Low(er) power server issues [Archive]

stevea

05-17-2009, 11:44 AM

I want to put together a low(er) power soho server system. It will run Linux, act as a router, provide numerous network services and implement encrypted tunnel and disk algorithms. Mobo hardware will minimally include a 1gigabit lan and a 100Mbit wan connection, 4(+) SATA and 1 PATA. 64bit and virtualization support aren't required of the CPU.

One design goal is low power for noise (fan), heat and cost reasons. Since server idle time will be high, the system power at idle is a major factor. The server probably cannot suspend/hibernate on a regular schedule, and a 30 second "wake-up" delay is generally unacceptable for services LDAP authentication. Idling unneeded disks is a decent strategy. It's somewhat difficult to evaluate CPU idle power reqs, as well as bridge & mobo reqs, so I'm looking for experience/advise. Maybe someone knows of a website ... (silentPC hasn't been very active recently IMO).

Starting with the CPU decision ...

The current Intel Atom won't have the performance to keep up with encryption/decryption requirements at speed.

I've never been impressed wthe Celeron/Conroe series, tho' the 35W max power is attractive. Many mobile CPU parts are low power and decent performance, but the chip and mobo pricing usually make these unattractive.

The 45W Athlon X2 and LE parts should work....
Intel 65W "wolfdale" ...
AMD 65W 64 X2's ....

----
I'd prefer to use a passive (large) heatsink on the CPU and use a pair of case 120mm fans for system cooling and I think this should be possible for the 45/65W CPUs.

The ideal mobo would have some minimal low-end on board graphics. I intend to use the system "headless", but most mobos won't boot w/o the VGA destination.

Any thoughts ? Suggestions ?

Hephasteus

05-17-2009, 02:19 PM

LE is good choice but 5050e would probably work a bit better. You can easily cool them. Heat sinks without fans on them being cooled by case fans don't work too well. There's just not much mass flow of air going over them unless you can duct the case fan to within an inch or 2 of the cpu. 4850 and 5050e can be undervolted and declocked slightly to bring it's TPD down to around 20 to 25 watts.

4850e and 5050e are going to be impossible to beat for flexibility. You can declock it devolt it into your power requirement range much easier than you can overclock overvolt atom to meet the requirements. It will beat any mobile chip on processing per watt but is simply too big to use in laptops and nettops.

It'll fight voltage settings but here's pretty good estimates of power usage on a 4850e 5050e

1.6 ghz set at .9 volt wants to use about .93 volts uses about 9 to 11 watts idle and 14 15 full tilt
2.2 ghz set at 1 volt wants to use about 1.05 uses about 18 to 20 idle and 24 to 26 full tilt.
2.4 ghz set at 1.1 volts wants to use about 1.07 volts uses about 20 to 22 idle and 26 to 28 full tilt.

About double the processing power on half the power of anything LE can do because its dual core with hyperthreading. And 65nm high metal gate versus 90 to 65nm normal silicon gate.

A microatx 8200 based board or 780G based board is going to be cheapest. You could make it entirely silent by making some heatpipes out of silver or copper .375 tubing and drilling some holes in the stock cpu heatsink and 8200/780G chip and routing the tubes to some part of the case and bolting them to drive cages or motherboard trays or backside of the case or top side of the case. You'd have to remove heatsinks to remove motherboard etc but the silence may be worth it.
If you got the time and energy go crazy if you don't go easy. Just know that planning on a single 800 rpm 120mm fan and planning on no fans at all is a big jump in effort and any 120mm fan plugged into the fan cpu fan slot even with cool and quiet disabled is going to be deathly silent. My 1500 rpm vantec's that normally run about 1430 usually run about sub 1000 rpms on the cpu fan connector.

curaga

05-18-2009, 09:37 AM

Via cpus might be good for the purpose. Many have the idle power under a watt, plus the integrated RNG, SHA and AES engines are nicely fast (plus they take no cpu away).

Nano would be a premier choice, but if not available, a recent C7 should do too. Of course it depends on if your specific encryption/decryption can be accelerated by the units (linux kernel can use the RNG, loop-aes can use the AES, there are patches for OpenSSL)

stevea

05-19-2009, 08:29 PM

Much thanks Hephesteus - the 5050e is one I had my eye on and it should work.

Tnx too curago. My two experiences w/ Cx/Via chips have been bad. One system (Fedora 6 IIRC) could be crashed by executing certain floating point instructions. IIRC there was an errata on the cpu that the then-kernel didn't address. I doubt the CPU performance alone would be sufficient but with the crypto engine there is a good chance.

I don't mind patching OpenSSL but that addresses ssh & https web browser traffic which isn't heavy, also openvpn which appears to use SSL/TLS. Kerberos crypto for NFSv4 won't be helped. On an initial look, is seems that geode AES may be usable by ecryptfs - which would solve the encrypted FS too.

Certainly a win on the power side. I will examine this further.

[time passes ....]

I see. The AMD Geode LX series has an AES security block well supported by Linux but the CPU is slug-slow.
The Via C7-D looks like a decent fit - 1.5Ghz, and a security engine, But the Via engine support under Linux is shaky I think. Also all the C7 Mobo's for the C7 are from 3rd tier mobo makers but they are dirt-cheap (I feel the need to shower after slumming with the JetWays and BioStars). The best Mobos for C7 have 2x SATA and one IDE so they fail the cut for lack of I/O.

Most interestesting, despite the C7 1.5Ghz/20Watt point the performance seems underwhelming. If you scan http://www.smallnetbuilder.com
You'll find NAS performance comparisons for many NAS boxen. The C7 based Artigo is less than half the NAS performance of an Intel E2160 NAS. The E2160 isn't i ncontention, but according the various benchmarks the E2160 is a good 10-20% slower than the AMD 4850 that Hephasteus suggested, and slower yet that the Athlon 5050e.

If I low-volt & declock a 5050e I'd have plenty of tweak-upgradability, zero issues with compatibility/support, and clearly better performance (encryption offload aside). C7 doesn't look like a win - seems more like a lock-in to mediocre NAS performance with some open questions and patch-work about the security offload.

The idle power of a 5050e is the question I need to answer.

movieman

05-20-2009, 03:14 PM

The idle power of a 5050e is the question I need to answer.

