Power Usage revisited, a case study.

[camus]

Originally Posted by TakeFlight

I've never understood why anybody would want to have their SageTV server go to sleep between recordings. It just makes no sense to me. But, everybody is entitled to their own viewpoints.

I guess I never understood why anyone would want to leave their PC on all the time. Do you leave the lights on at house all day? jk. Seriously though, I could see leaving it on if you have a "true" media server. In my case, my main HTPC in the family room is also my Media server with only 1 client, it may record 1 or 2 shows in the morning, and maybe 1 or 2 at night, some days it records nothing. I just can't see letting it run at idle for 18-20 hours a day. While it is relatively quiet, it is audible if nothing is on it that room, plus the power consumption. I have never missed a recording because the machine didn't wake.

[TakeFlight]

Originally Posted by camus

I guess I never understood why anyone would want to leave their PC on all the time. Do you leave the lights on at house all day? jk. Seriously though, I could see leaving it on if you have a "true" media server. In my case, my main HTPC in the family room is also my Media server with only 1 client, it may record 1 or 2 shows in the morning, and maybe 1 or 2 at night, some days it records nothing. I just can't see letting it run at idle for 18-20 hours a day. While it is relatively quiet, it is audible if nothing is on it that room, plus the power consumption. I have never missed a recording because the machine didn't wake.

Well, in my situation it's easy. My SageTV server is my media server and is my home automation server running HomeSeer. It happens to be part of my security system as well (with HomeSeer controlling that) with video cameras, etc. So, no question it needs to run 24/7. However, up until this past weekend, my SageTV server was my HTPC running in my media room. I still ran it 24/7. I know there are differing opinions on this, but my opinion is that it's less wear on components to just leave them on all the time. The most stress you can put on a component is when you first turn it on. Yes, the hard drives might be a slightly different animal in this regard because they are also mechanical, but hard drives have gotten so reliable, that they are not nearly the concern they used to be. So, I'd much rather have my SageTV server up and running all the time. But as I said, everybody is entitled to their own opinion. Of course, how much you record in a given day might sway you one way or another on this topic. In your case, you don't record that much so it makes more sense. I still would probably leave it on anyway, but that's just me. But, some people have 4, 5, 6+ tuners and are recording many shows every day. In that case, it really makes no sense to me to have it go to sleep between recordings. I'm kind of in the middle. I have 2 analog tuners and 2 digital tuners and on average my SageTV server probably records 10 shows a day. I don't necessarily watch everything it records, I just have it record things I like so that I have a large pool of shows to choose from at any given time.

[Ryokurin]

Yep. the same here. The only thing that may happen every month or so is sometimes you'll get the spinning circle while doing minor things, but I think thats more of a java 1.6 issue than sage. It still records and works fine otherwise, and its time for a reboot because of patch tuesday.

edit: I admit, I used to leave it on, but I lost my roommates, so I'm a power miser now. I'll do anything to save a few dollars on power

[elaw]

Originally Posted by camus

I guess I never understood why anyone would want to leave their PC on all the time.

How about because power management doesn't work?

Not trying to be a wiseguy, but I've spent many 10's of hours trying to get PM to work on my two media PCs and have had no luck with either (and they're fairly different). If I manually put the machine to sleep, it'll always wake to record a program. But I've never been able to get them to automatically suspend reliably. Best I've ever done is by setting "System standby" to 1 minute but that only works ~50% of the time and has some obvious practicality issues.

[elaw]

Originally Posted by jprine01

Curious if anyone has a computer using less then 65watts. (if they can measure)

I can come close! And what'll surprise you is the hardware.

My wife's web server is a dual-667mHz-PIII box with 768 megs of RAM and 4 SCSI drives on a RAID controller and an IDE drive connected to the motherboard.

And the whole thing only draws 70 watts! That's idling, as soon as you start any disk I/O it goes up toward 100.

[jprine01]

Just out of curiosity I checked my MediaMVP with the Kill-A-Watt.
I should of probably left it plugged in a while for a good average but..
3watts while completely powerd off and idle.
<5watts while in menus or playing video.

[wvpolekat]

Let me don my flame proof suit, because I am sure this will draw some fire.....

Judging by the sigs I see on here, there are 2 major factors with power consumption among many people here.

#1- Building something more akin to a gaming box...

Dual Xeons? Come on..... My server is running on an Athlon XP 1700, 2 tuners, comskip, recording ~30 shows a day with 2 clients and my average CPU utilization over the last month is 4%.

