While the Western Digital 1TB Green Drives do wonders for operational power consumption, they do very little for start-up power consumption.  Please see the link in my prior post.

 

True.  But the link was to a 2005 article that didn't include the new WD drives.  It is true, however, that the green drives do not have much difference in surge current.

 

Power rating of the PSU is limited by many factors, but the first one you hit above the rated capacity is based on thermal capacity of the most limiting component.  Things get hot and fail or become less reliable.  Power diodes and voltage regulators are like many devices....  they have a temp limit, can work over their limit for short periods, but like it cooler than the limit.  I have seen surge ratings on PSUs, but you are correct, they are not always stated.  But they do exist.  I am very comfortable with a system experiencing a moderate power-on surge above the rated continuous capacity of a well-made PSU with quality components.

 

You mentioned earlier in this post that you were running your unRaid system off an Antec EA380.  Out of curiosity, how many drives are you running?

Right now my unRAID system is 8+1.  It was 12+1 while I was building it and moving stuff around, deleting, and reorganizing, which allowed me to get rid of four 250GB WD drives.  It boots fine with the Antec 380, despite the fact that the power-on surge was well over 400 Watts.

 

Very true and an oversight on my part.  Unfortunately, this only makes the start-up power peak worse.

 

The reason I mentioned the power consumption variables of the mobo and integrated versus non-integrated features, is because if you are building a low-power system, it should be considered.

 

I know at least some of my drives stagger on powerup, 'cause I can hear them   but I don't know which so I don't know which controller.  I'm currently using the onboard SATA controller, one PCI Promise TX4 PATA, and one PATA drive on the onboard PATA ccontroller.  This is the same TX4 from the old Windoz box, and it also staggered, so I'm pretty confident that the Promise TX4 staggers.

 

When I get another 1TB WD drive, I'll be going to the 8-port Supermicro SAT2-MV8 SATA controller, and I'll specifically test it for staggering.

If you're trying to minimize spindle count, as I am, then a very small power supply might suffice. Specifically, I've got a VIA PC2500E board and two WD10EACS drives on the way. The spec sheets say I should see 4-5 watts sleeping and 40 with the whole system running flat out. I have a clamp-on DC ammeter that I plan to use to measure each component's consumption from each power supply rail, and I can compare that to the Kill-a-watt readings to figure out the efficiency of the cheap ATX supply I'll be testing the machine with.

 

If the power consumption is where I think it should be, and I have headroom for a third drive, I'm planning to use a Mini-Box PicoPSU for my unRAID machine. The nice thing about the PicoPSU is that, even with the external 12v supply figured in, the total efficiency is usually well above 80%, frequently above 90%. Again those are marketing and spec-sheet numbers, I'll post with some real-world measurements if I go the PicoPSU route.

Has anyone tried getting unraid to work on the GEODE Processor (motherboard recommendation?)

 

This weekend I embarked on small unRaid system using

 

MSI 915GM Speedster-FA4 Pentium-M Motherboard

Intel Yonah T2700 Core Duo 2.33Ghz 2.33/2M/667

OCZ 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory

Tray-less SATA RAID array cage three SATA in two 5.25 slots

  http://www.caloptic.com/cgi-bin/quikstore.cgi?product=MR325&detail=yes

APEVIA X-QPACK2-BK/500 Black Aluminum Body/ Front Mask MicroATX Desktop Computer Case 500W Power Supply

  http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16811144139

3 500GB SATA Drives (1 Seagate, 2 Maxtor)

 

I know it's small and a bit "over" engineered but I want to run a vmware server on it and rip directly to the machine when needed.

Also it's going to be a backup server for the rest of my network.

I plan to have it be woken up. Trigger jobs on the servers to do the backups, then power off when all the jobs are done.

 

 

In any case, so far it pulls about 90 watts with 3 drives spinning and 50 watts while drives are spun down.

 

 

Thoughts.. Would switching to a celeron save electricity or would CPU speed help as much.

(I do plan to set up a development environment and recompile the kernel to make use of the extra ram and core).

However I may just try with 1GB stick of ram and a celeron processor just to see the data.

(It's cheap enough)

 

I did score one of those 430W earthwatts power supplies so I may try that too.

 

Just curious if someone has tried the GEODE yet or an EPIA.

My main concern is compatibility with the SATA ports and network adapter.

I want an all in one motherboard.

 

One benefit of this mobo was the use of mobile CPU's and embedded video.

I have a DELL monitor that has SVIDEO so I can plug the output to that and not waste a port on my video switch.

 

I certainly had some quirks with this board upon start up.

I had to disable a bunch of things in the bios or else the kernel would OOPS when the E1000 network driver was assigned.

Oh jeeze, now to remember what I tweaked!

 

I have some pics of the build I'll post later.

 

Thoughts?

 

 

 

 

 

Search is your friend:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1186.msg7965#msg7965

 

I booted unRAID on my Geode and it worked.... didn't do anything other than boot it "just-to-see-if-it-would."

 

It did not boot on a Via C3.