15 Mar 2011 zanee   » (Journeyer)

Specification Pepsi Openindiana Build 148 – FAQ

I’m going to try in earnest to keep this post updated with relevant information about Specification Pepsi – Openindiana Build 148 as i’m now calling it.

  1. How much energy does the entire machine use?

    On initial boot with the Samsung Optical SH-223L/BEBS spinning up we hit 95 watts, the system then drops to about 50watts and as it idles out drops to between 47 and 48 watts. While pushing the machine using all 4 drives as stated in the spec, we fluctuate between 50 and 57 watts.
  2. Why the 750w ATX Power supply?

    Based on the above data the 750w would seem to be overkill but in my specific case I have multiple units plugged into the motherboard. If one doesn’t plan on adding more than 4-6 hard drives you could easily get away with a 200-250 watt power supply. I’m going to search around for one and update the original specification.
  3. Do you need to have the optical drive?

    Not necessarily, you could technically remove the optical drive after install of the specification if you wanted to save on initial start up power. However the unit spins up only on start-up and considering it will be rarely if ever used, it’s pretty much a complete non-issue.
  4. No ECC memory, will that be an issue?

    In the original specification I noted the addition of ECC memory. Well, the Intel D5x doesn’t support ECC memory most likely to save as much energy as possible. It also doesn’t support Dual Channel memory, again for the same reason. Not the biggest deal in the world for this machine as it’s primarily used for storage and technically speaking the likelyhood of getting severe degradation or errors are low. Still, it would of been a nice to have. To my knowledge I don’t know of any mini-itx motherboard manufacturers that support ECC memory. At least not yet.
  5. Instead of the D510, why not the D525?

    Well, if we take a quick look at a comparison between the D510 and the D525 we see that we gain a minute speed bump in processing and DDR3 instead of DDR2 and wattage remains unchanged. None of this quite frankly mattered to me at the time as the D510 was roughly $20.00 USD less. None of the stated improvements would significantly speed up the function of archival and storage. This obviously changes if you plan to do compression or encryption with ZFS in which case it may then become useful. In reality though it would make much more sense to apply that extra $20.00 USD to a proper gzip or encryption off-board card.
  6. How much will it cost you to operate this unit?

    I pay roughly 9 cents per kwh off the top of my head. I’ll have to update with exacts next time I check but based on that number we are looking at close to $3.05 USD per month with the machine running at an average of 0.47kw/h or roughly $37.00 USD a year. Not such a horrible price for the machine that backs up my lively hood. Not that bad at all.

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Syndicated 2011-03-15 02:48:39 from Christopher Warner » Advogato

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