Re: [gentoo-user] Rearranging hard drives and data.

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

David Haller wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Sat, 19 Dec 2020, Dale wrote:
>> A friend donated a older PC to me the other day.  It's a fairly nice rig
>> despite its age.  Some specs for those interested but may not matter in
>> the end.  TL;DR, skip to next paragraph.  It's a Dell Inspiron 546.  AMD
>> 9750 quad core CPU running at 2.4GHz.  It currently has 4GBs but
> Meh. I'm running an Athlon II X2 250, 65W TDP, i.e. same CPU family
> (0x10/16), running at 3.0 GHz with 4GiB DDR3 RAM ... After (again)
> over 10 years, I'd like to upgrade again a bit, Ryzen 5000 4-8core
> w/32GiB RAM like ;)
>
> [..]
>> The power supply was replaced a few years ago.  I may buy a new one that
>> is a little bit larger. It has a 300 watt now, a 400 watt would give
>> some breathing room for start up power for the extra drives.  I haven't
>> measured the wattage it pulls now.  May do that later. 
> Beware: I use a lot of disks and I tried running it with then 8 (or 9? 
> or 10? Lots!) HDDs with a 500W (or even 550W) PSU. System wouldn't
> reliably boot up. Replaced with a 650W PSU and it's running since
> (which is, those 10+ years now :) Currently I have a SSD and 7 HDDs
> (and 2 DVD[1]) ;)
>
> Typical spinning rust drives are (or at least were) specced to take up
> to about 30W while spinning up, ~10-12W-ish on access, ~5-7W-ish while
> idle. For me, that then was ~240-300W alone for all the drives at
> power-on. Too much obviously for the 500W PSU along with all the rest
> of the box also starting ;)
>
> I've got a nice Seasonic PSU from Corsair (TX650 v2) (the v1 was some
> other stuff), only drawback is that it has gotten a bit clogged up
> with dust and gotten loud and there's no easy way to clean it out (at
> least without taking it apart) *sigh*...

That's something to keep in mind.  I know start up is when drives put a
load on a power supply.  I might add, right at the time the power supply
is trying to get its stuff in gear.  For my main system, I think I have
a 600 watt, maybe 650.  I've got several drives in it tho.  According to
the UPS, it only has a 190 watt load and that includes the puter,
monitor and some other odds and ends.  Still, at start up, that power
supply needs to be able to handle that surge and at the worst time it
can have it at that.  A 300 watt power supply with that number of drives
could lead to problems if it would boot at all.


>> I'm thinking of making a storage system out of it.  I think it is
>> referred to as a NFS.
> Nope. NFS is "Network File System". You mean "NAS" = "Network Attached
> Storage" ;)

I thought that wasn't right.  Later on, I figured it out.  It was just
one letter but it was a big difference.  :/


>> It should be plenty fast enough to move data around.  Only downside,
>> not many spaces for hard drives.
> Also, that Phenom X6 w/ 125W TDP is plenty powerhungry, even at idle
> (ISTR 50W-ish, while modern stuff can take only 20-10W for the system,
> aside from the HDDs in both cases).

That's one reason I was thinking about those Raspberry thingys.  I've
read some of the new ones have more features and more processing power. 
Keep in mind, I'll only be playing videos from it or saving videos to it
or making backups.  Of course, with the upcoming fiber connected
internet, saving videos can take up some bandwidth.  It's rated at
200MBs/sec.  I doubt it will be quite that speed but still, SATA isn't
that fast either.  ;-)  One thing, I want to be able to expand which is
why I want to build instead of buy.  The recent Dell is a start at least. 


>> I see only two spaces for hard drives with one already taken.  There
>> is a open area that I could add a drive cage, I think.  May can fit
>> two or three hard drives in that.  There's also a 5 1/4 space too. 
>> Another downside tho, I'm thinking of going to SAS drives.  If I can
>> afford that, it will be a more dependable setup.  Of course, that
>> means I have to add card(s) for the controller(s).  It doesn't have a
>> lot of expansion slots but may be enough. Mobo is only SATA.
>>
>> Another option, find another case.  If I recall correctly tho, some
>> puter makers don't use standard layouts for the mobo screw holes. 
>> Anyone know if Dell is a standard ATX or some other screw hole pattern? 
> No idea, but I'd go for a different case. And probably, depending on
> budget vs. power-consumption (cost) for a different CPU+MoBo+RAM,
> something like a AMD Ryzen 3 3200G or maybe a x86 Celeron/Pentium/i3...
>
> HTH,
> -dnh
>
> [1] too lazy even to unplug the older one
>

I need to boot it up, let it sit for 30 minutes or so, try to catch it
at idle, and see how much it pulls.  Of course, it may do better with
Linux.  Windoze can be bloated at times.  :-p

Thanks for the info.

Dale

:-)  :-)