I recently purchased a Celeron 430 processor so I decided to test against the E3200 in my unRAID server. This test was conducted with all of my hard drives spun down and with no extensions running. At idle with the Celeron 430 the system consumed 87 watts according to my Kill A Watt. The with the E3200 installed the system consumed 89 watts.

 

Usually the E3300 (the E3200 is hard to find) costs about $10 more than the 430, I would assume idle power for the E3300 would be very similar to that of the E3200. The E3300 is about 3 time more powerful than the 430 according to PassMark. The bottom line is that you pay very little penalty in energy consumption and initial purchase cost for an E3x00 over the 430. If you anticipate running any extensions, it is worth considering over the 430.

 

BTW, my system consumes so much power at idle because I have 18 hard disks, two SATA cards and 6 fans.

Awesome!  Many of us have been waiting for such a comparison.  It is great to finally see the hard data.  Thanks!

Does unRAID make use of a second core?

 

Chris

I recently purchased a Celeron 430 processor so I decided to test against the E3200 in my unRAID server. This test was conducted with all of my hard drives spun down and with no extensions running. At idle with the Celeron 430 the system consumed 87 watts according to my Kill A Watt. The with the E3200 installed the system consumed 89 watts.

 

Usually the E3300 (the E3200 is hard to find) costs about $10 more than the 430, I would assume idle power for the E3300 would very similar to that of the E3200. The E3300 is about 3 time more powerful than the 430 according to PassMark. The bottom line is that you pay very little penalty in energy consumption and initial purchase cost for an E3x00 over the 430. If you anticipate running any extensions, it is worth considering over the 430.

 

BTW, my system consumes so much power at idle because I have 18 hard disks, two SATA cards and 6 fans.

 

The Celeron 430 can often be had for much less.  I bought my Celeron 430 on ebay for $21.  I bought my e3300 new for $50. 

Does unRAID make use of a second core?

 

The 2nd core is irrelevant when it comes to unRAID performance.  Doesn't matter if it uses it or not since the bottleneck is the speed of the hard drives and the bandwidth available to the drive controllers.

 

However, it could make a big difference to 3rd party software added to the unRAID server performing audio/video transcoding and other CPU-intensive tasks.

I've turned off the second core in my Athlon, to no detrimental effect (and a few watts lower power draw)

The interesting point I discovered a while back was there was very little measurable savings in power at idle between a Celeron-L 440 (35wTDP) and a Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz 4M shared L2 (65wTDP).

I was pretty disappointed.

 

I think the savings comes when you do CPU intensive tasks and max out the CPU.

I never did that test, but it would be an interesting one to perform.

 

Perhaps some long md5sum or par2 job would show the difference.

 

The Celeron 430 can often be had for much less.  I bought my Celeron 430 on ebay for $21.  I bought my e3300 new for $50. 

 

SuperBiiz has OEM new Celeron 450 for $29.17 after $5 off coupon AUTUMN5. S/H and tax extra

 

http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=CELE-450&title=Intel-Celeron-450-2-2GHz-800MHz-512K-LGA775-CPU-OEM

The 2nd core is irrelevant when it comes to unRAID performance.  Doesn't matter if it uses it or not since the bottleneck is the speed of the hard drives and the bandwidth available to the drive controllers.

 

Any system is only as fast as its slowest link

 

However, it could make a big difference to 3rd party software added to the unRAID server performing audio/video transcoding and other CPU-intensive tasks.

 

For myself, given that nowadays hardware component cost is not that high, i will rather have a dedicated unRAID machine instead of running 3rd party software on same machine that might create problems,if those software crash then unRAID goes down with them and parity check will need to kick in after recover. Not to mention unRAID is a simplified version of Unix that sometimes i found it is troublesome to install 3rd party software

 

For myself, given that nowadays hardware component cost is not that high, i will rather have a dedicated unRAID machine instead of running 3rd party software on same machine that might create problems,if those software crash then unRAID goes down with them and parity check will need to kick in after recover. Not to mention unRAID is a simplified version of Unix that sometimes i found it is troublesome to install 3rd party software

 

It's handy/efficient to run some things on the unRAID machine.  I run PyTivo so I can get material on my Tivo without having to run it through another computer.  No point in having my ~200 watt gaming rig running just to get a movie on my Tivo when unRAID is already running.  There are a number of scenarios where it just plain makes sense to process material directly on the unRAID server and pipe it to the destination without having to involve another computer.