Usefully low, I suspect: I measured the idle power of my two Linux systems at home a while back, and the AMD 5000+ was taking 60W from the wall while the dual-core Atom was taking 50W (peak obviously showed a much greater different at 109W for the 5000+ and 57W for the Atom).

I was surprised by how well the AMD machine did in the comparison, and the 4850e/5050e models should have lower power consumption than that; since it spends most of the time idle but does need decent performance at times I'm probably going to replace the Atom server with a 4580e at some point and reuse the Atom for a simple desktop web-browser/email system.

curaga

05-20-2009, 04:20 PM

Your quest is interesting to follow :) Please post your final results on what you end up with and how it performs

Hephasteus

05-21-2009, 04:25 AM

Ya have to agree with you stevea. The 4850e 5050e are pretty hard monsters to cope with by anyone wanting either silence or cheap power or what have you. I'd like to see via having a better time of things and their true random number generator stuff and cpu security stuff is pretty sweet. They are a bit behind everyone else and hopefully their Nano stuff will be a bigger winner.
But ya intel's don't like you taking their volts away but pretty much every AMD 65nm or smaller dual or quad or triple core you can take away alot of voltage and it won't even notice. I ran numbers against via's pc3 system and using a AMD 5050e won't give you quite the power sipping and the tiny package but it's a whole lot more powerful and flexible.
Geode was just a mistake and waste of time but hopefully they learned some good tech doing it.
AMD top quad comes with extra voltage stock 1.35 but the stupid thing will go from 3.2 stock to 3.7 ghz without touching voltage. They must be making these things able to work without hiccups with crazy powersupplies and voltage problems.

What's crazy with via though is the supply line. All their best stuff goes out to germany and small places in asia nobody has any of the other things. You can pick up an evergreen computer for 150 bucks but they only have their pc2 board and it's their pc3 board that is a really sweet product. And I guess the junk that has via on it they sell in america and UK are just there to make intel look good and them look bad.
If the everest had the pc3500 board in it would be fantastic buy.
http://www.via.com.tw/en/initiatives/empowered/sys-platform_arch.jsp#pc1_reference_design
But if you click on the pc2500 you will get that board in it.

Idle power depends alot on what the system has running for services. But I guarantee you using a 2.5 inch 7200 rpm laptop drive versus a 3.5" desktop drive will have more affect on idle power than anything you can cover with differences between ATOM, via, 5050e etc.

movieman

05-21-2009, 10:36 AM

But I guarantee you using a 2.5 inch 7200 rpm laptop drive versus a 3.5" desktop drive will have more affect on idle power than anything you can cover with differences between ATOM, via, 5050e etc.

It will certainly help, but, if I remember correctly, the 'green' 1TB drive in my Atom server is rated at 2W when idle so there's not a lot of power you can save.

Adarion

05-24-2009, 05:02 AM

I want to put together a low(er) power soho server system... Any thoughts ? Suggestions ?

Just my 2 ct
I dodn't have experience with headless systems yet, since I work (yet) only on x86/amd64 actively.
I don't know it arm and the others have CPUs capable of doing the jobs you want.
What I know is that the 4850e/5050e from AMD is a fine choice, it's cheap, you have a lot of Mainboards to choose from (ASUS M2A-VM ist quite nice and cheap, too) it's quite low power, passively coolable (I did exactly that), and still provides CPU power when you need it.
The other possibility I see is the mentioned VIA with padlock. The padlock part is nice the rest... huh. Well. I don't have a high opionion of it. Okay, I must admit power consumption with the right VIA ones can be really low and of course also passively coolable, but they all lack raw computing power (besides the padlock) and the drivers are often an issue. But then you didn't say you wanted graphics but since this is the main problem with drivers it might still work for you. Oh and sometimes something is broken on these mini ITX boards. In my case the HPET was in an unsuable state.
I don't know about intel but these atoms aren't that great as far as I heard.

If you go for a non x86-arch you would have to find a (meta)distribution that works on the specific arch and you won't have such a lot of packages to choose from. Gentoo e.g. has a package list comparison chart and you clearly see that most packages are x86 > amd64 > ppc and then all the others and embedded ones. On the other hand systems with power uptake less than 5W are possible.

A generally good idea would be either laptop HDD or flash memory built in. A single block of RAM (but large enough to avoid swapping or such things) and on x86 you sometimes have an undevolting option in the BIOS which can save you further watts - but check for stability.

stevea

05-24-2009, 07:26 PM

Hi Adarion,

You can run x86/amd architectures "headless"(meaning no vid display), it's the norm for servers. I've been doing so for years. A few BIOSes will allow you use use the serial port for startup/post messages, and there are a few replacement BIOSes specifically for this purpose. Otherwise the BIOS usually requires a vid card (not a display) in order to boot. Many X86 servers like the IBM X-series have a very low-end video on card on-board b/c of this. This way you only only an attached display for configuration or diagnostics.

I think a few of the higher end ARM and esp PPC CPUs might be capable; the MPC8621D for example. The problem is that I can't find any that have ~4+ SATAs + IDE + 2x enet interfaces. Usually these are built as embedded "one-off" boards for a NAS or a development card and will have at most one PCI slot in addition to some decent on-board peripherals. So for example "Buffalo Systems" might make a nice NAS system with 4 disk interfaces, but there is one enet, no PCI expansion and the amount of memory will be the minimum the vendor needed for a NAD (perhaps 64MB-128MB and soldered-in - NO mem upgrade slots. The peripherals and memory restrictions mean these are useless to me. There is also great difficult mounting these boards in a PC chassis since the form-factor is non-standard. The original chassis won't hold the peripherals I need.

I think you underestimate the Linux offerings. You can get a very complete Debian distribution for an amazing array of CPU architectures. The problem I have is getting a non-x86 system with sufficient power & mem & peripherals to do the job.

======
I'll post more on this later (in a rush at the moment) but I will be using some legacy drives.

The only (very few) laptop drives I have full mttf & life data on suggest these have 2x or 3x the unreliability as a 3.5inch drive. (300k-500k hours vs 750k-1500k hrs). These numbers might not be representative.

I intend to spin-down 2x of drives. This drops the power draw to around 0.8 watt each. These drives will be used for archival backup and only spun-up/mounted during periodic backup. Probably all but 1 (maybe 2) of the other drives will regularly be in "standby" which saves quite a bit even on older drives.

