Re: Hard Drive Spin Down
On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 12:35:17PM -0400, Celejar wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:33:11 -0400
> "Douglas A. Tutty" <dtutty@vianet.ca> wrote:
>
> > Or, the cheapest external multi-drive enclosure I've found is called
> > someone's old computer. Turn it on when you want to do a backup, backup
> > over rsync or NFS, and turn it off. If it does wake-on-lan you could
> > script it all from your main computer.
>
> But IIUC, the power draw, especially of an old and probably energy
> inefficient computer, is much higher than that of a dedicated external
> disk enclosure. I currently use an old computer, but I'm planning to
> try some sort of home built NAS (openwrt on a router and an attached
> external drive), and I'll see how that goes.
My 486 only uses about 20 watts with one 6 GB drive going but it won't
see a some 6 GB drives and anything larger. My P-II takes about 40
watts with a 6 GB drive. I haven't measured my dual-P-133 Tyan.
Remember, for just file storage, especially for backup, you don't need a
lot of processing power unless you are moving a whole lot of data over
e.g. a gigabit ethernet to a raid array and want to keep both at full
throughput. But if that's the case, a simple external disk enclosure
can't match that speed either.
Doug.
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