For myself, given that nowadays hardware component cost is not that high, i will rather have a dedicated unRAID machine instead of running 3rd party software on same machine that might create problems,if those software crash then unRAID goes down with them and parity check will need to kick in after recover. Not to mention unRAID is a simplified version of Unix that sometimes i found it is troublesome to install 3rd party software

 

It's handy/efficient to run some things on the unRAID machine.  I run PyTivo so I can get material on my Tivo without having to run it through another computer.  No point in having my ~200 watt gaming rig running just to get a movie on my Tivo when unRAID is already running.  There are a number of scenarios where it just plain makes sense to process material directly on the unRAID server and pipe it to the destination without having to involve another computer.

 

Agreed. If I'm paying the electric for the machine, might as well gain the technical knowledge and use it.

I shutdown a number of other machines after I migrated to unRAID.

For myself, given that nowadays hardware component cost is not that high, i will rather have a dedicated unRAID machine instead of running 3rd party software on same machine that might create problems,if those software crash then unRAID goes down with them and parity check will need to kick in after recover. Not to mention unRAID is a simplified version of Unix that sometimes i found it is troublesome to install 3rd party software

 

It's handy/efficient to run some things on the unRAID machine. I run PyTivo so I can get material on my Tivo without having to run it through another computer.  No point in having my ~200 watt gaming rig running just to get a movie on my Tivo when unRAID is already running.  There are a number of scenarios where it just plain makes sense to process material directly on the unRAID server and pipe it to the destination without having to involve another computer.

 

To me, i have my own HTPC all video/movie playback/TV recording.....etc are done at this HTPC, if i have need to install 3rd parity software i will do it on HTPC instead of on unRAID. unRAID to me is just a storage box, data from unRAID to HTPC for processing.

 

As long as any individual feels comfortable in dealing with those configuration/installation/troubleshooting in Linux, It has no harm to leverage on unRAID.

For myself, given that nowadays hardware component cost is not that high, i will rather have a dedicated unRAID machine instead of running 3rd party software on same machine that might create problems,if those software crash then unRAID goes down with them and parity check will need to kick in after recover. Not to mention unRAID is a simplified version of Unix that sometimes i found it is troublesome to install 3rd party software

 

It's handy/efficient to run some things on the unRAID machine. I run PyTivo so I can get material on my Tivo without having to run it through another computer.  No point in having my ~200 watt gaming rig running just to get a movie on my Tivo when unRAID is already running.  There are a number of scenarios where it just plain makes sense to process material directly on the unRAID server and pipe it to the destination without having to involve another computer.

 

To me, i have my own HTPC all video/movie playback/TV recording.....etc are done at this HTPC, if i have need to install 3rd parity software i will do it on HTPC instead of on unRAID. unRAID to me is just a storage box, data from unRAID to HTPC for processing.

 

As long as any individual feels comfortable in dealing with those configuration/installation/troubleshooting in Linux, It has no harm to leverage on unRAID.

 

I'm on the same road.....

 

To me, i have my own HTPC all video/movie playback/TV recording.....etc are done at this HTPC, if i have need to install 3rd parity software i will do it on HTPC instead of on unRAID. unRAID to me is just a storage box, data from unRAID to HTPC for processing.

 

As long as any individual feels comfortable in dealing with those configuration/installation/troubleshooting in Linux, It has no harm to leverage on unRAID.

 

I'm on the same road.....

 

 

Last time i checked Tivo box is nothing but Linux inside as well.  , Linux for embedded system is popular now.

Tivo has its own advantages however for me, i bet many as well, all i need in TV is just DVR functions that as long as i can watch live TV and do TV recording base on date/time, program serial, as well as TV guide that is enough meanwhile i also would like to use same box for watching DVD/BD and video in many different formats and maybe do video streaming from Netflix/YouTube and later maybe Internet TV. It is hardly, if not impossible, to find an off-the-shelf device can fulfill all of these requirements.

 

Those vendors have long been dreaming about having an all-in-one god-box as the center of home entertainment.