Mini/Micro PCs.

Oh and update, in case anyone is following along with similar issues with drive power saving...

""*-keeping the USB disk pack in standby is proving difficult. Current issue is the software RAID waking the raid1 pair VAULT to update it or something. Wakes it up f or about 5 minutes every 10!.""

This turns out to be caused by Ubuntu's default enabling if Smart Mon tools which poke the drive periodically for a Smart data update.

Using: systemctl disable smart-mon-tools

Took care of it and now the drives actually sleep all night. That's another few quid a month saved.
 
A very important point missed here, as discussed before. Once we move into having to heat the room with actual heating/radiators. The gaming PC comes back online. The 100W is just heat. I'm not struggling for heat right now, it's still ... well just autumn. In a month, that 100W will just stop the heating coming on as much!
 
PaulCa said:
Oh and update, in case anyone is following along with similar issues with drive power saving...

""*-keeping the USB disk pack in standby is proving difficult. Current issue is the software RAID waking the raid1 pair VAULT to update it or something. Wakes it up f or about 5 minutes every 10!.""

This turns out to be caused by Ubuntu's default enabling if Smart Mon tools which poke the drive periodically for a Smart data update.

Using: systemctl disable smart-mon-tools

Took care of it and now the drives actually sleep all night. That's another few quid a month saved.
Click to expand...

Something which can be irritating with many off the shelf NAS - they have the ability to put the discs into power saving mode but periodically various system tools will poke the discs for things like SMART updates or updating media indexes/thumbnails and keep waking the discs up unnecessarily with no ability to prevent it without 3rd party firmware or horrible hacks of the OS.
 
Rroff said:
Something which can be irritating with many off the shelf NAS - they have the ability to put the discs into power saving mode but periodically various system tools will poke the discs for things like SMART updates or updating media indexes/thumbnails and keep waking the discs up unnecessarily with no ability to prevent it without 3rd party firmware or horrible hacks of the OS.
Click to expand...

Indeed. With a "canned NAS OS" you will likely find a lot of "user space" dynamic filesystems and auto-mounting etc. All the bells and whistles that make it 'transparent' and easy to use. Those are all candidates for waking up disks to scan them.

On bare Ubuntu with only the services I use enabled, like samba, it's currently staying asleep so much that nearly every time I use it, it has to spin up.
A word to the wary though. If you are thinking of buying a multi-bay SATA->USB3 enclosure, beware that mine has a common chip (JMicron something). On all disks spinning down the SATA controller will go to sleep. If you wake a single drive, all 5 (in my case) will get spun up when the SATA controller wakes back up.... sequentially. If the drive you are waiting on is the last of the 5, or a member of a RAID array that needs rebuilt/scanned/assembled for use after shutdown... you could be waiting nearly a minute. Luckily the most accessed drives come online within about 15 seconds.

There are often odd behaviours with Windows and things like "Quick access" media files reaching out for icons and spinning drives up. There are also instances of applications and OS components timing out and producing errors while drives are spinning up. No instability though. Just annoying, retries once in a while.
 
PaulCa said:
Indeed. With a "canned NAS OS" you will likely find a lot of "user space" dynamic filesystems and auto-mounting etc. All the bells and whistles that make it 'transparent' and easy to use. Those are all candidates for waking up disks to scan them.

On bare Ubuntu with only the services I use enabled, like samba, it's currently staying asleep so much that nearly every time I use it, it has to spin up.
A word to the wary though. If you are thinking of buying a multi-bay SATA->USB3 enclosure, beware that mine has a common chip (JMicron something). On all disks spinning down the SATA controller will go to sleep. If you wake a single drive, all 5 (in my case) will get spun up when the SATA controller wakes back up.... sequentially. If the drive you are waiting on is the last of the 5, or a member of a RAID array that needs rebuilt/scanned/assembled for use after shutdown... you could be waiting nearly a minute. Luckily the most accessed drives come online within about 15 seconds.

There are often odd behaviours with Windows and things like "Quick access" media files reaching out for icons and spinning drives up. There are also instances of applications and OS components timing out and producing errors while drives are spinning up. No instability though. Just annoying, retries once in a while.
Click to expand...

I actually ended up changing my main NAS setup to an NVME drive as the front end of the storage with scheduled backup of changes to a round-robin of individual mechanical HDDs - it is noticeably more responsive over the LAN especially when dealing with folders with lots of thumbnails, etc. and doesn't result in a MechCommander like sequence of noise as all the drives spin up when you are trying to access just one disc (EDIT: Or all the drives in the main RAID array that was in use before).
 
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I usually have my own desktop running through the day alongside my work laptop and hadn't really thought about the power consumption, but I'm sure an i9 with a 3080ti is eating power it doesn't need to be just to run music and YouTube all day!

I do have an old Optiplex 5010 (Micro) which I use as an UnRaid NAS but running a VM on it wasn't great.
 
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So, this evening. Work laptop shutdown, just one monitor, the server, the (thin) desktop and some LED lights and.... 140W total.

Compare that to 2 weeks ago when it was around 250W+. It's £30 a month saving maybe.

I went round and spec'ed my ewaste machines, trying to get them in the right places.

Living room MC: i5-2400 8Gb Gtx 1030 - 4K 55" LG
Bedroom MC : i7-3470T 8Gb Gtx 1030 - 4K 43" LG
Server : i5-3470 8Gb
Desktop : i5-3470S 8Gb (USFF)

Bought a new one:
???? : i7-4790 16Gb

I tried to rank them with CPU Mark benchmarks online, but it just seemed odd.

3 x 3470s, but they differ by the T or S. Those are low and lower power requirements IIRC. So I think they rank as S, T, none.

The new box is pretty much slotted for the "Server" replacement. the 4th gen i7 has more VM/HV support.

The i5-2400 looks out of place, but... I don't have a better SFF. If I dropped the 2400 and used the 3470S in it's place, it's an USFF and will not take the 1030 for 4K@60Hz :(

Maybe I need another one! Would make a nice xmas present from my tech aware brother. "Buy me an eWaste box to replace my i5-2400"... and add", if you want to spend less than £180, I'll sub it.
 
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Update:
Austerity setup is working out much better than expected.

My daily is still the i5-3470 Dell Optiplex. I only notice the 30fps now when I switch the big gaming PC on as it's so much slicker and snappy. It's like comparing a 1.0L fiesta to a BMW M4. But the fuel bills match up too :)

The server upgrade went amazingly well. I had to buy a SATA power splitter, but I just swapped the drive in and it booted perfectly first time.

Better yet, having multiple client machines provoked me to move my development environments to VMs which turned out to work really well. An 8Gb Windows 10 dev machine works perfectly. Adding a 4Gb Linux Dev VM obviously works, running both VMs together does over commit the machine, but it will swap a bunch of stuff and then behave fine with a little lag on somethings.

I use both 21:9s during the day. 1 for work, 1 for personal. In the evenings I just use one. I have only fired up the gaming PC for select tasks like gaming or Fusion 360 where 3D rendering power is important and what most other things lack.

My "base load" electric now sides around 250W rather than 350W-400W it was 3 months ago.
 
Soon the big PC will be beneficial for heating purposes. As soon the radiator thermostat starts using the heating in the office routinely I get to move back the big machine for the daily, the power is not wasted then, it's heating the room!
 
I hadn't really given the power usage of my own desktop, which I normally keep running all day alongside my work laptop, much thought, but I'm sure an i9 with a 3080ti is using more power than it should just to run YouTube and music all day! It may includes speed of websites like Contador de Palabras.
 
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