I agree that drive power is an issue, but there aren't many "pretty" alternatives. My intention is to grind-down my oldest drives as the "always spinning" spindles, and use a good backup/RAID policy to prevent loss when the inevitable happens.

The point of my effort is to save money, not to save the hypothetically endangered polar bears at a premium. I estimate I'll pay ~$1/watt-year unless the current regime imposes cap&trade on carbon, in which case the figure might become $1.50/watt-year. If I can save ~25-30 watts continuously that's worth about $125-$150 over a 5 year server lifespan. It's NOT worthwhile for me so spend say $400 dollars in new disks for the privilege of saving $50 on disk power. I already own a lot of fully amortized disks. It's about frugality. ... but that calculation needs to be made.

-S

Hephasteus

05-25-2009, 03:39 AM

Thanks for sharing the hdd data. I still think I will go with one if i make next changes. They are just so quiet and if I heat pipe my motherboard in a custom all in one case i'll probably want the silence. Those 10 dollar IDE CF disk drives I really hope people will create like raided versions of those where you have to plug in like 4 32 gb cards to create your disk. Even with the slow access times if those are raided they would be fairly nice. 100mb/s to 190mb/s.

deanjo

05-25-2009, 08:43 AM

Mainboards to choose from (ASUS M2A-VM ist quite nice and cheap, too)

Sorry but that motherboard is the BIGGEST piece of shit around. Buggy chipset, unstable as hell, slow in disk i/o and really poor nic and really crappy USB. Asus has been trying to fix that board for a long time 19 BIOS updates and counting.

stevea

05-25-2009, 12:39 PM

Sadly I don't see much good data on CPU (not system) idle power.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-penryn-4ghz-air-cooling,1712-13.html
has a nice but little chart. Wikipedia has a nice list of total power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation

I'm estimating that an AMD 5050e would expecd 45W/7w at full/idle.
My old P4/2.6Mhz might be 65W/42W.

Using some performance estimates and actual numbers for part of the server tasks (w/ "sar") I think the CPU (of the class I'm looking at) will see a 4%-6% load. The idle CPU power figure consumption therefore dominates the power consumption. For example if we make the simplifying assumption that the CPU will expend max power 5% of the time and be idle the other 95%, the AMD5050e would average 8.9W, and the P4 ~43.1W. If the power expended by some hypothetical AMD part was 100W/7w then the avg would be 11.6W. So the MAX power increasing radically makes little difference for my server since the duty cycle is so low. My goal is to seek out the lowest avg power that supplies sufficient performance, so the idle power required is the big issue.

Of course the main goal is cost - with a 5yr estimated server lifespan and my decent cost of power I expect that 1 watt of average power saving is worth ~$5.50(minimum) over the life of the server. I can probable save ~34W by using the 5050e in place of an ancient P-4, and this alone justifies the price CPU+MOBO+DRAM (ignoring the time cost of money).

Adarion

05-25-2009, 01:50 PM

I'm estimating that an AMD 5050e would expecd 45W/7w at full/idle.

I can only tell for a whole system with a 4850e (including 3,5" disc, onboard GPU and so on) and it was about 45W idle (disk spinning iirc and CPU @ 2x1000MHz, no undervolting) and both cores compiling and stuff at 75W. It's some time ago I measured that so I could check that again. But I'm to lazy to pull the plug now for the measurement device. :)

I think you underestimate the Linux offerings...
Well, as I said there are some though most distributions keep to x86 and maybe PPC. But of course if you look around you'll find some for the other arches as well. Esp. Gentoo will probably work everywhere like NetBSD (which would also be a choice). Gentoo is also offering cross compiling so you may compile on a big AMD/intel box for a slower ARM/... embedded system.
But yes, it will be hard to find one that can work as a storage controller. I know of the WD something, just a case with a non-x86 and some storage, Linux already into it. (But I don't trust WD on hard disks.)
Well, if you can find at least one board with a PCI/PCIe slot you could buy a controller with lots of IDE or SATA (or mixed?) storage and you should be ok with that. Just need to make sure the Linux kernel driver for the controller will compile/work on your specific arch..
I don't know which kind of throughput you expect on the file server, but 64-128M could be enough if you don't need a big disc cache.

The problem I have is getting a non-x86 system with
sufficient power & mem & peripherals to do the job.
Mhm, well but as you said there are some chips around that can do quite a job at computing. From the Chemnitz Linux Days I know that some people were dealing with extremely low power environment Linux (Prof. Luithardt from Switzerland) and he told me that there are vendors offering complete boards with e.g. ARM-CPU, RAM (slotted or solidly mounted), network, sometimes even GPU, RS232 for serial console or via FireWire iirc. and often with an option for CF or SD Cards as mass storage. I wanted to get myself into that topic, also with headless stuff that works only via serial console but alas since I started working on my chemistry back at university there was a severe lack of time. And I'm a total starter on headless and/or non-x86 machines.

Many X86 servers like the IBM X-series have a very low-end video on card on-board b/c of this. This way you only only an attached display for configuration or diagnostics.
Yep, I saw some. Back at the times it was even just a 80x25 (and others) text adapter. :) Well, but you know that most x86-board Vendors will have a BIOS POST check for some GPU either at ISA, AGP, PCI/PCIe and they would beep and squeak all kinds of error if there is no GPU card. You would have to look closely or use a coreboot capable board.

On the HDDs: if you really want solid stable rugged drives you will have to invest tons of money into SCSI. Still the best and most robust solution. SCSI was built for 24/7 operation - most IDE/SATA are not. I know that Seagate (my preference in HDDs) offers some labeled as 24/7. They publish a lot of specs on their pages so you might want to check the MTBF etc.. Of course these 3,5" suck more energy than a 2,5" but latter are not built for file servers. They're prolly more for laptops, maybe with a high spin up/down count.

deanjo

05-25-2009, 04:47 PM

Yep, I saw some. Back at the times it was even just a 80x25 (and others) text adapter. :) Well, but you know that most x86-board Vendors will have a BIOS POST check for some GPU either at ISA, AGP, PCI/PCIe and they would beep and squeak all kinds of error if there is no GPU card. You would have to look closely or use a coreboot capable board.

