Reliability and Low power/power saving

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trif

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I'm looking to recycle or build a box to run FreeNAS which will probably be left on all the time,

According to what I've read I need 2.5ghz+ on 2 cores to get decent windows file transfers, I have an old gaming rig with an E8400 which is a bit of a power hog but would be better with a diff graphis card etc,

Is it possible to underclock a CPU that old? would this save power? or are there significantly better power saving options built into a 1150 socket board such that it'd be worth the initial cost?

The idea of this box is to make use of a range of hard disks spread around PCs and draws to make a decent ammout of storage space without buying new drives, as such I do not want to be spending a massive ammount of money on a rig to put them in, but I realise 60 watts for a year =~ £80 so some investment may be worth it.

This is also where the reliability question comes in, is there much difference between say £40 and £80 motherboards when it coems to reliability?
 
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Outlander_04

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Your E8400 has a TDP of 65 Watts . The latest generation of Haswell dual cores have a TDP of 57 watts .
The E8400 would need a graphcs card too , but something like a Radeon 6450 will idle at 9 watts

Yes , by all means underclock the E8400 . Most BIOSes should let you get to about 60% of the chips rated speed . Once you have underclocked then lower the voltage till it becomes unstable , and then add a touch more . I would try at around 1 volt to begin with probably

If you get a MB with any of the intel chipsets there should be no difference in reliability . But watch for the number of SATA ports for hard drives , and watch that you get a DDR3 board . DDR2 is expensive if you can find it
 
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jwk3

jwk3

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Take a look at HP microservers, they're basically a combination of a 4 bay NAS chassis and an "x86" laptop CPU (can do x64 OSes too!) I bought a used N36L for £150 with a 1TB HDD and 8GB RAM and it runs at about 40W with 2 HDDs in, this is measured from a multimeter and is power drawn from the socket. what are you using to measure your current gaming PC? 60 Watts sounds very low for an older PC with a dedicated GPU and multiple hard drives.
 
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trif

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jwk3 - sorry for the confusion over the 60 watts, I meant I know I can save £80 by shaving 60watts off whatever I use, current system uses probably about 200watts idle, but that'd come down with reduced fans, small grapics etc (using one of those power monitoring plugs to test all this)

I have an old AMD system (athlon 3500+) which only uses about 90watts idle but it doesn't have many Sata ports and I dont know if the CPU would be up to the task!

I've seen the Microservers with the cashback offers etc, I was worried the really low price would mean some components were really low quality?

Are PCIe/PCI add in SATA cards a way around a lack of onboard SATA ports?
http://www.ebuyer.com/205769-startech-com-2-port-sata-6-gbps-pci-express-sata-controller-card-pexsat32
http://www.ebuyer.com/123967-startech-4-port-pci-serial-ata-sata-storage-controller-raid-0-1-pcisata4r1

P.S. thanks for the clarification on motherboards Outlander, I'd been worrying about it for a while and it'd been pushing up the cost of my builds! :)
 
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jwk3

jwk3

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Those cards should work fine in a microserver. there are 4 bays in the chassis with one top bay for a sata DVD drive, which you can substitute for a 3.5 inch adapter, I've even seen some 4x 2.5 inch to 5.75inch adapters if you really wanted to go that dense. the DVD drive slot only works in IDE mode/speed though, so with factory BIOS is limited to 150MB/s. I'd recommend it for a quiet, low powered NAS. I wouldn't expect you to run anything stressful on it at speed but for a file server it's a great buy.

How many drives do you have?
 
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trif

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Hi JWK3, sorry, i'm not sure where the last 2 weeks have gone!

Probably about 5 I'd think, as I have a few towers around I may just look for a similar laptop type motherboard/CPU/PSU comp, though that looks like the cheapest bundle! But yea, that looks like exactly the kind of thing I'm after.

Anyway what I've also been worrying about:is that the data I store on this device (and I'm thinking of basically all "my" data, so my PCs are OS and installed products only) is that it isn't backed up anywhere else, what's the best option for backing up something like FreeNAS? just mirroring it to another different storage system? (I know it has fault tolerance built in with the right file system/raid, but not fault tolerant to accidental deletion/virus(ransomeware etc)
 
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jwk3

jwk3

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it's always a great idea to have what we call in the industry an "offsite" backup, which is something that is physically in a separate location so that in the case of fire/flood/theft etc the data has an intact version somewhere. It's also recommended that this stays offline/disconnected, but it may not be feasible for some situations. businesses use a regular rotation of modern tapes (we're talking TB capacity tapes here) that most of the tapes sit on a shelf away from the main computer/site/nas.

Before I moved my primary data-set to the cloud I did this:
I have my documents backed up to a USB hard drive that sits in my garden shed (furthest point away from my house I can safely get) and it only comes inside and connected when I do my monthly manual backup.
 
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trif

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Yea, we do that at work rotating removable HDDs at different intervals, I've got a shed here with power and network so was just thinking about putting something in there,

However with the planned capacity of the FreeNAS in my house it'll likely end up larger than a single USB disk, I was thinking I have enough other, smaller HDDs around I could use the E8400 as a second host with a boat load of disks, it'd only powered on for a day or two a month while an archive is made then powered down again? Do you think FreeNAS again would be good for that? or should I go for a different solution (though I dont know what would simultaniously go wrong with two different FreeNAS installs?)
 
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jwk3

jwk3

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a shed with power and network sounds great. you could even see if your E8400 PC supports wake on lan and see if the power draw is feasible in sleep mode. I've used nas4free rather than freenas myself but try any options you like out without proper data (create some random test files)
 
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