Reduce power consumption

[johnblanker]

Right now I have 3, 7200rpm drives in my rig.
AMD Athlon 64 X2 7750 Kuma cpu.
4 gigs (2x2 sticks).
No gpu card and no onboard gpu.
Antec 500 watt psu. Bought it about 10 years ago, (probably not 80 plus)
(2) 120mm fans running off mobo fan controllers. Can freeNAS control these too?

Right now this rig is pulling about 80 watts at idle. I have the auto standby set at 30, and the Advance Power Setting disabled.

I was thinking of getting a new PSU. Newegg has an 80platinum one for around $60. And I will be replacing my drives with WD green drives.

Any other thoughts about how I can reduce power? Do you think getting that psu will make that much of a difference? What about underclocking the cpu? Or the voltage?

I just use my NAS for streaming media. Just shares. No transcoding, apps, dlna. Nothing.

Thanks!

 

[cyberjock]

Buy newer hardware. Old hardware is documented throughout this forum to have very poor efficiency compared to newer hardware. Most hardware before 2008 had no respect for power usage. It was about performance with only a secondary respect for power. But, today's technologies shut off whole cores and sometimes all but 1 core, depending on workload.

Me personally, I upgraded to a brand new system from one dated 2009 last year. I saw a significant performance boost and I saw a drop in power usage that will pay for the hardware in about 3.5 years. So I'm not complaining at all.

 

[johnblanker]

I'm kinda trying to keep the $ down. Just bought a house. If I decide to stick with freeNAS I will def take your advice.

Hmm, I can shut off cores to on my cpu. That's another option. Wonder if that would do anything.

I am assuming that cpu power is needed to run apps and do transcoding. If I am just sharing files how much cpu power is needed?

I saw a video of a guy who had a window open. Looked like a cmd window that display the current cpu and ram usage of freeNAS. Kinda similar to Windows' task manager. How can I do this?

 

[cyberjock]

Well, keep in mind that shutting off cores in your BIOS may have zero effect on your actual power usage. The design of the hardware may not allow you to turn off the actual power to said cores.

How much CPU power you will need depends on many factors. As old as your CPU is, you'll probably see a performance drop from cutting out cores.

# top tells you your CPU and RAM usage.

 

[johnblanker]

how do I use # top? Thanks.

 

[cyberjock]

Here's the manpage..

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=top&sektion=1

 

[johnblanker]

Thanks. I'm a noob at all this. Ok, I can see the commands on that page, but how do I enter them? cmd, broswer?

 

[joeschmuck]

On the GUI left had side, click Display System Processes, that is the top display. And you likely could save a little bit if you could turn off any advanced features in your BIOS you are not using.

EDIT: BTW, 80 watts is not terrible for power consumption for an older system. I'd think you would want to have a system with ECC RAM since you are using FreeNAS. Think of it in those terms if you value the data you are placing on your NAS.

 

[johnblanker]

Thanks. I'm pretty sure I turned off non-essential stuff. Really only serial and parallel ports. No audio and the board has no gpu. 80 watts here on Long Island is only about $5 a month. I guess that's not too bad. I get jealous when I hear about how these synology/drobo/etc boxes are pulling only 30 watts tho.

 

[joeschmuck]

Some of those other boxes can't saturate a 1Gb connection either and are under powered and/or over priced.

 

[johnblanker]

Yeah, I just couldn't see paying $500 for an empty box.

well, I got a new corsair PSU, 80+bronze for $25. Hope that helps. I put in my 5 green drives and started copying over my 4TB of media. Right now with the Antec psu at load it's averaging about 140 watts. Haven't seen it idle yet.

For the green drives it is the consensus to set the power settings at: Hdd standby: 30, and Advance power Setting: off?

 

[joelmusicman]

Actually the Synology/Drobo stuff usually has a PC built into it (probably Atom), which explains the cost. I felt that FreeNAS was better though.

As a point of comparison, FreeNAS boxes built on modern hardware usually pulls around 30w before drives. I don't have a kill-a-watt but I'm guessing my system with a G3220 and 6x3tb drives probably idles at 60 or so.

Here's an example that shows power consumption of a semi-modern system (i5-2500K):
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1374-page6.html

If you decide to upgrade, make sure and go the ECC route as it doesn't add much cost...

 

[johnblanker]

ok, thanks. How about the HDD power settings?

 

[joelmusicman]

I'm not sure, as I follow CyberJock's recommendation to leave them spinning full-time. I've also heard that there are some random writes that keep the drives from sleeping even during prolonged inactivity, particularly in the new .system volume.

 

[johnblanker]

does ecc memory work in most desktop mobo's? I'm not using any parity drives, just stripe. Is ecc memory still better than non-ecc?

 

[cyberjock]

Your question is quite complicated.. please read this thread for all the nasty details...

http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...d-hardware-feedback-and-some-questions.14484/
The thread goes off-topic onto ECC explanations.. and it's technical. But I'll give you the link since that's faster than writing it all out again.

 

[johnblanker]

Thanks cyberjock. My board is the Gigabyte MA770-UD3. It's quite old. ECC ram for this board is quite expensive, I'm assuming because of how old the board is. About $200 for four 4GB sticks, on newegg.
I got the password shares to work, finally. All is good. A couple questions:

1. When I transfer data to a single drive (seagate green) I get about 25MB p/s. When I transfer data to my array (3 WD greens) I get about 80MB p/s. I am assuming because it's writing to all 3 drives in the stripe therefore it's writing quicker?
2. The hardware thread mentioned how Realtek NIC (mine is embedded on mobo) suck and that the Intel NIC is better. Is this for speed? What makes it better and should I get one?
3. I have two shares that are password protected. When I provide the PW for one, I can get into the other one without the password. Is this normal?
4. Lastly, When I delete a folder on my dataset, it deletes all the contents in it but does not delete the folder. I have to do it twice.

thanks again.

 

[cyberjock]

#1: Yeah, probably.
#2: speed and reliability.
#3: That depends on your client. Windows cache's your login info so it *might* be normal. It'll be up to you to determine that.
#4: Sounds like something on your client is locking the folder. It'll be up to you to determine what program is locking it. :(

 

[johnblanker]

I changed the permission on the volume from unix to windows and that let me delete the folder. It's an open access share.

UPDATE* I know I'm deviating from the "recommended" equipment and parity setup. I just really want to experiment with parts leftover and/or really inexpensive parts.

This processor actually works with my board. A bunch of reviews state that people are using it with freenas builds. It's 45 watts, half that of my current Kuma 7750 cpu. In an effort to reduce power consumption, I wonder if it's worth it for $30. I might be able to get it free with "Amazon points" too. Got the 80+Bronze corsair PSU coming ($24!) too.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Bear in mind that the listed wattage for CPUs is generally the maximum TDP, and will have little bearing on idle speeds.

You might have some luck manually tuning the maximum clock speed/voltages through either your BIOS settings, or via software (cpufreq) but don't expect serious gains.

That's also a single-core chip with poor IPC (instructions per clock) so you're going to lose some performance.