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About LinkBacksOriginally Posted by Salazaar
Yes please! Always good to hear about other people's projects, problems and solutions!
Yes please! Always good to hear about other people's projects, problems and solutions!
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My broadband speed - 750 Meganibbles/minute
I've settled on using Debian for my NAS as it gives me more room to experiment with other servers, DNS and Postfix for example, and I've yet to test it myself but apparently Linux is much more efficient at Samba transfers than BSD which FreeNAS is based on. FreeNAS has the advantage of being very easy to set up but TBH once you know what you're doing, setting up a Samba server on Debian isn't hard either, I did get a bit stuck myself as I ended up with read-only shares but I found this guide incredibly useful, and for anyone new to Linux or more specifically CLI then have a look at this guide or at least the first few pages which walk you through getting the system up and running - the others go through configuring services which you probably won't need or want. In fact that site covers most popular distros so even if you chose Fedora or Ubuntu or something there will probably still be a guide (although the search function could be a little better considering how many articles they have).
@Salazaar: Try Linux to see if you get a speed increase, from what I've read the difference in throughput can be considerable. Here's one article I read: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/n...owall=&start=5
Sorry for the lack of updates (I meant to mention this a few days ago TBH) but I'm getting the components for my NAS for my birthday which is next week so I'll post back with more info then, after I've set it up.
Last edited by watercooled; 24-05-2010 at 01:01 PM.
I have next to no experience with Linux bar the occasional tryout of Ubuntu which puts me off a little bit.
Plus, since I've only got a 100mb/s router at the moment (and no budget to upgrade, my entire project has been done on a near zero budget) it doesn't look like switching up to Debian, or whatever, would actually make any peceivable difference.
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Yeah with 100mbps you'll probably get wire speed with either.
I'm still planning to install Debian to a flash drive so I can safely spin down the HDD and prevent the OS from spinning it up every time it needs to access something, can anyone think of anything I've missed - the plan is to have no swap and mount /tmp in a ramdisk by adding "tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0" to fstab. Obviously the main challenge with booting from a flash drive is avoiding lots of writes which could wear out the flash memory fairly quickly.
Just got some more RDRAM, so the rig stands at the moment:
P4 single core 1.8Ghz, 256mb RDRAM, 40Gb HDD, 100mb/s ethernet - free
Extra 256mb RDRAM - £5
PCI to SATA I card - £5
FreeNAS - free
Coming soon:
1.5 to 2Tb Ecogreen F3 - Birthday present
Possible second drive the same at my own expense - £70-90
And then I should be all set...
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Sounds good, where are you booting the OS from?
Get one of those watt meter thingies and see how much juice it needs. You may find it's cheaper to get a new system entirely over 18 months.
"In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."
The 40Gb drive, unless I can get hold of a cheap IDE to SD/CF adaptor, and a cheap SD/CF card.
Dunno about that... Standard Dell ATX PSU (300w? not sure, haven't pulled it to check) running a P4 and a couple of drives vs £300+ for a new system. You really think it'll make that much difference?
Last edited by Salazaar; 26-05-2010 at 08:56 AM.
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Electricity isn't that expensive. It'd take years to make that money back.
At 10 p per kwh 150 watts 24/7 is around £130 per year. If the replacement idles at 50 watts it'll only cost around £44 per year. The OS is free so it's only hardware that needs buying. Build it yourself and I think you can build a NAS box for £200 or less.
That's why I say get a meter thingy. It might save it's cost over 18 months. It might not but until you have it's power consumption, you can't judge.
"In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."
That's assuming there's a 100w difference with whatever replacement I could get. The TDP on a P4 is just less than 50w and other than the efficiency of a slightly newer PSU not a lot of the other components would change all that much.
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True, but to re-post one of my favourite graphics:
That's 155W at idle for an i7 930 @ 4GHz and two 5870s in Crossfire - so I suspect that your estimate of a 100W saving by switching to a newer machine is probably a bit optimistic.
Tricky one. /var contains a lot of log entries, so that would be a candidate for the hard drive - but then you may find that it is never inactive long enough to spin down - and if you look at the specs of some drives, there are are sometimes lifetime limits on the number of spin ups and spin downs, so while the spun down device may consume less power,frequent spin ups may actually onsume more - and add to the wear and tear on the drive, more than leaving it running.
Oh yes - one other thing. If you are planning to run a mailserver, that complicates things a bit. Depending on your distro and the default postfix settings (if you use postfix) yiu may find that the mailbox(es) are located in /var - especially if you use virtual mailhosts (saves users from having to have a shell account on the box) and they may see a lot of activity - either filling up (IMAP) or write and delete cycles (POP) which would either prevent a hard drive from spinning down, or adding to the wear on a flash drive. Postfix itself is also a prodigious logger! (in /var/log)
One note of caustion - I don't know how significant wear will be - cetainly a flash drive in (say) a windows based laptop will probably get the same or greatewr use than a carefully designed NAS. But flash drives are still relativlely new, and haven't really been around long enough )IMHO) for those results to be known - but then I am not really an early adopter of technology - at least not when something important or irreplaceable (like my data) is at stake.
Oh yes - one other thing - by default you may find that mailboxes are kept in /var (check your distro and the way postfix - if that is what you use - is set up) and if yoiu are running IMAP, the mail folders can grow quite large and almost by definition will ave a number of read writes - so is not really a candidate for a flash drive, but would certainly prevent a hard drive from spinning down. Postfix does quite a lot of logging too - in /var/log
On the other hand, leaving /var on the flash drive is addng to the write load of that drive and the logs will grow with time. You can disable some logging, but that loses an audit trail (which may not matter to you) or you can use logrotate to overwrite the logs at (say) 4 weekly intervals, r when they reach a certain size, but that adds to the wear load on the drive.
Whether those factors are significant in the overall scheme of things I can't say. However I'm still not convinced that using a flash drive in something like a NAS, which by definition will probably be running 24x7 or at least only boot up once a day, is really worth while - certainly not from a speed point of view - maybe from a power consumption aspect - although it would be interesting to see what the payback period is for the increased cost of the drive against the energy saving.
Last edited by peterb; 26-05-2010 at 08:29 PM.
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Been helped or just 'Like' a post? Use the Thanks button!
My broadband speed - 750 Meganibbles/minute
A few more very good points there, I was planning on doing it mainly so it could spin down since it would be idle most of the time but considering what you said it's probably not worth it. On the other hand I do have a new 120GB HDD for my 360 so I could make use of the old 20GB one as a boot drive but I'm a little concerned about the custom firmware on there.
Last edited by watercooled; 27-05-2010 at 04:33 PM.
It wasn't an estimate. I was using that as an example as to why it's worth measuring. You don't know what your kit is using until you measure it or research it. I don't think there's a lot of info out there about power consumption of old machines. I wasn't suggesting that an old P4 uses 150w at idle because I have absolutely no clue how much one would use - it could be 20w, it could be 150w and Salazaar might not know either so I offered a suggestion.
"In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship."
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