I haven't ran across a board in a while that would not boot without a display adapter. Then again almost all boards have a IGP on them nowdays anyways built into the chipset.

Adarion

05-25-2009, 05:36 PM

I haven't ran across a board in a while that would not boot without a display adapter.
Me neither, but I didn't really look our for it. At least on the x86 side. Probably the coreboot can implement a headless boot without breaking. But the IGPs shouldn't suck up too much power for a normal system. But then if one really wants to go down with power usage its even better without any of that. (but less easy to set up)

deanjo

05-25-2009, 06:46 PM

Me neither, but I didn't really look our for it. At least on the x86 side. Probably the coreboot can implement a headless boot without breaking. But the IGPs shouldn't suck up too much power for a normal system. But then if one really wants to go down with power usage its even better without any of that. (but less easy to set up)

Why would you need coreboot? Like I said most boards (if not all within the last 3-4 years and the ones that did were using AGP slots IIRC) don't need any graphics at all to boot. An IGP won't really draw any appreciable power if not being used.

stevea

05-26-2009, 01:36 AM

Thanks for your comments and especially power figures Adarion.

I develop driver/kernel software for embedded systems (Linux & other) of various sorts for a living, so I'm quite familiar wiith the non-x86 issues. The embedded ARM NAS boards mostly use Marvell chipsets that do not meet my needs. Most of the development boards are shockingly expensive ($3000 for the Freescale MPC8641D for example) and even tho' Linux has been ported, it will likely require much driver work to make some off-the-shelf SATA card play with these. There are also more powerful ARM CPUs than the Marvell but these aren't available on any modestly prices boards I'm aware of. Perhaps on a $1500 6U PCI board or a similarly priced VME card. These are not realistic solutions unless some mass-market product contains the features I need.

If you read my initial post you'll see that I an not building a NAS, I'm building a router/server that will maintain a VPN connection, perform DNS forwarding, routing, firewall, and a number of modestly compute intensive apps and especially some performance challenging crypto tasks. These will not fit well in a 128KB DRAM footprint. I think 1GB DRAM should be sufficient and leave some good space for disk and network buffers.

On the HDDs: if you really want solid stable rugged drives you will have to invest tons of money into SCSI. Still the best and most robust solution. SCSI was built for 24/7 operation - most IDE/SATA are not. I know that Seagate (my preference in HDDs) offers some labeled as 24/7. They publish a lot of specs on their pages so you might want to check the MTBF etc.. Of course these 3,5" suck more energy than a 2,5" but latter are not built for file servers. They're prolly more for laptops, maybe with a high spin up/down count.

I am not impressed with SCSI reliability claims ... see these ...
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html

Conclusions from the second (Usenix) paper states, "In our data sets, the replacement rates of SATA disks are not worse than the replacement rates of SCSI or FC disks". Pro'ly once true that SCSI & FC were superior, but today the difference is marginal.

Both papers (my POV) indicate that there are several failure mechanisms not captured in the manufacturers MTTF calculation. So yes use the mfgr data, but expect the failure rate to be higher this. In the Google paper the range of measured failure rates indicate the best disk have ~500k hour MTTF, the worst(defective lot) ~67k hr by measurement.

I've read the data on Seagates Momentus 7200.4 laptop drive (600khr MTTF, and low power - mostly under 2.2W while operating). There are a lot of power-thrifty 3.5" drives, like the Seagate 7200.12 1TB which uses 6.6/5.4/5.0/0.79W during seek/rw/idle/standby (750k hr mttf). I too prefer Seagates and they are very good about providing data on their drives.

The 500GB laptop drive costs as much a good quality 3.5" 1.5TB drive, so *IF* you need the disk space, then 3x laptop drives will consume about the same power as a decent 1.5TB, will cost 3x as much, and the 3x laptop drives have 1/3rd the reliability of a single laptop drive which is already inferior to the 3.5" drive. Laptop drives have little or no power advantage on a "per gigabyte" basis.

So I can appreciate the use of a laptop drive where the primary goal is low power, single drive, and cost and reliability aren't design drivers. That's not my situation. Also I'm not seeking a truly silent system, but I would prefer to offload the cooling to 120mm case fans.

----------
Another approach is the use of a solid state drive. These are currently very pricey, and one 64GB drive will consume ~2W when active, just like a laptop drive. The MTTF is reported at 1500k hours, but the price per gigabyte is currently about 20X that of a 3.5" 1TB rotating drive. These flash based drives have a limited number of write cycles, and their I/O can be very fast. So they might fill a niche for frequently accessed data. Perhaps holding a Linux XIP(execute in place) capable root file system mostly mounted read-only to avoid flash wear-out.

==========

Although I object to lower reliability drives, it must be recognized that even a simple RAID1 improves the reliability dramatically - to the "don't care" point even for crummy drives. One of the papers mentions a bad batch of disks with a 13% AFR (~67k hr MTTF). The other paper suggests that failure of a disk in certain RAID increases the probability of another RAID disk failing by a factor of 39. So a RAID1 of these terrible disks, might still have a combined MTTF of 20 Million hours - far better than any single commercial drive. Of course RAID1 means approximately double the power.

I have concerns about the currently reliability & MTTF of my legacy disks, since some have many hours (years actually) of wear; mostly 160GB to 300GB SATAs. I'm thinking of using the oldest drives in a RAID(non-0) config, and using the remainder for non-RAID backup mostly kept in standby. That way if I lose a RAID drive (most likely case I think) I can rebuild the RAID with a new disk. If a backup drive(s) fail I can reconstruct a current backup from the live copy.

Note there are still single-points-of-failures, your PC might be hit by lightening, so RAID does not replace an offsite backup scheme, but it nearly eliminates the fear of single drive failure data losses.

movieman

05-26-2009, 11:50 AM

Well, if you can find at least one board with a PCI/PCIe slot you could buy a controller with lots of IDE or SATA (or mixed?) storage and you should be ok with that.

I thought about that, but if you care about disk throughput and want to slap on a bunch of drives in a RAID configuration then two modern hard drives can saturate a PCI bus and one modern hard drive can saturate a poorly-implemented PCI bus (getting maybe 60% of theoretical throughput).

stevea

05-30-2009, 10:25 PM

You are right, but OTOH if I have a couple disks (say RAID1) only spun-up daily to perform archival backup ,then I don't care greatly if this is a fair bit slower.