#2- Using PCs as clients

Judging by the average wattage use of a PC, the MVP is a sipper. <10 watts vs 6x that for a PC. Unless you are doing HD, anyone with power consumption concerns using a PC for a client is barking up the wrong tree. Ditch the PC and get an MVP. If you still want the PC there for gaming or whatever, that's fine, but for TV watching the MVP should be the first choice for anyone concerned about power usage.

Something else to think about... More watts= more heat. So in the summer each watt you are consuming to run something in an air conditioned space is 1 watt of heat you will have to remove. When I still lived in Houston changing to CF bulbs made the biggest difference in comfort in the summer since I didn't have a light bulb pumping heat into the room while spending money to pump it right back out.

Now, anything PC related that generates heat is in the basement unless I have a need to sit in front of it regularly.

I would bet that a standard def Sage server could even be based on a VIA C3 or similar CPU. That would get the power consumption way down. I/O may be a bottleneck, but based on the I/O usage I see on mine, even ATA133 has lots of room left.

[TakeFlight]

Originally Posted by wvpolekat

#1- Building something more akin to a gaming box...

Dual Xeons? Come on..... My server is running on an Athlon XP 1700, 2 tuners, comskip, recording ~30 shows a day with 2 clients and my average CPU utilization over the last month is 4%.

I do agree with you for the most part. However, I do have to point out that the Athlon XP is far from miserly when it comes to power consumption. In fact, I just replaced an Athlon XP 2100+ system with a Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz system (with two additional hard drives) and the new system is using about the same amount of power according to a Kill A Watt device. However, there definitely is no need for tons of CPU power on a SageTV server UNLESS you are transcoding or using the machine for other purposes other than just SageTV. Even with transcoding it doesn't necessarily have to be anywhere near high end. So, from that standpoint I agree with you.

Originally Posted by wvpolekat

#2- Using PCs as clients

Judging by the average wattage use of a PC, the MVP is a sipper. <10 watts vs 6x that for a PC. Unless you are doing HD

HD is the key for me (and I'm sure many others). I have two MediaMVPs sitting in a closet not being used at this time because they were replaced by SageTV client PCs so that I could watch HD. The MediaMVPs were purchased before I went HD. Although, if I ever got off my ass and ran some more CAT5 to other places in my house I would still use the MVPs on crappy older TVs.

Originally Posted by wvpolekat

Now, anything PC related that generates heat is in the basement unless I have a need to sit in front of it regularly.

I totally agree. That's exactly where my SageTV/HomeSeer server sits along with my cable modem, VOIP router, 2 wireless routers, gig switch, HDHomeRun and other things. They are out of site and out of the way and doing their thing in a nice cool environment. And luckily my basment is not subject to high humidity or moisture.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by wvpolekat

Let me don my flame proof suit, because I am sure this will draw some fire.....

Judging by the sigs I see on here, there are 2 major factors with power consumption among many people here.

#1- Building something more akin to a gaming box...

Dual Xeons? Come on..... My server is running on an Athlon XP 1700, 2 tuners, comskip, recording ~30 shows a day with 2 clients and my average CPU utilization over the last month is 4%.

I also agree also, to a point. But you should really check out the SCPR link I posted, modern PCs/systems (using X2 or C2D chips) are very power efficient, bare bones (as a headless server would be) they pull 50-60W idle.

You can get a lot of horsepower today for not a lot of electricity.

#2- Using PCs as clients

Judging by the average wattage use of a PC, the MVP is a sipper. <10 watts vs 6x that for a PC. Unless you are doing HD, anyone with power consumption concerns using a PC for a client is barking up the wrong tree. Ditch the PC and get an MVP. If you still want the PC there for gaming or whatever, that's fine, but for TV watching the MVP should be the first choice for anyone concerned about power usage.

My HTPC is driving a 110" 2.39:1 720p FP setup, MVP is completely unacceptable for such a setup. When/if the HD Extender is out, I'll get one and re-evaluate my PC client.

Something else to think about... More watts= more heat. So in the summer each watt you are consuming to run something in an air conditioned space is 1 watt of heat you will have to remove. When I still lived in Houston changing to CF bulbs made the biggest difference in comfort in the summer since I didn't have a light bulb pumping heat into the room while spending money to pump it right back out.

They lower your heating bills in the winter though

I would bet that a standard def Sage server could even be based on a VIA C3 or similar CPU. That would get the power consumption way down. I/O may be a bottleneck, but based on the I/O usage I see on mine, even ATA133 has lots of room left.

