Re: Living in NGL: was: [gentoo-user] NAS and replacing with larger drives

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 4:53 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>> It took some digging around but I found out it is a AMD Phenom 9750 quad
>> core.
> You might want to hook a Kill-a-watt to that and see how much power it
> uses.  Those older AMD processors were really inefficient.
>
> One thing I've come to appreciate with anything that runs 24x7 is to
> consider the energy bill to run things.  That's why the bulk of my
> storage is running on ARM SBCs.  Those things use almost no power when
> idle, while even a modern amd64 system will often use more at idle
> than an ARM will at full load.
>
> Most of the newer CPUs are MUCH better in performance per watt as
> well.  A server that uses just 50W 24x7 costs about $65/yr (and I have
> pretty cheap electricity due to a 1yr contract - odds are it costs
> quite a bit more for most of this list).  That's a fairly significant
> amount of money so it can pay to optimize things, especially if you
> replace what was a power-hungry performance CPU from 10 years ago with
> a lower-end CPU from today that probably has double the performance
> for 10% of the power draw.  Obviously if you want bleeding edge the
> electricity bill won't cover the up-front costs, but lower end CPUs
> are very cost-effective and efficient compared to really old systems
> that people tend to use for these kinds of projects.
>


My UPS has a power meter thing on it which is pretty close.  It shows a
little over 100 watts for rig and monitor to when running.  Given it is
winter time here, I don't mind the extra heat.  It's either the puter or
a heater.  Given the forecast, I'm considering a emerge -e world pretty
soon.  lol  This NAS box won't run 24/7 tho.  I'll run it when I update
backups then shut it down and maybe even move it to a out building. 
Once I build a Raspberry thingy, I may have one as a 24/7 NAS box and
take some load off my main rig.  That I would like to have more
efficiency with.  That's for later tho.  First, I want to build a small
one that will fit in my fire safe.  Of course, I still want a larger
safe so that maybe I can have a 6 bay NAS box.  I wish I could find a
commercial or bank type safe that is used.  If it isn't to heavy. 

I still remember my old AMD 2500+ single core rig.  That thing pulled
over 400 watts idle.  If I was compiling a lot and all the fans were
running plus hard drives were busy, it would pull even more, close to
500 watts or something.  It's been a while but I remember winters were
nice but summers made the A/C run a good bit longer.  Thing is, my
current rig is much faster, likely 10 times faster, and pulls less than
200 watts even if at full power plus I have a LOT more hard drives.  It
goes to show, you can't measure computer power by what it pulls from the
wall.  :-)

If I like these Raspberry things, may make a media box out of one.  I'd
like to have a remote tho.  ;-)

Dale

:-)  :-)