HD200: Only 7 Watts?

[PeteCress]

Using a gadget called "Kill-A-Watt" (a little power meter for checking how much electric an applicance uses) I got 7 watts for an HD200 while it was rendering a show. 5-6 watts when it was supposedly turned off (red LED no longer lit, but power brick plugged in).

Is this even possible? The LED night light in our bathroom takes 3 watts.

My initial reaction is that Yours Truly is doing something dumb.

Pretty good if it's for real.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

Using a gadget called "Kill-A-Watt" (a little power meter for checking how much electric an applicance uses) I got 7 watts for an HD200 while it was rendering a show. 5-6 watts when it was supposedly turned off (red LED no longer lit, but power brick plugged in).

Is this even possible? The LED night light in our bathroom takes 3 watts.

My initial reaction is that Yours Truly is doing something dumb.

Pretty good if it's for real.

It's for real. Other people have measured it and have come up with the same numbers.

Gerry

[wrems]

This got me curious so I tested with my HD200 with my killawatt. I got basically the same results. Although, I peaked at a whopping 8 watts for an HD recording!

I’ve been meaning to check the numbers for sometime. I suspected they were going to be low, but I wasn’t expecting 6-8 watts. That’s great.

Now I just have to get my server to sip and not guzzle.

[Brent]

I get 5 - 8 watts as measured by Kill-a-Watt. Yes it's amazing and yes it is yet another reason to use extenders instead of computers in a multi-room setup.

[MeInMaui]

This is exactly the reason I retired my client PC in the living room and switched to the HD200. This was last spring when our electricity rates were sky rocketing (they finally topped out at $.43/kWh).

Aloha,
Mike

[bigbill]

Yep, I turned off two pc clients and replaced them with HD200's.

[mike_ac]

Originally Posted by wrems

Now I just have to get my server to sip and not guzzle.

That's where a NAS comes in handy. I've been using a Thecus 4100 with 4 x 1.5 tb green drives, and have been peaking at about 40 watts. When idling, it's sucking up only about 15-20. The whole rig uses less electricity than a low-watt light bulb!

We have an old DVD recorder (second generation) that doesn't do much better...

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by mike_ac

That's where a NAS comes in handy. I've been using a Thecus 4100 with 4 x 1.5 tb green drives, and have been peaking at about 40 watts. When idling, it's sucking up only about 15-20. The whole rig uses less electricity than a low-watt light bulb!

Could somebody elaborate on that?

From context I'm guessing that "NAS" is some kind of server-type device that serves up files.

But don't you still need a WHS box or other PC to run the Sage server?

I just measured my WHS box plus all routers an other devices (i.e. I plugged the UPS into the Kill-A-Watt) and the whole setup was pulling 153 watts with 4 1-TB drives and minimal activity.

How does that stack up with others?

[gplasky]

NAS=Network Attached Storage. Think of a box with some drives plugged into the network. A small kernel OS running that will basically present the drives as shares over the network. You would still need sonmething to run SageTV server. (Another plus for running WHS)

Gerry

[Fuzzy]

And, I'm willing to bet there is no savings on running the drives in a separate NAS as opposed to running the same drives in the actual server.. all you get with the NAS route is lower performance.

Also, I believe most NAS implementations are not very good at turning the drives off when not in use.. especially RAID based NAS.

assume 4 drives, with up to 4 simultaneous recordings...

# of record -- in server, individual --- in server, RAID ---- NAS
0 recordings --- 0 drives spinning --- 0 drives spinning --- 4 drives spinning
1 recording ---- 1 drive spinning --- 4 drives spinning --- 4 drives spinning
2 recordings --- 2 drives spinning --- 4 drives spinning --- 4 drives spinning
3 recordings --- 3 drives spinning --- 4 drives spinning --- 4 drives spinning
4 recordings --- 4 drives spinning --- 4 drives spinning --- 4 drives spinning

The only point I see to going NAS is if you need to access teh storage, while the sage pc is shut down/sleeping...

[mike_ac]

The NAS definitely has advantages. We have our NAS connected directly to an HD-200 (typically standalone mode) on one gigabit LAN, and to our PC on another gigabit LAN.

When the PC is up, we can transfer files, use the PC as a media server, etc, but the cost is high. Even HTPCs use a lot of juice. The motherboard alone can consume 3x the power of our entire NAS, even with all four drives spinning. Throw in a video card, sound card, memory, CPU, etc, and the savings is really palpable.

The HD-200 is working in standalone mode for us, because we have u-verse handling the rest. When the Hulu connectivity improves, we'll revisit that approach. But for now, we only have the NAS and u-verse running around the clock. The HD-200 is actually powered down much of the time (because of instability otherwise).

The NAS is much more efficient at managing the drives than a PC. It's a specialized appliance that has very intelligent RAID hardware, a proper backplane, additional data buffering, and better thermals (very low heat generation). It spins the drives up & down much more efficiently than my PC can (and I have a high-end custom PC), meaning that it really idles, and doesn't sit there supporting 200 windows daemons (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit). The gist of it is, the actual cost of keeping the drives up is measurably lower.

A NAS often can serve as a FTP server or bit torrent client, if that matters to you. It can give you a nice layer of protection from the outside world. We currently don't use either. We do use its DNS server capabilities, though, to isolate its second LAN from the U-verse network.