I'd still like to investigate more, but I think there is some relationship between server horsepower and responsiveness, even of PC clients. After my data collection, I'm more inclined to upgrade my server, well, actually probably upgrade my HTPC and demote it (Athlon 64 3400+) to server duties, the Athlon 64 with CnQ uses less power than an Athlon XP but is much more powerful at the same time.

[RobJ]

Originally Posted by jprine01

Curious if anyone has a computer using less then 65watts.

Originally Posted by elaw

I can come close! And what'll surprise you is the hardware.

My wife's web server is a dual-667mHz-PIII box with 768 megs of RAM and 4 SCSI drives on a RAID controller and an IDE drive connected to the motherboard.

And the whole thing only draws 70 watts! That's idling, as soon as you start any disk I/O it goes up toward 100.

UnRAID Server 4.0
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+(65Watt version) 2.4GHz dual core
BIOSTAR NF4UAM2G Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard
Antec True Power Trio ATX12V 650W Power Supply
A-DATA 1GB (2 x 512MB) DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
SYBA PCI-E X1 2 port SATA II Controller Card
5 hard drives:
2 Seagate 500GB 7200.10 SATA II
2 Samsung 500GB SATA II
1 Seagate 250GB 7200.9 SATA150
MSI GeForce 7100GS 512MB GDDR2 PCI Express x16 fanless - kept in static bag on floor of computer case!

A Kill-A-Watt monitors watts at one second intervals. I currently run the unRAID server headless, no monitor, no video card, no mouse, no keyboard, only a power cable and network cable attached. At bootup, watts spike to near 300 very briefly (could be higher between measurement points), then settles to 130s during unRAID startup, and falls to its usual idling wattage of 101 watts. UnRAID has configurable spin down of the drives, so after one hour all 5 drives spin down, and watts fall to 70. After monitoring the small fluctuations on the Kill-a-Watt, I'd say the true value is about 69.7 watts.

If I access any single spun-down drive, the watts increase by 6, consistently. With all 5 drives up and idling, it increases by 31, from 70 to 101, so you could make a case that any hard drive powered on and idling is using about 6.2 watts. Among the 5 drives, there were significant performance and temperature differences, but no definitive difference in watts used. Sample size is small though, I'll be adding other used drives to the array.

I could make no definitive conclusions from my testing of reading/writing to the drives. It varied widely depending on the operation and/or application doing the reading/writing, plus I could not accurately determine the system load to subtract, how many additional watts the CPU, RAM, bus chipsets, etc need during these operations. An unRAID parity check simultaneously reads all 5 drives, at max speed, uses 143 watts, an increase of 42 watts, but is that 8 more watts per drive and 2 additional watts of system load, or is it 5 more per drive and 17 additional watts used by the system, or... ? Other reading or writing operations caused rather wild fluctuations in the watts measured, from the local and remote caching and buffering, networking, application speed, who knows what was causing the moment-to-moment throttling of the read/write speed.

One interesting measurement: if I play an SD TV recording on a Windows client, a 2GB MPEG, the watts increase by one! Yep, each SD playback stream uses a whole watt! HD recordings would probably use more, but I don't have any HD to test.

If I install the 7100GS video card, I measure 12 additional watts.

[wvpolekat]

Originally Posted by stanger89

My HTPC is driving a 110" 2.39:1 720p FP setup, MVP is completely unacceptable for such a setup. When/if the HD Extender is out, I'll get one and re-evaluate my PC client.

Gee, could that possibly be why I qualified that with "Unless you are doing HD"?

[jprine01]

My MVPs are very laggy in the menus, but I guess its about the same as a tivo or another set top box PVR. Every time I go from a MVP to my client PC I'm like whew this is so much nicer I wish I had a real PC at every TV... So I guess there is one reason not to have MVP's... Although on my case there is no place for a PC to replace my MVP's unless its one of those mac mini's maybe. Hopefully the HD extenders are more responsive..

Nice to see your 5 HD's take the same 30 watts as mine 6-6.5watt per HD is pretty accurate.

[Ryokurin]

Originally Posted by elaw

I can come close! And what'll surprise you is the hardware.

My wife's web server is a dual-667mHz-PIII box with 768 megs of RAM and 4 SCSI drives on a RAID controller and an IDE drive connected to the motherboard.

And the whole thing only draws 70 watts! That's idling, as soon as you start any disk I/O it goes up toward 100.

I'm willing to bet its possible on modern hardware, Use something like a Celeron or a low power Athlon (some are rated for 35w) Really, if all you needed was standard def mpeg-2 you could probably get a C3 or a C7 to definitely be under that.

