NAS or a home server?

ChileanLlama · 15 Oct 2009 at 21:53

THFC said:
Will underclocking affect the other use as a HTPC and playing bluray discs?

Overclocked before but never underclocked - seems a strange concept

If you use it for WHS it won't have another use

WHS is based on Win2k3 and is really not suited to playing back media itself. It's geared around running as a headless unit, serving up media to clients (including HTPCs) and only has a small c:\ drive for installing apps on (20gb).

Also the way it works, especially with multiple disks, it's safer to stay away from working on the machine directly, and doing it via the clients and their connector software.

Not saying it can't be done, but it's not what it does best. You might be better off keeping the HTPC as it is and working out how to add basic server functions to that OS instead.

Underclocking is just the opposite to overclocking, slow it down to run at a lower speed and it should be cooler and require less power

shaf · 16 Oct 2009 at 08:34

I'm using a spare E8400 that was lying around - I know overkill.

Mini-ITX Intel DG45FC Motherboard
4 HDD
Venus 669 case

Total Power Consumption is 85 Watts when idle.

Runs/Streams fine.

I considered going down the Dual core Atom route but with my past experience with Atom I decided against it. I had an Asus EEBox running XP and it was never very responsive - low power consumption though.

Bonjour · 16 Oct 2009 at 09:12

This is turning into a useful / interesting thread.

It's a shame I've just recently invested in a QNap TS-509 and 5 1.5TB drives. WHS may have been a more interesting route to compliment the gigabit network I've just installed throughout the house (two ports to every room, including kitchen).

sunama · 16 Oct 2009 at 09:17

shaf said:
I'm using a spare E8400 that was lying around - I know overkill.

Runs/Streams fine.

I would hope so. E8400 is one of the fastest CPUs around.

shaf said:
I considered going down the Dual core Atom route but with my past experience with Atom I decided against it. I had an Asus EEBox running XP and it was never very responsive - low power consumption though.

The Atom330 seems to save about 11W of power, over the E3200. Thats about £11/year savings, so it hardly seems worth it. However, can the E3200 handle HD video streaming...I wonder.

The people who are successfully streaming HD videos seem to be using some pretty powerful CPUs.

ChileanLlama · 16 Oct 2009 at 16:51

Sunama, what's the E3200 clock and FSB speed?

I may get some time over the next few weeks and underclock my E5200 to put your mind at rest - it won't be easy though it's headless and hidden away

The other thing is that the E3200 is more than powerful enough, it's just whether it will be with the other overheads and disk access when using it on a WHS.

MichaelHo · 16 Oct 2009 at 19:21

Ok so this is what I currently have spare at home:
- Antec P180 full atx case
- AMD athlon 64 3500+
- g skill zx DDR 2gb kit
- nf4 LAN party mobo
- hiper 400W modular psu

not got full access to the net (on iPhone atm) so can't do research on these components. But do you guys think I could re use any of these for a home server? Keeping in mind power consumption/performance ratio is a ke factor.
If I build a home server I will buy brand new data HDDs.

ChileanLlama · 16 Oct 2009 at 23:20

All of it should be fine for a home server. If you look at WHS, just check for W2K3 drivers. I can't really comment on the power usage, though I'd expect it to be pretty high considering the age of the kit.

sunama · 17 Oct 2009 at 10:17

ChileanLlama said:
Sunama, what's the E3200 clock and FSB speed?

E3200
2.4Ghz
800Mhz FSB

It would be great if you could underclock your E5200 and see if it chokes under the pressure of HD streaming.

Thanks.

ChileanLlama · 17 Oct 2009 at 12:52

Sunama, I hadn't looked, but I expected them to be much slower clock than the E5200. They're only 100mhz with a 1mb cache as opposed to 2mb on the Pentium.

Dropping my clock 100mhz isn't going to prove anything - I think the E3200 looks a great choice.

Here's a review I found with the E3300, E3200 and E5200. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/print/celeron-e3300.html

If one of these can't stream HD content to HTPCs then it's not the CPU that's at fault

sunama · 17 Oct 2009 at 13:52

ChileanLlama said:
Sunama, I hadn't looked, but I expected them to be much slower clock than the E5200. They're only 100mhz with a 1mb cache as opposed to 2mb on the Pentium.

I'm wondering if the extra cache size is making the difference to WHS, demigrator and HD streaming.

I'm just a little spooked that there are quite a few people who seem to be struggling to stream data fast enough, to prevent stuttering on HD material. Most are putting this down to the fact that demigrator is running non stop for around 40hrs straight, keeping their cpu usage at around 100%.

