Re: Most energy efficient (home) setup

[Jeroen van Aart <jeroen () mompl net>]

Leo Bicknell wrote:
> But what's really missing is storage management.  RAID5 (and similar)
> require all drives to be online all the time.  I'd love an intelligent
> file system that could spin down drives when not in use, and even for
> many workloads spin up only a portion of the drives.  It's easy to
> imagine a system with a small SSD and a pair of disks.  Reads spin one
> disk.  Writes go to that disk and the SSD until there are enough, which
> spins up the second drive and writes them out as a proper mirror.  In a
> home file server drive motors, time you have 4-6 drives, eat most of the
> power.  CPU's speed step down nicely, drives don't.

Late reply by me, but excellent points.

A combination of mdadm and hdparm on linux should suffice to have a raid 
that will spin down the disks when not in use. I have used for years a 
G4 system with a mdadm raid1 (and a separate boot disk) and hdparm 
configured to spin the raid disks down after 10 minutes and it worked great.

I think in a raid10 this would only spin up the disk pair that has the 
data you need, but leave the rest asleep. But I didn't try that yet.

What I'd like is to have small disk enclosuer that includes a whole (low 
power) computer capable of having linux installed on some flash memory. 
Say you have an enclosure with space for 4 2.5 inch disks, install 
linux, set it up as a raid10, connect through USB to your computer for 
back up purposes.

Greetings,
Jeroen

--
Earthquake Magnitude: 3.0
Date: Friday, April 13, 2012 17:45:06 UTC
Location: Central Alaska
Latitude: 64.0464; Longitude: -148.9850
Depth: 1.80 km