[LUAU] Anyone use a Linksys NSLU2? USB hard disk drives are FOSSfriendly?

[Brian Chee]

While it doesn't pull a constant 350watts, there is a minimum that is
constant. This is why I'm looking towards something with a much smaller
power supply that is closely matched to the total load.
(drives+interfaces+motherboard+CPU+RAM) This is the reason why most of the
appliances go with either wall warts or inline power supplies. Typically
these types are in the 35watt range.

So for instance the 250gb snap server appliance has a 60watt power supply
pulling 44watts off that under full load. I can afford to keep a 60watt
light bulb burning, but a 400watt like in my old IBM Netfinity server is
more like keeping a small hairdryer running...a bit different.

The Medallion by TechSol that I was using for the PODS project didn't have
a floating point processor (I dont' think NFS or SMB needs it) and can be
run with a 30watt wall wart and depending upon what i/o you turn on, can
drop its load down under 10watts with ethernet+IDE+LCD running. We got the
medallion down to 32mw in deep sleep, and something like 3 watts with most
of the i/o turned off and only jumped up to 3 watts when we turned the
radio on. (VGA, serial, USB, etc all take LOTS of power)

Ideally what I would love to build is a medallion (or Via) based system
running something like freeNAS on a super small power supply to float
charge a 12volt gel cell to avoid the efficiency loss in a UPS. This is
why my home security system takes so little power, same deal. My only
hesitancy is that I may need more CPU horse power than a strongarm 1110
can provide if I want to implement iSCSI.

One thing to note, if you plan on playing with virtualized load balancing
like VMWare ESX server (VMotion) you MUST be using iSCSI at a minimum
since SMB/NFS NAS will NOT work.

/brian chee



University of Hawaii at Manoa
School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology (SOEST)
Advanced Network Computing Laboratory (ANCL)
2525 Correa Road, HIG 500
Honolulu, HI  96822
Voice: 808-956-5797       Email: chee at hawaii.edu
Brian J.S. Chee, CNE/CNI
http://ancl.ics.hawaii.edu

On Wed, 27 Dec 2006, R. Scott Belford wrote:

> Brian Chee wrote:
> > My biggest bitch about "normal" machines is that I want my NAS up all the
> > time and a 350watt power supply could potentially add something like
> > $20/month to my electric bill....
>
> As a partial aside - if a power supply is rated at 350 watts, does this
> mean that it constantly pulls 350 watts?  If so, I may need to do a
> costs-benefits analysis of my own pc based file servers.
>
> > /brian chee
>
> --scott
>