ChileanLlama said:
Dropping my clock 100mhz isn't going to prove anything -

This is correct.

sunama · 17 Oct 2009 at 13:55

jbloggs, are you going ahead with your Asus build and have you ordered any parts yet?

ChileanLlama · 17 Oct 2009 at 14:08

sunama said:
I'm wondering if the extra cache size is making the difference to WHS, demigrator and HD streaming.

I'm just a little spooked that there are quite a few people who seem to be struggling to stream data fast enough, to prevent stuttering on HD material. Most are putting this down to the fact that demigrator is running non stop for around 40hrs straight, keeping their cpu usage at around 100%.

This is correct.

As said before, I've not seen this since the very early days.

One thing I'm not sure you're picking up from my posts is that HD streaming in itself isn't a CPU hog, it's more to do with bandwidth for your disks and network. On WHS demigrator is potentially impacting this.

It is either a bug or the users are shifting a lot of data around on slow machines, and by slow machines I don't just mean just CPU, but also amount of RAM, disk speed and network saturation will play a big part.

But...if it is a bug then it won't matter what CPU you have, the E3200 looks more than capable in my eyes - and I almost wish it had been available when I built my last two WHS boxes.

If you're set on a home server regardless, then it comes down to more a question of what OS you're going to run on it than the hardware. I can list the hw in my WHS's if it is of any use as they don't have this problem, but they were not built for power saving - which is something you're keen on.

[Edit: My main box (10 disks) is drawing between 140 and 203w, measured through the UPS status]

jbloggs · 17 Oct 2009 at 14:48

sunama said:
jbloggs, are you going ahead with your Asus build and have you ordered any parts yet?

Yes, will be going with the Asus V2-P5G45 with an Intel Celeron E3200 + WHS, will order next week, already have 2GB OCZ Platinum Revision 2 XTC PC2-6400 ram and a few (SATA) HDDs, may also buy a Samsung 1.5TB F2 EcoGreen as well, or may leave for a while...

measured through the UPS status

Which UPS are you using and is the UPS connected to any other box, any software on WHS box to shutdown etc incase of power outrage?

ChileanLlama · 17 Oct 2009 at 15:14

It's an APC UPS 350, nothing else attached to it. Using the standard APC software to manage any shutdowns. Basically it's at it's limit for this UPS, but it was free, it gives just enough time to shutdown if there's a power outage.

jbloggs · 17 Oct 2009 at 17:47

I have an APC SmartUPS 1500i that I could put the WHS box onto, but I would have to buy a new bit of hardware to do so (as I already have a comp. on it) which is quite expensive, would be cheaper just to get myself (sometime in the future) an APC Back-UPS ES 700VA which looks good (and can be got for a keen price)...

Zarf · 17 Oct 2009 at 18:03

MichaelHo said:
Ok so this is what I currently have spare at home:
- Antec P180 full atx case
- AMD athlon 64 3500+
- g skill zx DDR 2gb kit
- nf4 LAN party mobo
- hiper 400W modular psu

not got full access to the net (on iPhone atm) so can't do research on these components. But do you guys think I could re use any of these for a home server? Keeping in mind power consumption/performance ratio is a ke factor.
If I build a home server I will buy brand new data HDDs.

Yeah that'll be fine, I'm running a similar build (X2 3800, 2GB ram, NF4 mobo) It sits at 2% usage most of the time, and peaks up to 20% during busy network transfers (100MB/s)
That said, I'm using hardware RAID.

MichaelHo · 19 Oct 2009 at 17:27

Zarf said:
Yeah that'll be fine, I'm running a similar build (X2 3800, 2GB ram, NF4 mobo) It sits at 2% usage most of the time, and peaks up to 20% during busy network transfers (100MB/s)
That said, I'm using hardware RAID.

Do you know what sort of power consumption it has?

Vertigo · 19 Oct 2009 at 18:45

Am currently running WHS on Hyper-V on my server in the garage and it's working very well. Outright performance over a GbE network when copying large files suffers a bit by virtue of the disk virtualisation but the flexibility is worth it to me. Can always use passthrough disks if you want speed over flexibility. Also means I can run other machines on the box as and when I need to

Find WHS is a very effective backup system which can keep a daily bare metal image of all my client machines and only takes 20-30 mins to update each day.

jbloggs · 29 Oct 2009 at 22:15

Got my hardware components a couple of days ago, so have it all up and running now, just tweaking to how I want it, only have LightsOut Add-In to install and setup. Almost finished copying/moving vidoes/music then will back up of each comp...

sunama · 30 Oct 2009 at 00:37

I await your results. In particular, with HD material.