Low wattage SageTV media server

[neilbradley]

I thought I'd share my SageTV media server configuration with everyone. I have two R5000-HDs, running SageTV server, with 9 1.5TB HDs. The machine is sitting in my garage, so video playback or noise was not a concern.

I have measured the wattage pull with a Kill-A-Watt. Here's the
pertinent info:

* Coolermaster RS-600 80+ supply:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817171036

* Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813121359

* 2GB of memory:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820134192

* 8GB parallel SSD:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820208315

* Areca ARC-1120 8 port PCI-X RAID controller:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...reca%20arc1120

* 9 1.5TB Seagate hard disks:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148337

* 3 Powered SATA drive cages (each with an 80mm fan) - the 4SA:

http://www.addonics.com/products/rai...e4rcs35nsa.asp

2 Case fans of unknown type. Includes the crappy chipset fan that comes with the D945GCLF2.

One hard disk is connected to the motherboard SATA port and runs all the
time since it's spooling video from my two capture cards (R5000-HD). The
remaining 8 drives are connected to the Areca RAID controller and are set to
spin down after 10 minutes of inactivity. The system is running XP Pro.

Wattage was measured with a Kill-A-Watt:

Powerup wattage : 310 (settles after 20 seconds)
OS up, array spinning, capture occurring: 131
OS up, array stopped, capture occurring : 70

For those interested, if I disconnect everything except for the motherboard and SSD, it consumes 21 watts. Hope you all find this helpful!

[rtengvad]

Thanks for the watt info.

For a low power setup I can recommend Seasonic S12II PSU. I believe it even beats your Coolermaster in efficiency.

check out

http://www.80plus.org/

for more info.

And WDs Green power disks are very energy efficient as well 0,9-4-7 watt (1 TB) if I remember correct. If you can live without comskip there is no reason to invest in a power hungry CPU either. A VIA C7 eg. would do just fine.

Rasmus

[Spartan]

What do you use the SSD for?

[neilbradley]

Originally Posted by rtengvad

Thanks for the watt info.

For a low power setup I can recommend Seasonic S12II PSU. I believe it even beats your Coolermaster in efficiency.

check out

http://www.80plus.org/

for more info.

And WDs Green power disks are very energy efficient as well 0,9-4-7 watt (1 TB) if I remember correct. If you can live without comskip there is no reason to invest in a power hungry CPU either. A VIA C7 eg. would do just fine.

Thanks for the note on the Seasonic supply. Does it have a single 12 volt rail? Switching supplies typically are considerably more efficient when loaded >50%.

The Western Digital "Green" drives are more greenwashing than any appreciable savings. Drive spin down is far more important in saving power than the 2-3 measly watts the "green" drives save. In order to get a 9TB usable array, I would've had to buy 11 of those 1TB "green" drives, which would've gotten spun down anyway. When the drives are not spinning (which in my case is >20 hours a day), they all consume the same amount of power regardless of manufacturer. The other option would be to use 6 of the 2TB drives, but that would've cost $1800 vs. $1161.

There's nothing special about the WD "Green" drives, other than spinning at 5400RPMs instead of 7200RPMs, and they only save 2-3 watts each over a 7200RPM drive when spinning, but nothing when the drives are idle. Putting it another way, each of the WD 1.5TB drives would've cost me $10 more each, so $90 difference. That means I'd save about 10.5 cents in 9.259 days. It would take me 7936 days (21.7 years) at my usage rate to make that money back, so not a good financial call. To make it back with the 2TB drives vs. 1.5TB drives, it would've taken me longer than 100 years to make it back.

The moral of the story is, just because it says "Green" on the drives doesn't mean they save any appreciable power.

The D945CGLF2 is not "power hungry" as you assert (and it's also not the CPU consuming most of the power on the board - it's the chipset). A dual hyperthreaded 1.6Ghz CPU with 2GB of memory using 21 watts is not appreciable, and it does outperform the 2Ghz C7 considerably. I also would never put the C7 on the same level as a 330, either, in terms of performance. I've owned several C7 motherboards, one of which I tried in this system (the Jetway J7F4K1G5DS) and it could not keep up with the two R5000HD streams. Don't know where the problem was, but the D945GCLF2 works without a hitch. I kept getting "pushing it" readings from the R5000HDs.

This system replaced a Q6600 server, which was pulling over 300 watts at idle. Yikes.

[neilbradley]

Originally Posted by Spartan

What do you use the SSD for?

The OS. Disabled swap and indexing. It boots up nice & fast! It'd be better if I used a SATA drive with better performance, but for the task at hand it works nicely.

