Engergy efficient RAID5 and system design

[benjanet]

I'm designing a new sage TV server, to be rackmounted in my wiring closet. Since this machine will be on 24x7, I am concerned about energy efficiency. Here are a few of my ideas:

Hardware Raid5 that can enter standby mode

Solid state drive for operating system

Possible RAM drive for timeshifting and other frequently accessed files

8600GT appears to be a very energy efficient GPU, and has full h.264 support.

High efficiency power supply closely matched to system requirements.

Has anyone used anything like this for their systems?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by benjanet

I'm designing a new sage TV server, to be rackmounted in my wiring closet. Since this machine will be on 24x7, I am concerned about energy efficiency. Here are a few of my ideas:

Hardware Raid5 that can enter standby mode

I'm not aware of any that cant, but consider that it it takes a lot of power to spin up the array (less so if your controller+drives support staggered spinup).

I'm looking at WDs Caviar GP drives when I upgrade expand, 3.8W Idle is really tough to beat.
http://www.storagereview.com/1000.sr?page=0%2C6

Solid state drive for operating system

I think it would take you a while to make up the cost, laptop drive are relatively cheap.

Possible RAM drive for timeshifting and other frequently accessed files

HD runs 9GB/hr, so ramdisk for any recording duties is kind of impractical. Oh and since Sage doesn't use a dedicated buffer for live TV, it's kind of impossible.

8600GT appears to be a very energy efficient GPU, and has full h.264 support.

Are you playing files on this box? If not, you'll want onboard video instead as it's much more efficient than any external card.

High efficiency power supply closely matched to system requirements.

If I read you right, you really don't want to do that, end users just don't really have enough information to get a PSU that's "just enough". But beyond that, you don't really waste any significant amount of power by getting an "oversized" PSU.

This thread will probably be of interest to you:
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthr...ght=case+study

[GTwannabe]

RAID-5 isn't conducive to high energy efficiency, as all of the drives in the array are constantly accessed to compute and verify the parity data. They won't have a chance to spin down. Even if they did, the power savings of shutting down a drive is minuscule.