricity prices skyrocketed you MIGHT see the green drives as cost effective. If you want low power solutions you have to build them into your server from the get-go. Even if your disks used twice the watts WD is claiming, it's STILL not cost effective. Trying to do it after the fact is flat out never cost effective. Once you have the drives installed its too late to be unhappy about the power usage.

 

[andoy31]

agree. I'm just giving out options to save some power and save on some OPEX. :)

as for me, the newest,lowest and cost effective cpu (1155) i can find is the celeron G530 rated at 1600-2400mhz forcing the cpu to just 1600Mhz quickly ensures me of ~20Watts power savings and even with the decreased CPU performance my end-result is not affected.

 

[cyberjock]

agree. I'm just giving out options to save some power and save on some OPEX. :)

as for me, the newest,lowest and cost effective cpu (1155) i can find is the celeron G530 rated at 1600-2400mhz forcing the cpu to just 1600Mhz quickly ensures me of ~20Watts power savings and even with the decreased CPU performance my end-result is not affected.

It is possible that you saved nothing at all. The amount of power the CPU draws is an important part of efficiency, but how much time your CPU isn't idle is also a big part. There's lots of comparisons where a low power CPU is much worse than a high powered CPU only because the high powered CPU can finish the work quickly and go back to idle.

 

[andoy31]

True, but for my usage pattern- only 5 clients and uses only cifs and afp and with cpu downclocked, i still can saturate a gigabit connection -hence the savings. :)
Even if i bring the cpu back to original clock speed, my bottleneck is the NIC of 1Gbps, given that i have a realtek nic, i doubt the cpu will idle as soon as the processing is finished as it'll have to take care of the nic interrupts.

 

[cyberjock]

And what about scrubs? What about when you actually DO need CPU speed?

Theres a chance you're shooting yourself in the foot. In the end though, it really doesn't matter. We're talking about,at most, 15w difference in power. You MIGHT be saving $10 a year. If you're happy that's all that matters. The pennies saved aren't really worth the energy spent keeping my computer on to continue the conversation. It's really that easy. Someday enough people will realize they spend SO much more money to save a few buck.

Ever heard of solar power? Wind power? Electric vehicles? Hybrid vehicle? Yeah.. me neither. You don't buy them because they're "economical". You buy them because it makes you "feel" good.

If you feel good with your choices, then great. That's all that matters. Most likely the electricity spent just having our conversations exceeds the difference in cost between an underclocked and default clocked CPU. :)

 

[madmax]

I think I made a mistake on the motherboard I bought. I thought it was a sound pick for this project. I was trying to find a good ITX form factor.
http://www.jetway.com.tw/jw/ipcboard_view.asp?proname=NF9A-Q67&productid=858

It had two Intel NICs. 6x sata ports which I thought it was better pick over using a raid card, better performance but now I'm thinking that maybe with a different board it would of been better with a raid card.

The Q67 chipset or at least the Jetway bios is limiting on what I can do to the processor and memory for overclocking. i can't set the memory timing settings which i'm disappointed b/c I can do cas 7 on my memory but the board is setting it at cas 9. There doesn't seem to be any overclocking from basic or advanced settings. No changing the multiplier or voltage. Bios just sucks. There are settings for power states.

The drives I thought I got a good deal for the money. Pretty much wanted 7200 rpm for performance but now realizing at the cost of power. I like the five year warranty and pretty much saw that Seagates had a lot of 1 year warranty. I got each 2 tb sata 6gb WD black at 145 a piece which i think is pretty good for brand new.

I think i might use the http://ark.intel.com/products/67346/Intel-Server-Board-S1200KPR
It supports xeon and ECC and I will just find a supported raid card as well.
What are your thoughts on just power savings, understandable if I buy it wouldn't be cost effective but I might be sell my mobo for 70-80% of what I bought it at and recoup some of the money.

Is there way to under clocking through the command line on freenas?
Also anyone have a script for 8.2 for monitoring drive and CPU temps? I been trying to get this script to work

http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...-(CPU-HDD-mobo-GPU)-temperatures-on-FreeNAS-8

I having problems with a syntax error on line 2. I get the CPu temps and hd activity but when i get hdd temperature, I get this

HDD Temperature:
awk: newline in regular expression Device Num... at source line 2
context is
BEGIN { DevName="N/A - Drive in standby mode" } /Temperature_Celsius/{DevTemp=$10;} /Se
<<<
awk: syntax error at source line 2
awk: bailing out at source line 2
ada0
awk: newline in regular expression Device Num... at source line 2
context is

 

[madmax]

I think I made a mistake on the motherboard I bought. I thought it was a sound pick for this project. I was trying to find a good ITX form factor.
http://www.jetway.com.tw/jw/ipcboard_view.asp?proname=NF9A-Q67&productid=858

The board has two Intel NICs and x6 SATA ports which I thought it was better pick over using a raid card, better performance maybe but now I'm thinking that maybe with a different board it would of been better with a raid card. I couldn't find many Intel supported ITX mobos that had x6 SATA.

The Q67 chipset or at least the Jetway bios is limiting on what I can do to the processor and memory for overclocking. i can't set the memory timing settings which i'm disappointed b/c I can do cas 7 on my memory but the board is setting it at cas 9. There doesn't seem to be any overclocking from basic or advanced settings. No changing the multiplier or voltage. Bios just sucks. There are settings for power states.

The drives I thought I got a good deal for the money. Pretty much wanted 7200 rpm for performance but now realizing at the cost of power. I like the five year warranty and pretty much saw that Seagates had a lot of 1 year warranty. I got each 2 tb sata 6gb WD black at 145 a piece which i think is pretty good for brand new.

I think i might use the http://ark.intel.com/products/67346/Intel-Server-Board-S1200KPR
It supports xeon which I could use E3 1220LV2 at 17w TDP and also ECC is supported. I would have to find a supported raid card as well.
What are your thoughts on just power savings, understandable if I buy it wouldn't be cost effective but I might be able to sell my mobo for 70-80% of what I bought it at and recoup some of the money.

Is there way to under clocking through the command line on freenas?
Also anyone have a script for 8.2 for monitoring drive and CPU temps?

 

[andoy31]

To each his own ;)

Not sure about underclocking at cli for freebsd-- think you can just use powerd or buy a board that has a bios to do such.

Saw some scripts before on cpu/hdd monitoring -- the script runs sysctl -a |grep cpu for hdd it can be done via smartctl -a. Think there's a monthly report generated by freenas that sends out these info.

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly, if you buy a RAID controller you will probably up your power usage by 5-10 watts. So you might increase your power load.

I'm really not understanding why you're spending so much energy to fix a problem that you aren't likely to fix. You're talking about saving 5watts at best. From my other post, that's about $35 a year. I'm betting you could save more power than that just by opening windows and not running the A/C as much.

You're spending so much energy on it, any energy you might save you're probably spending keeping your desktop on just so you can try to find a way to save power.

 

[andoy31]

as what you mentioned --as long it makes a person feels 'good'. Understand that it may not be that much, but 5 watts here and there will compound and affect the bottomline.