Realistic power on E35M1-I DELUXE system

[misterg]

Hi folks,

I'm considering to build my own mini itx system for a small and very efficient windows 7 server, based on the passively cooled Asus E35M1-I DELUXE. I want this system to be as power efficient as is possible.
 
The setup I have in mind will be according to the following criteria:

- no optical drive, no keyboard mouse display
- system will be in the metering cupboard, so no audio or video connections needed to TV etc
- just user ethernet, no wifi
- Operating system running on a usb stick
- 2GB memory, low voltage for power reasons
- two 2.5" hdd's in raid 0 for large storage, that spin down when not used (made possible by doing OS on USB stick)
- ideally fully passively cooled yet small

The question I have:
- what is the realistic minimal power usage of such system (idle cpu with the two harddisks spinned down), as I read on some forums that 30 watt is drawn in idle mode from the Asus system (this would be way too high in my opinion, below 10 watt should be easily possible)?
- what is the most efficient power supply that you recommend? I could considering an enclose with built in PSU (e.g. Antec ISK100 which comes with a 95 watt PSU) or a PicoPSU (they are very small, but are they really worth getting if space is not a big issue?
- what enclosure do you recommend? Looks not important, functionality is.

Any thoughts highly appreciated!

Thx,
misterg

[bodger]

Have you considered the ramifications of using a RAID 0 set for a server? By doing this you are sacrificing any semblance of data security -- a glitch in either drive effectively kills data on both drives -- in exchange for a bit of speed. In this sort of application speed doesn't seem to mean much at all since even Gigabit Ethernet will not keep up with regular HD data rates in most cases.  Simply using the two drives normally, no RAID, would be safer and provide the same storage. As for OS on a stick, I predict that you will find it so slow that you will be screaming at it in no time at all assuming that you can get over the hurdles and get it to work at all. Windows 7 just isn't meant for that sort of application. Instead, get yourself a small cheap SSD (perhaps 60gB) and use that for a system drive then you won't have to sweat things like 'where does the swap file go?' and 'where did all of these temp files come from?' and 'why does it take 30 seconds to load a small DLL?' and power consumption should be minimal.

As for power consumption, I'd guess that you might well get down to the range you suggest. My Windows Home Server in the equipment closet in the basement consumes 85-90W on average (measured mains power to the box) and that has 6 X 2tB WD 'green' drives for data and a 200gB drive of some sort from the junk box which holds the OS. No real attempt at super-low consumption was attempted so it has a dual-core Celeron CPU and 8gB of RAM and an old DVD drive for loading software.

Good luck -- let us know how it goes.

[tino]

Hi folks,

I'm considering to build my own mini itx system for a small and very efficient windows 7 server, based on the passively cooled Asus E35M1-I DELUXE. I want this system to be as power efficient as is possible.
 
The setup I have in mind will be according to the following criteria:

- no optical drive, no keyboard mouse display
- system will be in the metering cupboard, so no audio or video connections needed to TV etc
- just user ethernet, no wifi
- Operating system running on a usb stick
- 2GB memory, low voltage for power reasons
- two 2.5" hdd's in raid 0 for large storage, that spin down when not used (made possible by doing OS on USB stick)
- ideally fully passively cooled yet small

The question I have:
- what is the realistic minimal power usage of such system (idle cpu with the two harddisks spinned down), as I read on some forums that 30 watt is drawn in idle mode from the Asus system (this would be way too high in my opinion, below 10 watt should be easily possible)?
- what is the most efficient power supply that you recommend? I could considering an enclose with built in PSU (e.g. Antec ISK100 which comes with a 95 watt PSU) or a PicoPSU (they are very small, but are they really worth getting if space is not a big issue?
- what enclosure do you recommend? Looks not important, functionality is.

Any thoughts highly appreciated!

Thx,
misterg

I've been looking at the latest Fusion Based motherboards and been thinking of doing something similar to what you have mentioned.

I personally would look at getting a standard PSU over the Pico, just as its better value for money and also has a better efficiency rating than the Pico. In the majority of cases anyway.

Another option to an SSD is to use a CF card which would be better than a USB stick imo.

Also RAID 0 won't give you a great performance boost as bodger mentioned having a JBOD or if you can spare the loss in space RAID 1 would be better. RAID 5 would give the best of both worlds regarding redundancy and performance.

[misterg]

Another option to an SSD is to use a CF card which would be better than a USB stick imo.

Good one, haven't thought of that. I even have both a quite fast CF card of suitable size and a CF-SATA adapter that could be tried for this purpose.

Furthermore, the raid0 could indeed be discarded for nonraid configuration if the speed increase is not worth doing this. I'll try to get this up and running shortly, will keep you posted on the power aspect as well.

Cheers!