darkryoushii
Explorer
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2013
- Messages
- 60
Okay, so this:
is your system? Those are 7200RPM drives and Toshiba rates them around 7W active, 4W idle, 1W sleeping. Five of them active is going to be 35 watts, idle will be 20 watts. Sleeping, 5 watts. But many here will tell you, spinning drives up and down is extremely stressful on drives, and will likely lead to unhappiness. It might not be a tradeoff you want to make.
I'd love to spin them down because I don't believe anyone who says that it puts unnecessary wear on a drive. Maybe 5 years ago but not anymore. With proper head parking, more durable motors and better all round quality these drives will definitely stlll last at least 10 years before they die from sleeping.
3 140mm case fans? Are you running them full speed? Do you know the wattage? Are you using passive cooling for the CPU, or also running a fan on that? It's funny to see people try to build energy efficient systems and then not realize that cooling has a significant power impact.
All fans are set to the lowest fan speed that they can possibly stand while keeping the CPU less than 45 degrees. The case fans are running off the slowest option on the Define R4's fan controller.
I don't have any direct experience with the A6-5400K but I've heard griping that AMD's current power management is less aggressive than Intel's. Still, the most energy-efficient high performance systems we've been building here are Xeon E3-1230 based boxes that eat about 45W idle (no drives). A SoC-based NAS will take a few watts plus whatever the drives require, and an Atom-based NAS usually seems to average around 20-25W plus whatever the drives require (true of the name-brand NAS devices or if you roll your own Atom based FreeNAS). Intermediate platforms like the N36L/N40L/N54L are a little more than that, but really, hitting less than maybe 40W on a performance platform is going to be very difficult, and when you add drives to that, it pushes consumption up. Hoping for a 50W idle is probably unrealistic, but if you want to spin the drives down and can figure out what your drives need in order to make that happen, I'd expect 70-75W as a reasonable goal, and if there's anything else you can change in your system to reduce wattage, that'll help too.
When I manually spindown the drives (ataidle -S 10 ada0) I get 57w idle with the drives in standby. If encryption adds overhead to the power or stops the CPU from underclocking as quickly or other negative effects then there is a few watts saved there as well. Surely 55w is possible, and I thought maybe even 50w is possible.