September 30, 200916 yr Just re-building my 1st unRAID server. My 1st system was built with bits out of the drawer and re-using parts from other systems. Just really to see whether unRAID was suitable for what I wanted. It worked well but parity check performance was low around 25Mb/s with only four disks in the array. Adding another 4 dropped that to 14MB/s. That equated to five days for a parity check. From my initial system testing I knew I could use a low power CPU, I looked around a decided on a low power sempron CPU. I personally like AMD, most of my systems run AMD. I even bought a 45W sempron LE-1200. Whilst chatting to one of my suppliers, I mentioned low power CPUs and he said he has just the ticket. Dual AMD 1.5Ghz Athlon X2. AMD 3250e. 22W TDP, drops into AM2 socket and uses standard heatsink/fan combo. He also has some 2650e single core 15W TDP CPUs. Brisbane core, based on 65nm AMD processing. Dropped it into the Abit a-s78h I'm testing and started running some tests. Memtest passed OK, MD5 checks all passed ok, parity check ran last night and all passed OK. 45 C under load (streaming 6 MKVs via SMB, running a parity check and copying 4GB media file to each data disk in the system). No video stuttering, clear audio, 30% CPU utilization, 30MB/s read, 6MB/s transmits). 35 C under idle conditions. The 780G is considered a low power chipset. Typically 15W. CPU supports C1E power states, AMD cool and quiet, 1.0V vcore. Given its ability to handle my load test I might consider the AMD 2650e, single 1.6Ghz with a 15w TDP. With that whole system should idle around 40-50W. I think one of my mates has a killawatt I may be able to borrow to confirm power consumption... I'm impressed thus far, parity checking the array at 76MB/s.
September 30, 200916 yr Author I was seeing the following error being reported. Sep 30 02:49:33 Tower kernel: Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = -62505628 ns). A quick google showed it relates to C1E power states, I turned on Software SMI for CIE and enabled AMD Cool n Quiet. Seems like it might of fixed the error. Being a low powered CPU I assume these must be enabled despite the bios setting being disabled. Setting C1E to Hardware C1E caused weird video output (jumping text tlike the vertical sync was unstable and vertical lines accross the top of the monitor) on the console monitor.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.