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Re: [LUG] Computer Suppliers

 

On Wed, 26 Nov 2008, Rob Beard wrote:

Gordon Henderson wrote:

£65.00    http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12231 (mobo & CPU)

<snip>

Gordon, after reading your post last night it got me thinking a bit more
about my home file/e-mail server which is currently running on a single
core Athlon 1400.  I was looking to upgrade it to a P4 3GHz but after
getting a rather large electricity bill it made me stand up and think
about the Atom.

Do you have any running cost figures for the Atom?

My current home server/firewall/swiss army knife of a thing has a single core HT Atom in it with 1GB of RAM and 2 x 1TB "green" WDC drives. It's also got a D-Link 4-port Ethernet card which I'm sure will add a few watts to the total.

It sucks about 45 watts.

Not as "green" as I'd personally like it, so while the Atom processor itself is low-power, the rest of the chipset isn't. That heatsink and fan is not on the cpu - it's on the northbridge chip - the CPU just has a heatsink on it..

For a home fileserver, you'll easilly get away with something much lesser - 800MHz or less and these mobos are still avalable, although I'm not sure they're any "greener" really..

In terms of performance - well, do you need it? Especially if you're only running 10/100 networking. With Gb I might look at something better, but you'll hit disk head bandwidth before you saturate the Gb network.

I have to say, if I didn't want to do other things on it, I'd probably get a Drobo for a home NAS type of box. They're quite clever and being a custom motherboard, etc. very low power. (but many more £££'s! - and a disclaimer that I have a friend who works for them!)

I use this:

  http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11662

in a lot of boxes, but it seems to consume about 20W with no drives fitted, running off a "brick" type PSU. It's got dual SATA connectors and an on-board RAID-1 controller (although I don't use it, prefering Linux s/w RAID)

Right now the Atoms are cheape than the VIA boards, but come with a fan, so I'm still buying VIAs for fanless systems.

I'm not sure what my current server runs at but I'd assume it's a lot
more than 8 Watts (it has 4 hard drives for starters).  I'm thinking of
maybe replacing the 4 hard drives (which give me about 600GB) with the
750GB drive out of my desktop (which will give me a good reason to clear
out some of the junk I've horded).

Just back it up ;-)

I replaced my old server which had 2 x 80GB IDE drives internally and 6 x 72GB SCSI drives in an external enclosure and saved just over 100watts... So while nice and geeky to have a RAID-6 system, it was just a bit costly!!!

Since the dual core Atom has HT, I presume it'll be more than enough for
my needs (my Athlon 1400 server currently runs Ubuntu Server for file
sharing and SME Server on VMWare for my e-mail server).

Hopefully if it's quiet enough (or could be made quiet enough with a
couple of massive fans) it'll pass the wife test so I can move it
downstairs to the lounge too.

I experimented with the single core after playing with wifys Acer Aspire One - I was going to use it as a desktop, but I was having issues with my fileserver, so put it in there and it hasn't missed a beat, so I got the dual-core for the desktop. Not actually put the power meter on that yet. The loudest thing is the PSU fan...

Actually, I'll meansure it now ...

.. one reboot later ..

OK, as I type this, running X, dual core+HT mobo, 2GB of Kingston RAM, one old 80GB IDE drive, it's settled at 42 watts. I'm not running any cpu speed reduction stuff on it yet. (Stock 2.6.27 kernel doesn't seem to support it, but I'm sure I'm just missing something obvious)

Runnung a 'make -j' on apache has taken the load up to about 150 and the power up to 47 watts peak - but it's fluctuating. I can get it up to 50 watts by running burnBX and burnMMX.

I'll probably save some 12 watts when I move /home to the server and boot it off flash - although right now the DVD & CD burners I have are not plugged in as the mobo only has a single IDE socket which the main drive is in. (Will get a SATA flash drive)

As a desktop it's great - not a gamers machine, but for what I do - mostly software dev and the "usual" webby stuff, it's excellent.

Gordon
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