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Gordon Henderson wrote: > 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.. > I presume though with a big (12cm) fan or two it would be possible to remove that small northbridge fan, either that or get a copper replacement. > 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.. > Well it's not just file serving that I do, I'm also running VMWare Server on there and a couple of virtual machines. It's really slow at the moment but it works, I figured with two cores and HT the Atom would speed things up a bit. > 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. At the moment I'm on 10/100. I'm mulling over upgrading to GB ethernet. I currently have a 24-port 10/100 switch in the loft which is overkill, I know I could get away with something smaller. > 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 can't afford £££'s at the moment, that's why the Atom 330 looked attractive. > 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. > In the future I'm hoping to build a PC for in the car (geeky I know but it's something I've wanted to do for ages). I was thinking of a VIA board for that. >> 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 am at the moment, I'm going to force myself to live with much less space. I've got to have a fair whack of space for some DV videos I've got to edit but I know I don't need 750GB on my desktop. > 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!!! > Yep, that is quite high. >> 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 > Great, well it sounds like it'll do the job for a server anyway. Now if I can get a small enough and quiet enough case (but not a MiniITX case as I can't afford one of them) then I might just be able to get away with keeping it in the lounge. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html