nanog mailing list archives

Re: Most energy efficient (home) setup


From: Henk Hesselink <nanog () voipro nl>
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:22:20 -0700

Have you looked at the HP ProLiant MicroServer?

Cheers,

Henk


On 13-04-12 12:06, Jeroen van Aart wrote:
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



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