Doesn't solve the fundamental problem - the embedded parts have too few interfaces. Need a minimum of 4X SATA and 2X enet (one GigE, the other at least 100Mbit), and should really have an IDE. I don't see this on embedded card, but it's easy to find a <$100 AMD Mobo with all these and more.

Adarion

06-05-2009, 12:27 PM

Thanks for your comments and especially power figures Adarion.
No problem.
B.t.w. on the HDDs, I don't know about all the other manufracturers but Seagate's 7200.11/12 are doing quite fine on power consumption, esp. the one with only 1 disc (320GB often, maybe even 500). Not as low as a 2,5" but good anyway, nice idle values.
Maybe with the increasing data density they already use less platters on your mentioned 1TB drive.
I have some of these 320/500 and until now they seem to be quite sturdy (like all mine Seagate drives did). (I had a loose power or data cable a few times but no real horror. Unlike with some other models that died from now to now+1minute.)

That's an intersting read.
Well, I found a recently published book (1st press) on embedded linux in German, dunno if it's also transalted to English) but I guess I'll get myself a copy.
What makes me wonder, too, are these pricey boards beyond all reason. But I saw a few offers in Germany, Swiss and maybe Austria and they offered some headless and with GPU boards for... well... more reasonable prices (150-300E maybe, you could probably calculate this 1:1 in US$ since overseas electronic equipment is far cheaper). So there should be boards that are buyable.
Thing is, that only few bear a lot of storage options. Which sucks of course.
Then there was that mentioned external storage solution by WD which is running a Linux on a headless ... ARM? Actink to the outside as NAS or something. Still there is probably only 1 disc attached. (But at least you get em with >1TB if you need it.)
When you look around there are tons of cheap Linux on non-x86 hardware parts around, problem is that most of them are routers and designed to just exactly fit this purpose. So they often only have a storage chip (not even a slotted CF card or something) and no mass storage or USB connectors. Otherwise they sell for 30-80 bucks and should have everything else neccessary. Just the missing storage. :/

>to make some off-the-shelf SATA card play with these.
Aren't all the Kernel-internal drivers working on all arches the kernel is ported to? Maybe only if PCI bus/slots are absolutely uncommon on the specific arch. I would expect (or hope) them to run.

>These are not realistic solutions unless some mass-market
>product contains the features I need.
I fear there won't be a mass market so soon. Look at these mini-ITX invented by VIA. They're still not cheap at all even though the HW is lame when it comes to computing power. I mess with these VIA stuff for some years now and slowly offers are getting better. More stuff to choose from. Still the small hulls for a MiniITX-HTPC are very expensive, like a full big tower.
The only thing is see atm are these already finished black boxes meant as storage solutions where you must file a Harald-Welte-GPL-violations lawsuit until you get any access to the device. And then these things will be limited often to the pure purpose only so you may not have the best conditions for encryption, networking/filtering and so on.
I also wonder when there will be encryption chips like the VIA padlock for insertion onboard or in PCI slots etc. That would be a really nice addition, taking a lot of load off the CPU.

>Laptop drives have little or no power advantage on a "per
>Gigabyte" basis.
*nods* But then it depends how much of a storage you need. For a file server it's of course not enough but for a HTPC which is used for playing music and a DVD from time to time it should be fine.

>Also I'm not seeking a truly silent system, but I would prefer
>to offload the cooling to 120mm case fans.
Scythe (Japanese firm I think)is offering some nice fans, quiet but still getting air in/out. Not the cheapest though and you still have to compare between models since not all of their products will fit perfectly.

>Another approach is the use of a solid state drive.
Nah, as you mentioned they're very expensive and then they suck about the same power all the time (a 2,5" laptop drive in sleep mode sucks less power I read some weeks/moths ago). They may be a fine speedup as a system/bootup drive though when one has the money.

Generally I wonder when the principles of design will turn 180° in terms of power usage. Until now systems where meant/built to be always on, and some things may go to sleep when not needed. But why not start design where the default is being off and only being waked when needed?
Prof. Luithard told me that there is a long way to go, both for HW manufracturers as well as the Linux kernel.

>even a simple RAID1 improves the reliability dramatically
Humm, I always counter this.
The cons:
a) twice the price, but only one time storage
b) twice the power, heat, noise
c) it's only pure HW failure reliability. If a program runs amok, some malware fVcks your system or an ext4 chooses to keep your data round in RAM for 10 hours even though you closed your apps... *cough* well. Then nothing is gained with a Mirror RAID and the defect data or no data is written (or not) nice and synchron to both drives. :)

I don't understand why everybody packs these RAID capable chips on every board.
Furthermore I know some guy with a RAID5 and the 3 discs failed after a few months within some weeks. One by one.
So I came not to trust too much into any RAID system.
Okay, maybe it weren't the best conditions how he used his HDDs, I dunno exactly what he did.

>using the remainder for non-RAID backup
Yes, that's what I do. Only that I have no RAID at all and tons of new, old and even older PATA discs (from 320 GB to 250 MB from the 486). But once they were so cheap and quicker than a CDR(W)/DVDR(W) I use them for backups. And with good handling they should do well many further years.

Well, feel free to tell your experiences if you find a suitable system.

curaga

06-05-2009, 01:42 PM

I also wonder when there will be encryption chips like the VIA padlock for insertion onboard or in PCI slots etc.There are, and were before the Padlock. They have weak points, biggest being the limiting rate of the pci bus.
Some of the first ones didn't even support DMA/bus-mastering, so they could actually increase the cpu load.

stevea

06-06-2009, 10:06 AM

Seagate is my preference too, but ...

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/desktop/Barracuda%207200.11/100452348g.pdf
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/desktop/Barracuda%207200.12/100529369b.pdf
The 7200.11 uses 11.16/7.96 Watt operating/idle
The 7200.12 uses 6.57/5.0 Watt operating/idle
In standby they are 0.99 & 0.79 W respectively.
BTW most vendors do not publish such complete specs.

So the 7200.12 is low power but the 7200.11 is not.

