up and running, now to make it better! help on power options.

[fizzgig656]

HI all, ive spent most of the morning looking at how to control the power usage more. Ive set the power deamon on. ive also set the HDD to spin down etc but can anyone help reduce the watts further. if possible? IE got to one of the power saving states suspend, standby etc.
Im currently pulling 37-43watts idle-access, spin up peaks at 54 watts booting hits a bit higher still.

ive got an atom d2700mud MB
300w ATX
1 stick of 4gb ram
4x 500gb HDD 3.5"'s in a icydock caddy with fan!

im using onboad lan, onboard graphics card, passive heatsink,

I will be wanting to install a 4x sata raid card but havent bought it yet..

Sorry if there are threads else where but i have been trying to find them, im a bit green to freenas as well!!!:)
cheers

 

[jgreco]

"300w ATX" sounds generic.

Really, the problem is, most power supplies are really inefficient. Especially for higher rated power supplies, that often offer 70-80% efficiency but only when you're in the ballpark of the numbers they were designed for.

Take a look at this because I'm too lazy to summarize it this morning

Anyways, the problem is that if you've got a system that's only using ~10% of the PSU capacity, your efficiency is low. If you don't have a power supply with a high efficiency factor to begin with, you're likely to be burning a lot of watts on waste.

Consider trying a high efficiency power supply. I've been tempted around here to get some PicoPSU-150's to have on hand, they look like they have the potential for awesomeness but I don't know what the actual efficiency ends up being.

I can tell you that I've got a Supermicro D525 in the shop right now on a generic power supply, it's eating 32.8W but earlier we had it on a Supermicro PWS-351-1H 350W supply and the meter was showing more like 22W. That's a significant difference of course, and shows how on these low power systems, poor selection of components can lead to 50% (or more!) wasted power.

Running powerd drops it by about 1.1 watts.

Your "icydock caddy with fan!" is a prime candidate for further investigation. Disconnect the fan and take a measurement. If it makes a difference, then consider whether your fan is running full speed; given that it's a name brand mfr it could go either way. You probably want a fan but you might want a variable speed fan, either temperature controlled or maybe PWM based on the motherboard fan control.

 

[fizzgig656]

hi, thanks, the PSU is an ebay jobbie a evo labs p4 model e-m300 so one area to look into, the icy dock fan seems to made only a watt or two difference, so one thing to think on, but i was thinking more of suspend or standby?

 

[jgreco]

For only a watt or two, leave the fan on, I'd say. Suspend or standby is not a really great idea, as your NAS will be inaccessible when in those modes, but some people have written scripts to shut down the system when there's no traffic, and combined with a wake-on-LAN app for the clients, one can probably make something work out.

 

[fizzgig656]

OK thanks. Its only going to be used less than 50% of the time as a home nas.
Another question or two.firstly I tried a 4xsata pci raid card, set up a raid 5 and booted Frenas but only saw the individual discs. And not the raid drive? Is this just incompatibility?
Secondly what are the read write differences bwetween using raid 5 or raid ! And just straight drives. Bearing in mind I've got 2 data via 3gb on motherboard and 2 off the raid card.(I changed the configuration after the raid 5 didntvwork off the one raid card.
I understand there will be other bottle necks but ill be on either 100mb or gig LAN?

 

[fizzgig656]

OK thanks. Its only going to be used less than 50% of the time as a home nas.
Another question or two.firstly I tried a 4xsata pci raid card, set up a raid 5 and booted Frenas but only saw the individual discs. And not the raid drive? Is this just incompatibility?
Secondly what are the read write differences bwetween using raid 5 or raid ! And just straight drives. Bearing in mind I've got 2 data via 3gb on motherboard and 2 off the raid card.(I changed the configuration after the raid 5 didntvwork off the one raid card.
I understand there will be other bottle necks but ill be on either 100mb or gig LAN?

would i be better changing to a mini pci-x sata card rather than the pci card to run 2 of the 4 sata drives, will that speed things up, or an i digging for the sake of nothing???

Also is a 4 disk array a good idea as raid z1? ie can i still survive with the loss of 1 drive? or would i be better to stay with 3 drives and have the 4th as a solo drive?

 

[fizzgig656]

even more questions, am i going to see much of a saving using a 300w 80plus psu? could i run my setup on a PicoPSU-150?