[jprine01]

My 65watt system is using a Celeron.
Just happend to find this link for AMD new 9watt CPU should be powerful enough for HD?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by jprine01

My MVPs are very laggy in the menus,

Java 6

[tsitalon1]

This thread made me go buy a Kill-a-watt

Haven't tested my Sage server yet, but I did test my Vista machine.

AMD ATHLON XP 3800 X2 DUAL CORE
2GB RAM
ON-BOARD VIDEO
500GB SATA II Perpendicular drive

130 watts while runing idle. .60kwh in 8 hours

This is alot more than I thought it would pull. I will be playing with power management.

[dvd_maniac]

I have a pretty high electric bill and I think my Sage server might be to blame.
It has 7 hard drives and 5 of them are on a 3ware 9500s-8 Raid-5 card.
I found the datasheet on the raid card and it reads:
Power Requirements 8.72W max. on +5 V
250mW max. on +3.3 V
250mW max. on -12V, +12 V not used

But what does that mean in terms of kwh?
Is the raid card a big hog? I don't mind buying a meter to check but I really do not want to start ripping the guts out of my Sage Server. If others here say that the raid card is a hog I might just get a couple of bigger hard drives and use the on-board raid. I have 3 1TB external Maxtor drives and an LTO-2 tape drive to backup all my stuff so I can forgo raid-5 if it will save enough of my Electric bill.

I other question. I have an 85w AMD X2 4400+ and I do ALOT of encoding. When My CPU is going full throttle, does it use a lot of electricity compared to idle? I do not have Cool & Quiet enabled...

[TakeFlight]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

I have a pretty high electric bill and I think my Sage server might be to blame.

I other question. I have an 85w AMD X2 4400+ and I do ALOT of encoding. When My CPU is going full throttle, does it use a lot of electricity compared to idle? I do not have Cool & Quiet enabled...

A RAID card is not going to cause a high power bill. For that matter, a single computer (even with many hard drives) is not going to cause a high power bill. Things that cause high power bills are many (and I mean MANY) incandescent lights left on for VERY long periods of time, big appliances like electric dryers and electric stoves/ovens and then whole house units like AC or heat (if your heat has a blower or is a heat pump). The only way a computer could cause a high power bill would be if you were running MANY computers together.

It seems to me people underestimate the amount of power consumption appliances and whole house systems use over the course of a month if they think a computer (or a RAID card) is a major contributor to their power bill.

The only way a computer (or a RAID card) could be a major contributor to your power bill is if you turned off everything in your house (including heating/cooling, EVERYTHING!) and only ran a single computer. Of course, that would be a very low power bill, but the computer would be to blame for what you did get charged.

BTW, given the stats for your RAID card, it uses less than 10W total.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

I have a pretty high electric bill and I think my Sage server might be to blame.
It has 7 hard drives and 5 of them are on a 3ware 9500s-8 Raid-5 card.
I found the datasheet on the raid card and it reads:
Power Requirements 8.72W max. on +5 V
250mW max. on +3.3 V
250mW max. on -12V, +12 V not used

But what does that mean in terms of kwh?

If I do my math right, 1W = 0.720KWH/30 days. Or to look at it a different way, 1KWH = 1.38W over 30 days.

So that means your RAID card uses ~7KWH/30 days.

Is the raid card a big hog?

Nope.

I don't mind buying a meter to check but I really do not want to start ripping the guts out of my Sage Server.

There's no ripping guts with a Kill-a-Watt, especially if you're on a UPS, in which case you don't even need to take the server down to connect it.

If others here say that the raid card is a hog I might just get a couple of bigger hard drives and use the on-board raid.

RAID arrays are moderate users of energy, but let's put things in perspecitve, your RAID card uses about as much power as 1 HDD.

I have 3 1TB external Maxtor drives and an LTO-2 tape drive to backup all my stuff so I can forgo raid-5 if it will save enough of my Electric bill.

Dropping RAID-5 will save you, at most, maybe 15W, or 10KWH or so. That's probably like $1.

I other question. I have an 85w AMD X2 4400+ and I do ALOT of encoding. When My CPU is going full throttle, does it use a lot of electricity compared to idle? I do not have Cool & Quiet enabled...

You'd have to define "a lot", but yes, it uses more, though without CnQ enabled, it's not as much more as it could. It will still be <85W. Your whole server probably pulls <200W when encoding.

[dvd_maniac]

Thanx everyone, I feel better...

ALOT of encoding is about 10hr/day