Also there have been numerous firmware problems reported against the 7200.11. The 7200.12 has a clean record. You'd be well advised to read storagereview.com and also look for customer reviews befor buying any disk.
====

Yes there are less expensive development boards, but usually with fewer features and more difficult to support features, I've used products like these before.
http://www.emacinc.com/servers/embeddedservers.htm
but you will find that if these are built to any standard, like PC104, that the price will far exceed a PC mobo. If it's a "one off" board it will not have the features and expandability I need. Yes there are often(usually) still problems integrating PCI parts onto MIPS, ARM or PPC architectures. You'd be surprised at some of the headaches. To start with all x86 PCs integrate PCI into the support chips, bbut most embedded parts use any of a number of offchip parts. The utility & performance of the PCI is quite dependent on the hw & sw implementation.

If I had the luxury of selecting the CPU and chipset and the board features this could be a good solution. Finding an appropriate board offered a la carte isn't likely.
=====

Your complaint against RAID1 is like complaining that milk is white.
>a) twice the price, but only one time storage
>b) twice the power, heat, noise
Yes double the power and cost buys you e' = 1-(1-e)^2 the error rate. That is why we consider RAID. Your typical ~1.5% failures/year translates to 0.0225% failures/year in RAID1. The 750Khr mttf would become 23M hr mttf.((note you will have double the component failure rate, but only a microscopic chance of data loss)). It costs double for this boon.

>c) it's only pure HW failure reliability. If a program runs amok, ...
It is not news that RAID *IS NOT* a backup. A RAID creates reliable storage only. No one should think otherwise.

Yes, one of the disk reliability papers notes that if one disk in a RAID fails there is a 39 times greater probability of failure. This is still a major decrease in data loss probability. They think this may be due to problem systems - bad power or frequent power losses.

To save power perhap I should create a RAID1 for an archival backup disk pair instead. These disk will be in standby (very low power) except during backup, perhaps daily. Then periodic offsite backups from there. This means that the local archival backup is stored with great reliability. I can afford to lose anything else. The backup pair will consume very low average power due to the low duty cycle.

Also consider the real price. 2 1T seagate 7200.12's in a fully active RAID1 cost $180 capital and consume 10.32W (10% active time). At my current rate for 5yr 24x7 operation that's an additional $53.25 for power (a little more for added cooling). So I can operate a 1TB RAID1 for 5yrs at ~$225 - that's quite a bit cheaper than a non-RAID 1TB across 2 -500GB disks from 18 months ago.
======

I'm not a fan of crypto hardware generally either. Several times there have been implementation bugs, or a once secure crypto becomes no-longer safe. You consume power constantly for an intermittent task. I might feel differently if there was a extremely low power elliptical curve crypto at a low price ... but software seems cheaper in the long run.

It is true that I am rejecting some low-end processors, even the intel Atom based on performance. Yes the crypto task is one major reason, but not the only one. If you read smallnetbuilder website (link given before) you will see that many NAS boxes have low performance despite adequate disks and GigE networks. It appears that the basic I/O performance, perhaps interrupt handling is a limiting factor. I know there is a significant differnet in GigE performance in Linux based on the specific driver/chipset. I wish there was a good analysis of what this bottleneck is.

curaga

06-06-2009, 11:16 AM

Beyond the normal chipset differences, with higher cost "server" ethernet chips being orders faster, the better class also supports DMA offloading.

Adarion

06-06-2009, 01:02 PM

Well the VIA boards with padlock suck up few power for an x86 so if the implemented (hardware supported) algorithm is fine for you then it could be the best solution since the padlock should do very fine on encryption while the VIA C7 CPUs are capable of normal tasks while sucking up few Watts but not good for more intensive computing.
Still needs comparison of the different vendors/boards and they're not all great.
If you dislike the HW crypto chips then the AMD 4850e/5050e should be the best, reliable and still cheap solution on today's market.
Power supplies are still an issue, since most normal PC ones tend to be available in horrible dimensions of 450 and far above which no sensible box will ever use but these micro PSUs are rare and expensive. I personally go with some 350/400 ones with 80+/85+ rating. And there was a test in Germany's probably best allround computer mag (c't by heise press) some time ago which showed the efficiencies under low, medium and high load. So I took their results as a base for my decisions. And my PSUs give quite a good picture in efficiency even on low load.

Of course you could wait some time until something better arrives or the non-x86-embedded ones get better in terms of storage and expansability but I made the experience that you will wait far longer than you expected and wanted and you still don't have your machine.
There will always be some sour grape in the bunch of them.

On the Seagates: I was referring to the 320GB 7200.11 model (1 disc spinning) which should still be low on energy consumption 8lower than the average 7200.11 series and most earlier series). Otherwise I just put a reiser3.6 on a 500GB 7200.12 today for this one shall become my main storage operating drive. Sure, these 7200.12 are better on power usage below the line. But so they are supposed to do since these are the newer models and finally vendors (besides GPU vendors... :/ ) go for the energy efficiency.
But it's awesome to see such a lot of specs published. I mean that's truly something to make up a decision.

stevea

06-24-2009, 10:13 AM

To Curaga - *ALL* GigE chips use DMA and nearly all offload checksumming and some I P& multicast subscribing too. It's been two decades since I've seem a LANCE design where the CPU passes the enet data.

Well the VIA boards with padlock suck up few power for an x86 so if the implemented (hardware supported) algorithm is fine for you then it could be the best solution since

I'm not completely satisfied with hardware crypto, since the crypto required may change over time. Also these low-end CPUs do not perform well in NAS applications (see smallnetbuilder.com for comparisons). Maybe a better VIA mobo would help, but they seem unavailable here.

I agree that waiting for a great embedded NAS board may be an intolerable wait.

Power supplies are still an issue, since most normal PC ones tend to be available in horrible dimensions of 450 and far above

I completely agree. Who needs these 850W PS ??? Most PC PS operate most efficiently around 65-85% of stated capacity, and most systems have an initial power draw that is the maximum draw. So the goal is to choose the minimum sufficient PS capacity to get past startup. Of course a little headroom for upgrades is desirable

I recently purchased a 'kill-a-watt' power meter and applied this to two systems. My current server (3x disks, 2 in standby, 2.66Ghz P4HT 65W TPD, 1 GB DRAM), has an idle consumption around 66W, and at CPU load ~112W, then about 4 extra watts if I hit the disk hard. I expected this system would have idled over 100W so this was a shock. So my estimate is that the idle CPU (no speedstep or hibernate) uses only around 20-25W. The load CPU power is obviously limited around 65WTPD. So I don't believe that switching to the AMD part will offer much idle power saving, but will offer a lot more saving at load. Since my current system power is surprisingly low, I will implement the full functionality on this system as-is and then measure the average power - and only then make a decision to replace the mobo&cpu.

