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| New debian-based server |
| Friday, 12 June 2009 18:45 | |||
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2687 After selling my Taurus LAN a few months ago I was looking for an alternative NAS. The main features I was looking for were acceptable gigabit-ethernet throughput, handling of at least 2 SATA drives for data storage and most importantly power consumption as low as possible. More than 30W were inacceptable. As I always wanted to build a little fileserver myself (and wanted the box to do more than just offering a few samba shares) I started looking for the appropriate hardware which I thought to have found in one of those brand new and shining Atom-based boards with the nVidia Ion platform. Unfortunately they are not only pretty expensive but also not to get yet. After searching weeks for another energy-efficient solution I came about a standard AM2-board featuring the nVidia nForce 630A chipset. Concerning the CPU I decided for a single core AMD Sempron LE-1250. As the system is supposed to idle all day long, deliver a few files over the day and serving a few website with PHP and MySQL only this CPU is powerful enough to handle my needs. Plus this CPU is easily to undervolt. The server uses one 2GB DDR2 RAM module, the system is installed at a 2.5 SATA hard drive and there is one 3.5 SATA hard drive storing my data. To get the most efficient power supply I read about those picoPSUs. They´re nothing more than a little PCB connected to the ATX plug and powered by a single low voltage DC line. In conjunction with a laptop PSU they have an efficiency factor of about 95%.
I already had the case, the 3.5” hard drive and the notebook PSU, so I had to pay around 200€ to get everything. Setting up the hardware was business as usual, the only thing that I forgot to buy was a 4pin power adapter for the picoPSU. I cut the plug off of an old PSU and soldered it to a Molex Y-adapter for the picoPSU. After installing the OS and all necessary services (this gets covered with another article later) I checked the power consumption of the box: 40W idling all drives spinning. Way too much, especially considering the fact that the box idles 99% of the time. To get the power consumption down I disabled all onboard peripherals I didn´t need: floppy drive, IDE ports, serial and parallel ports. I also lowered the frequency of the onboard graphics adapter down to 420MHz, the RAM voltage down to 1.8V and the HT frequency down to 800MHz. I also undervolted the CPU with a linux tool, but I´ll cover that with another article later. After setting the spindown time to 10 minutes the box now consumes 21W idling with the 3.5” hard drive sleeping and 27-28W idling with the 3.5” hard drive spinning. Network throughput is around 50MB/s reading and 35MB/s writing, which is pretty ok considering the energy consumption. This is exactly what I had in mind and using those Sharkoon fans makes the box almost unhearable.
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