[sic0048]

That is low powered - especially with all those drives. I assume it is simply a file server (ie just storing files including those created by the R5000s).

That is certainly a lot of storage space! If you are only using it for recorded shows, you could probably have around 250 complete seasons worth of shows.

[Lucas]

Neil,

nice set-up. I set-up something similar without RAID though.

On drive spin-down and the associated spin-up I found that SageTV and the HD200 sometimes flip-over while waiting for a file from a drive which was spun down and takes its time to spin-up.

How's you experience with that?

[blueroom]

I use that Intel Atom 330 mainboard for a gateway and file server 45W and she sleeps at night with wakeup on alarm (ClarkConnect gateway software). I'm building a Sage HTPC AMD 5050E, M3A78-T, Hauppauge 1800 and small 80G SATA boot. I plan to capture directly to the server HD (for H.264 conversion Apple TV, etc).
Not sure how well it'll work but there's the fun.

[david1234]

Originally Posted by neilbradley

A dual hyperthreaded 1.6Ghz CPU with 2GB of memory using 21 watts is not appreciable, and it does outperform the 2Ghz C7 considerably. I also would never put the C7 on the same level as a 330, either, in terms of performance.

The atoms are just sweet procs- I've been very impressed with their performance! I picked up a netbook with a 220 (or whatever the single core atom is) for my wife, and it absolutely blows away my P4-2.4Ghz workstation.

Seems like it's nearly the perfect server proc, if you don't need to do any really heavy processing. Although, with the hyperthreading, I'll bet it could run comskip without impacting the system too badly- might not be incredibly fast, but not terribly slow.

[neilbradley]

Originally Posted by Lucas

Neil,

On drive spin-down and the associated spin-up I found that SageTV and the HD200 sometimes flip-over while waiting for a file from a drive which was spun down and takes its time to spin-up.

How's you experience with that?

I'm running two R5000-HDs, so that single motherboard controlled 1.5TB hard drive spins all the time since it seems to be constantly recording. So in direct answer to your question, I don't have any experience with it. I suspect the only thing I'd miss is the beginning of some early morning infomercials. ;-)

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by neilbradley

I'm running two R5000-HDs, so that single motherboard controlled 1.5TB hard drive spins all the time since it seems to be constantly recording. So in direct answer to your question, I don't have any experience with it. I suspect the only thing I'd miss is the beginning of some early morning infomercials. ;-)

I was referring to your video library which presumably resides on your raid array. In my experience when trying to play a dvd rip or mkv file from my Video library, the delay associated with the drive spin-up causes an error in SageTV.

[rtengvad]

Originally Posted by neilbradley

Does it have a single 12 volt rail? Switching supplies typically are considerably more efficient when loaded >50%.

I don't know actually. My system consumes 50-100% running, so I was looking for at PSU that has a high efficiency not only at loads >50%

Originally Posted by neilbradley

The Western Digital "Green" drives are more greenwashing than any appreciable savings.

You might be right. I haven't calculated the return of investment ratio. Where I live we pay ca 0.4$ / kWh so 3-5 W/drive adds up. I don't record much but my system is the center of media in the house so the drives are spinning more that 4 hours a day. It is surprising to me that for a multi multi TB systems like yours the array is spinning less than that. More storage, more activity I would expect.

Finally don't forget the ”warm glow” effect knowing that your system is as efficient as possible

Originally Posted by neilbradley

The D945CGLF2 is not "power hungry" as you assert (and it's also not the CPU consuming most of the power on the board - it's the chipset).

You are 100% right and my remark was general and not meant for your system. The early Atom based chipsets though had quite a high standby consumption. Don't know about that today.

Interesting what you write about the c7. I was thinking of building my next setup around that. Know I will reconsider.

Thanks

Rasmus

[sandor]

eh, i just pay an extra $10 a month to PECO so that they buy "my electricity" from a local wind producer. the $30 or so i would save in electricity usage each year is far too little savings to make up for the time spent sourcing the lowest usage parts.


someday ill have a solar array on the roof, and disconnect from the urban grid

[neilbradley]

Originally Posted by Lucas

I was referring to your video library which presumably resides on your raid array. In my experience when trying to play a dvd rip or mkv file from my Video library, the delay associated with the drive spin-up causes an error in SageTV.

Oh - I get it. I'm still useless as far as answers go, as I use PowerDVD 8 to play back my DVDs.

As an aside, I just tried it with an MKV and had no trouble (spinning circle for a bit longer than usual). I can see the RAID card type having an effect on how long things take to come up, too, so your mileage may vary.