The other surprise is that my workstation system (3x disks in a RAID0, 2.66Ghz E6700 Core2Duo, 6GM DRAM) uses ~132W at idle and ~210W at full load, peaking around 240W at startup. I could easily use a 300W PS on this heavy-duty system.

On the Seagates: I was referring to the 320GB 7200.11 model (1 disc spinning)

Yes these run about 8/5.0 Watt at active/idle, but I have fears about the 7200.11 firmware problems and would prefer the 7200.12 which are still lower power.

deanjo

06-24-2009, 10:22 AM

Yes these run about 8/5.0 Watt at active/idle, but I have fears about the 7200.11 firmware problems and would prefer the 7200.12 which are still lower power.

I would stay away from the 7200.12's as well. I've personally had a couple of 1.5 TB drives 7200.12's that died (bad sectors) within a period of 48 hours of being used bought from two different suppliers. I was asking my local supplier about them as well and I guess the RMA rate on them is so high that they are going to drop the seagate line all together.

gururise

07-01-2009, 02:25 PM

What exactly are you going to be doing with your server? That will determine whether or not you need a 5050e. While the low power parts from AMD tied with a descent IGP motherboard (780g) are excellent parts, your still probably looking at a total system idle of between 45 - 65 watts (depending on the efficiency of your power supply).

Have you looked at the BeagleBoard (http://beagleboard.org/)? Its a fanless single board computer based on the Arm Cortex-A8 core. Costs $149, idles at 1 watt (5 watts at max CPU) and is probably about as fast as an Atom based computer. If it has enough power for your needs, you may consider it, as it is silent (passively cooled). You can run Ubuntu, OpenEmbedded or Android on it. Has a DSP core, people are watching 1080p video on it.

movieman

07-02-2009, 01:51 PM

Its a fanless single board computer based on the Arm Cortex-A8 core. Costs $149, idles at 1 watt (5 watts at max CPU) and is probably about as fast as an Atom based computer.

In my experience of ARM embedded systems I doubt a 600MHz ARM and attached DSP is as fast as a dual-core Ion system. Certainly if you want CPU performance the ARM is going to struggle to keep up with a dual-core, quad-thread x86 running nearly three times as fast.

I did look at the Beagle Board at one stage, but from what I remember it doesn't enough I/O to make a viable server.

movieman

07-02-2009, 02:43 PM

Yeah, it doesn't appear to have any ATA or LAN interface, which isn't exactly good news for a server :).

stevea

07-07-2009, 03:34 PM

I would stay away from the 7200.12's as well. I've personally had a couple of 1.5 TB drives 7200.12's that died (bad sectors) within a period of 48 hours of being used bought from two different suppliers. I was asking my local supplier about them as well and I guess the RMA rate on them is so high that they are going to drop the seagate line all together.

Deanjo,

There is no 7200.12 with 1.5TB size and never was. Some websites speculate Seagate may release one, but currently the 1.5TB Seagates are the 7200.11 (firmware problems) or 5900.12 (5900rpm, low power). You have misidentified your troubled product, and you have now misinformed & confused others. You should be more careful & accurate when you badmouth a product.

It's silly to drop Seagate b/c of one troubled product like the 7200.11. If you look at storagereview.com you will clearly see that every disk manufacturer WD, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Maxtor have had "klinker" product families. When it becomes a pattern then it might make sense, but that is not the case for Seagate. WD is IMO worse, and Hitachi has had more spectacular disk-family failures.

Also important to me is that the 7200.11 fiasco was due to firmware and not a mechanical issue. It appears that Seagate shipped the original 7200.11s with a firmware problem that could cause permanent failure. The first updated firmware had an equally evil bug. Reports indicate the 3rd firmware set for this family is fine, but I have no direct experience. I'd rather just avoid that line and get the lower power and generally higher performance 7200.12s

It's also the reason you should do some homework before buying any drive. The customer reviews of newegg or the forums of storagereview would have allowed you to easily avoid your bad experience.

-S

deanjo

07-07-2009, 04:06 PM

Deanjo,

There is no 7200.12 with 1.5TB size and never was. Some websites speculate Seagate may release one, but currently the 1.5TB Seagates are the 7200.11 (firmware problems) or 5900.12 (5900rpm, low power). You have misidentified your troubled product, and you have now misinformed & confused others. You should be more careful & accurate when you badmouth a product.

It's silly to drop Seagate b/c of one troubled product like the 7200.11. If you look at storagereview.com you will clearly see that every disk manufacturer WD, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Maxtor have had "klinker" product families. When it becomes a pattern then it might make sense, but that is not the case for Seagate. WD is IMO worse, and Hitachi has had more spectacular disk-family failures.

Also important to me is that the 7200.11 fiasco was due to firmware and not a mechanical issue. It appears that Seagate shipped the original 7200.11s with a firmware problem that could cause permanent failure. The first updated firmware had an equally evil bug. Reports indicate the 3rd firmware set for this family is fine, but I have no direct experience. I'd rather just avoid that line and get the lower power and generally higher performance 7200.12s

It's also the reason you should do some homework before buying any drive. The customer reviews of newegg or the forums of storagereview would have allowed you to easily avoid your bad experience.

-S

Right looking back at the receipts the 7200.12 that died in 48 hours were 1TB's. They were replacing the "fixed" 1.5TB - 7200.11's. as well as a bunch of 500GB 7200.11's.

stevea

07-07-2009, 04:11 PM

What exactly are you going to be doing with your server? That will determine whether or not you need a 5050e.

I described that in the top of post#1 and along the way.

While the low power parts from AMD tied with a descent IGP motherboard (780g) are excellent parts, your still probably looking at a total system idle of between 45 - 65 watts (depending on the efficiency of your power supply).
Agreed,

Have you looked at the BeagleBoard (http://beagleboard.org/)? Its a fanless single board computer based on the Arm Cortex-A8 core. Costs $149, idles at 1 watt (5 watts at max CPU) and is probably about as fast as an Atom based computer.

