Power & CPU Q's - Can system be put to sleep and resumed with the power button?

[zenorb]

Hi

Can system be put to sleep and resumed with the power button like a desktop windows PC can?

So switch off overnight when not in use with quick resume in the morning.

Any figures on Power consumption when at idle or under normal load assuming modern CPU + Watts per HDD?

FYI I'm looking at 14 x 3TB drive internally plus two lots of 4 x 3TB drive via eSATA ports (see other post).

With the cost of electricity these days it would be good to have an idea of Watts drawn.

Also, am I correct in thinking CPU cores and clock don't really matter (except maybe for Socket Chipset support - see other post) and that a two core celeron will do as good a job as an 4 core 8 thread core i7 or does 'horsepower' actually make a difference with FreeNAS in some instances?

With thanks

 

[cyberjock]

YOu know, I wrote you out a really nice response to this question and 2 others.. but then I noticed that you have created 5 threads in less than 2 hours and all of them seem fairly trivial to answer if you have read the manual, checked out the FAQ, looked at my guide, and done a little searching.

How about you do your homework before you start posting. Protosd politely told you off in the previous thread I read, take that as a hint to do your own homework.

 

[zenorb]

That's such a shame you were put off providing what would have been helpful answers especially if you'd already written them. I've spent two full days reading the docs, your guide and searching and was very enthusiastic to clarify these points concisely as I was about to spend $4K on gear.

I posted the questions separately with tags to help others.

Regards

 

[Stephens]

If you look up the specs for the drives you plan to use, the specs will tell you how many watts it should use. That's a much better way to determine expected draw than some generic numbers that may not fit your situation.

I'm not familiar with any sleep functions except in one area -- and it's the most important one. You can configure your hard drives to go to sleep. That's where most of your power will go, so putting them to sleep will give you the lion's share of the power savings you wish to have. For instance, on my low power system, I'm running at about 60 watts, but only about 20 watts when the drives are sleep. If that's not enough, you'll have to just shut it down and deal with the short boot-up procedure when you're ready to use it.

Also, it's not enough to guess watts based on "modern CPU". Look at the CPU you want, and find out what Intel or AMD says it'll use. They're all over the place.

Horsepower makes a difference in some instances, such as scrubs/resilvering and plugins. Also, if you're using CIFS, it's single-threaded, so higher clock speeds (up to a point) benefit more than number of cores (unless there are multiple users).

 

[William Grzybowski]

FreeBSD ACPI implementation is very weak, suspend-on-ram might or might not work.

There is a tool called acpiconf to put the system in S3 state.