Bonuses: true hot-swap and RAID 6 support (any 2 drives can fail simultaneously w/o data loss, plus more usable storage space than RAID 10 or 0+1).

The disadvantages of a NAS are that you can't put in expansion cards or run windows software on it. We can run a few linux applications, but very few at that. One of those is a simple media server, but the HD-200 is better suited for it, so we have the media server shut off. Our TV is dlna compliant, so the media server does work with it, but it is clunky and awkward.

Ours is little more than a low-power, high-performance data storage device. For $400, it pays for itself in the course of a year on power bills alone.

[mike_ac]

Correction: I just did the math, and based on the wattage differences, the yearly power cost of our set up is about $23, versus $215 if we left our PC up around the clock. So, it would take 2 years to recover the energy cost, not just one.

On the other hand, our A/C doesn't have to kick in to cool the room holding the server, whereas the PC generates a LOT of additional heating... Maybe the cost savings is much more than $200 per year...

[Fuzzy]

The cooling aspect is one thing to think about, but not to the degree you might be thinking. a SEER 12 AC unit (most newer energy efficient models) uses about 1 Watt of electricity to move 12 BTU/hr. 12 BTU/hr is the heat generated by 3.5 Watts... so, in the hot seasons, for every 3.5 watts of energy used in a consumer electronics device in the home (which is all eventually turned to heat), it actually uses 4.5 watts of electricity..

Conversely, if you are in a cold season, and especially if you are already using electric as your heat source, the computers are effectively free to run.. every watt used by the pc is heat added to the house, and works out to a watt the heater doesn't have to generate.

Also mike, your NAS saves you energy because you don't NEED the sage computer running to use your extender, as you use it in standalone mode.. for this, of course a NAS makes sense... hoever, if you are using an extended in normal extender mode, the server has to be up and running, so you might as well put the drives there.

[mike_ac]

I definitely wasn't intending to sound like I was against an HTPC setup. I was just replying to the questions about why one would choose a NAS.

When the mini ITX 785G boards and X-25 drives start dropping in price, I'll probably build a low-power, near-silent HTPC for the next go. Then, I can have the best of both worlds.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by mike_ac

...a low-power, near-silent HTPC

FWIW, I just yanked the video card out of my WHS box.

Now the total draw (PC, routers, tuners, you name it...) of the entire rig is 125 watts - down from 150 - and that's with 4 T-bytes in the form of 1-gig WD greens. That means the PC itself is only drawing 75 watts.

As soon as UPS comes through with the SATA card I ordered yesterday, I'm going to hang said card and four more greens on it.... then we'll see how much it all draws.

Around here (SE Penna, .18/KwHr) 150 watts comes out at
(150*24*365)/12 or about $20 per month.

Drop the KwHr rate to fifteen cents and it's about sixteen dollars per month for the whole rig.

[hugenbdd]

I have WHS running with about 6 drives. Non are "green". 1 320, 3 500g and 2 1tb drives, an additional Network card, and an older 6600gt video card.

For the "accessories" I have 2 HDHR's, a switch for HDHR, switch for the house network, 1g hub, cable modem and a WRT54g wireless router. The UPS software says it runs at about

151 watts (Not sure if I trust the UPS internal meter) and I have seen it peak to about 180 when recording & com. skip scan.

May have to pull the graphics card now that you did to test it out.

Dave

Originally Posted by PeteCress

Could somebody elaborate on that?

From context I'm guessing that "NAS" is some kind of server-type device that serves up files.

But don't you still need a WHS box or other PC to run the Sage server?

I just measured my WHS box plus all routers an other devices (i.e. I plugged the UPS into the Kill-A-Watt) and the whole setup was pulling 153 watts with 4 1-TB drives and minimal activity.

How does that stack up with others?

[mike_ac]

I'm expecting that the 785G will pull around 40W total with a mobile (or undervolted) CPU. We'll have to see if that plays out. If it does, it could be a real winner. A solid state drive would pull very little itself, and the only significant heat generation would be the motherboard.

There are a couple of boards that already make this level, so I'm hopeful. (see http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...nt,1997-5.html). The 780G + sempron described in this article can't do HD well, but the 785G (with a much better graphics engine) should be better.

Personally, I'd like to see an ITX form factor HTPC with eSATA, and then put a low-cost (sub-$200) RAID 5 box on the back for data storage. I could hide that real well in my living room... Imagine a $500 passively cooled (truly silent!) 40W (peak!) HTPC...

We're almost there!

[kurt711]

I run SageTV server on Acer H340, it is a Intel Atom 230 based home server. I have 4 1GB drives and 1 1GB esata, esata drive being dedicated to Sage recordings(64k formatted). With one HDHR as tuner, whole thing uses less than 50 watts. Granted, can't do heavy encoding and such but something that runs whole day, its perfect. I am surprised that HD200 uses 5-6 watts in standby. I'll have to hook it up to killawatt but I was under the impression that most CE devices standby under a watt.

Anyways coming from a Tivo and WMC, new setup uses much less power and much more centralized. Thanks Sage, keep on improving though

[comet48]

My Power consumption;
Server - 250 watts
Plasma TV - 450 watts
Sage HD 200 - 8 watts
Total - 708 Watts

[freedml]

'Off' is just the red light and the video drivers being off. Most of the HD200 stays on. Which is why you have to 'cold boot' it (remove the power physically) when it freezes.