I have seen it. I use another OMAP3 processor at work, we ported a BSD style OS ported to it. It is a sweet little embedded CPU, but it doesn't come close to an Intel Atom330 (perhaps half the performance). The Beagle doesn't have the interfaces needed, not even close. I have a NAS at home w/ a 500Mhz Marvell ARM using SATA & GigE and the CPU can't keep up. The OMAP is clearly a bit faster, but still will fall far short.

Has a DSP core, people are watching 1080p video on it.
TI (the cpu mfgr) makes the OMAP for music/vid handheld use, so this is what the architecture does well.

TI has an OMAP4 family of ARM Cortex-A9 parts announced that go at least to 1Ghz, but I haven't seen enough details.

I agree that there are probably are some <10Watt CPUs out there that can do the job, but they either cost a lot or else are configured (like the beagleboard) w/o sufficient peripherals.

It's a shame. I can imagine a lot of uses for say an OMAP3 on stackable PC104+ form factor to you could made a decent low power system - totally customized. The typical cost is a deal-killer tho'.

stevea

07-07-2009, 07:58 PM

Right looking back at the receipts the 7200.12 that died in 48 hours were 1TB's. They were replacing the "fixed" 1.5TB - 7200.11's. as well as a bunch of 500GB 7200.11's.

You didn't correctly ID the drives you report you returned.
You didn't even know they were 1TBs and not 1.5TBs.

No one believes that Seagate (you mentioned the RMAs) replaces their 1GB 7200.12 with a 1.5TB 7200.11 - that not a policy any mfgr uses on RMAs. They certainly replace with the same model if it's still shipping and commonly refuse to change models on RMAs.

Somehow your credibility on the matter has gone missing, and your story doesn't pass the sniff test.

Care to post the web page for the drives you RMA'ed ? They send you a link. It's about the only evidence I'd accept for your obviously distorted comments.

stevea

07-29-2009, 08:49 AM

This topic has heated up again recenly b/c
/The vid card fans on both old P4 systems have started making rude noises
/The N.bridge fan on my P4 server has started acting flakey
/I' jonesin' for a system build.

So I was just about convinced to buy the 5050e, except it's an older technology, no hyperchannel and getting hard to find the part, then I came a this ...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/athlon64-power,2259-7.htmlcross So the system idle power for their Intel E7200 and E8500 systems bracket the 5050e system power. The intel dual core parts outperforms the 5050e in cpu performance per watt when it is loaded.
The E7200 clearly beats the 5050e, and very probably true for the E8500 too.

Problem is the E7200 is hard to find, perhaps de-clocking an e7400 gets you to a similar place. Then again there are the E4xxx and E6300 which probably use more power (65nm vs 45nm). So maybe a low-end E7xxx or E8xxx would be a best-fit here.

FWIW some recent test systems at Smallnetbuilder lead me to think an Atom330 could probably handle the workload, but finding such a board with enough SATA/PATA interfaces is impossible.

deanjo

07-29-2009, 11:07 AM

You didn't correctly ID the drives you report you returned.
You didn't even know they were 1TBs and not 1.5TBs.

No one believes that Seagate (you mentioned the RMAs) replaces their 1GB 7200.12 with a 1.5TB 7200.11 - that not a policy any mfgr uses on RMAs. They certainly replace with the same model if it's still shipping and commonly refuse to change models on RMAs.

Somehow your credibility on the matter has gone missing, and your story doesn't pass the sniff test.

Care to post the web page for the drives you RMA'ed ? They send you a link. It's about the only evidence I'd accept for your obviously distorted comments.

Within the return period of the drives Seagate tells you to return to place of purchase for quick exchange. Hell even maximumPC when reviewing Seagates new NAS solution that uses the 7200.11 1.5 TB experienced a drive failure within the first few hours of use.

http://fixunix.com/storage/505151-seagate-7200-11-high-failure-rate.html

stevea

07-29-2009, 03:48 PM

Within the return period of the drives Seagate tells you to return to place of purchase for quick exchange. Hell even maximumPC when reviewing Seagates new NAS solution that uses the 7200.11 1.5 TB experienced a drive failure within the first few hours of use.

http://fixunix.com/storage/505151-seagate-7200-11-high-failure-rate.html

Yes, I completely agree. The 7200.11 w/ the 1st & 2nd revision firmware were terrible. The current 3rd rev *seems* to have solved the problem. This has nothing (apparently) to do w/ the drive size, all the 7200.11 initially had a firmware problems.

What I don't agree w/ is your comment that your 1.5TB 7200.12's didn't work. There was no such disk ever built. Further the largest 7200.12 at 1TB seems to have a very good track record (except that writes are a little slower than I hoped). That doesn't mean that there aren't infant deaths.

deanjo

07-29-2009, 05:54 PM

Yes, I completely agree. The 7200.11 w/ the 1st & 2nd revision firmware were terrible. The current 3rd rev *seems* to have solved the problem. This has nothing (apparently) to do w/ the drive size, all the 7200.11 initially had a firmware problems.

What I don't agree w/ is your comment that your 1.5TB 7200.12's didn't work. There was no such disk ever built. Further the largest 7200.12 at 1TB seems to have a very good track record (except that writes are a little slower than I hoped). That doesn't mean that there aren't infant deaths.

And I corrected the statement:

Right looking back at the receipts the 7200.12 that died in 48 hours were 1TB's. They were replacing the "fixed" 1.5TB - 7200.11's. as well as a bunch of 500GB 7200.11's.The 1.5's were the latest version after the "fix" was introduced for the 7200.11 1.5's. Trying the 7200.12 1TB's made no difference in reliability. The 500's also included the newest "fixed" firmware. Again these were not "drives" not showing up after power down. These were ever increaseing bad sector count and "head hammering to death" issues. I might also add that many NAS solutions and raid cards do not support the seagate drives (7200.11's especially noted) in their solutions just for this very reason. Even Seagate does not recommend using these drives in a raid setup other then a simple mirror. They will be the first to tell you to look at their enterprise series for anything but the simplest of raid setups.

christina2009

08-11-2009, 03:50 AM