[neilbradley]

Originally Posted by rtengvad

You might be right. I haven't calculated the return of investment ratio. Where I live we pay ca 0.4$ / kWh so 3-5 W/drive adds up. I don't record much but my system is the center of media in the house so the drives are spinning more that 4 hours a day. It is surprising to me that for a multi multi TB systems like yours the array is spinning less than that. More storage, more activity I would expect.

It depends upon if it's being accessed. Since it's RAID 6, any operation is going to get spread across several drives. Under a full ~50MB/sec upload to those drives, it went from 130 watts of usage to 134, so nothing appreciable. That's about like I'd expect. Rather than one big stream of operations to a single drive, it's a stream of operations to a bunch of drives. The utilization is spread out.

Also, if you increase the power rate from $0.105/Kwh to $0.4/Kwh, it'll still take longer than 5 years to recoup your investment on a "Green" drive. However if your drives are spinning more than 4 hours a day, you may lower a recoup from 5 years to 4 years. ;-) But it won't be appreciable enough to be worthwhile.

The problem is, most people don't do any homework on what they'd save. They hear the word "Green" or "low power" and immediately buy it based on that.

Originally Posted by rtengvad

Finally don't forget the ”warm glow” effect knowing that your system is as efficient as possible

Heh. Far be it for me to be smug about energy usage. I was running 12 500GB drives with a quad core Q6600 system that was pulling 400 watts continuous. I think I calculated out something like 1.8 years of time to recoup the investment.

Originally Posted by rtengvad

You are 100% right and my remark was general and not meant for your system. The early Atom based chipsets though had quite a high standby consumption. Don't know about that today.

Uhm... well, the only "chipset" for the Atom is the D945, and that system in standby power is 1-2 watts, so I don't know how it could be considered "high". The motherboard and SSD, sitting at XP, only consume 21 watts, and at that point it's much better to start looking around one's home in regards to lights and HVAC.

Originally Posted by rtengvad

Interesting what you write about the c7. I was thinking of building my next setup around that. Know I will reconsider.
Rasmus

Just be careful. A 1.6Ghz C7 != 1.6Ghz Atom in terms of performance. It's considerably less - BUT it is lower pwoer as well, and it may work for your needs. It just didn't for mine.

--Neil

[neilbradley]

Originally Posted by sandor

eh, i just pay an extra $10 a month to PECO so that they buy "my electricity" from a local wind producer. the $30 or so i would save in electricity usage each year is far too little savings to make up for the time spent sourcing the lowest usage parts.

someday ill have a solar array on the roof, and disconnect from the urban grid

You're totally correct, sir. I was going from a barn burning 300+ watt system to the low usage 67-70 watts, so the savings was appreciable.

However, you drive the point home - one needs to evaluate what they'd save in their configuration. There is no "one size fits all" situation in terms of saving money on power and/or heat.

[rtengvad]

Originally Posted by neilbradley

The problem is, most people don't do any homework on what they'd save. They hear the word "Green" or "low power" and immediately buy it based on that.--Neil

I believe most people only are going for the cheap deals and are not even considering running cost. So I would argue that it is the other way around. However running cost should be incalculated and that will for sure make some green alternative look more attractive. Others not. You have got your selfs a good deal with those Seagate disks. For me the fact that they don't specify the wattage means a no go. Its a principle for me so I'll stick with WD. A bit of search on the web and you can find good deals for the green alternative as well (however it might not beat your Seagates).

I guess you might consume around 4 watt extra per drive in running mode (again I don't know about Seagate but thats the difference between the green and the non-green WDs I have). Times that by 9 and you equivalent to a small light bulb heating up system when running. You'll need extra cooling and have more noise.

Originally Posted by neilbradley

Uhm... well, the only "chipset" for the Atom is the D945, and that system in standby power is 1-2 watts, so I don't know how it could be considered "high".

I've seen a few references in the past. This one for the i945 eg.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-...iew-30931.html

Good to hear that might have changed

Originally Posted by neilbradley

Just be careful. A 1.6Ghz C7 != 1.6Ghz Atom in terms of performance. It's considerably less - BUT it is lower pwoer as well, and it may work for your needs. It just didn't for mine.

Thanks for the advise

Rasmus

[rtengvad]

Originally Posted by sandor

eh, i just pay an extra $10 a month to PECO so that they buy "my electricity" from a local wind producer. the $30 or so i would save in electricity usage each year is far too little savings to make up for the time spent sourcing the lowest usage parts.


someday ill have a solar array on the roof, and disconnect from the urban grid

Another way to pay for a good conscience

Rasmus