Be Excellent To Each Other

Yo.

I'm looking to reduce my PC energy usage. I was wondering if such a thing existed as an external NAS with room for about 4 hard drives and an embedded bit torrent client.

I have google failed in finding something that doesn't cost thousands

Yeah, loads of them. My DLink DNS-323 has a very nice BitTorrent client; it's about £150 and holds two drives. The four-disk version is the 343. There's also the Netgear ReadyNAS devices, I think they can run a torrent client.

Basically all these boxes run a small Linux distro, so it's a matter of hacking into the Linux and installing whatever you want.

Incidentally, I've owned my DNS-323 for a little over two years now and I think it's more than paid for itself in terms of electricty consumption saving compared to leaving a PC on.

Plug it into a windmill. And turn it off when you're not using it.

Ooh, is that the one that you have to reformat your drives for?


Helpful, thanks.

How does that reduce his energy consumption though?

with the d-link, do the disks have to be blank before use? It's not a deal breaker though, as I was intending to buy some shiny new ones anyway.

Yes. The unit will want to format them. All these things do, they use Linux filesystems. On the plus side, you can pull the drive and read them in a normal computer, with a little messing around installing drivers.

You can put it on a bunch of existing NAS things.

The problem with FreeNAS is I would want to run it on my slowest, oldest PC setup that still works. Using that PC though means that I couldn't use SATA, pretty much destroying the point

Uhh, citation? No mention of that in the docs, and the CDs are only x86 and x64 -- all these embedded NAS devices use ARM chips.

I have a buffalo linkstation NAS. It consumed barely any less power than my iMac (once the screen goes to sleep), and is actually noiser, and is annoyingly slow, so I just leave the iMac on.

It's doing far more than a NAS box can and I don't have to mess about with linux and filesystems and all the rest of it.

Really? Bloody hell. When the drives are idling my NAS is rated at less than 10W, with both drives spinning it's about 25W [#power_consumption_benchmarks" class="postlink">citation]. Does the iMac really use that little power, or is the Buffalo not very good?

Or some other thing, you know.

I suspect my particular model of Buffalo isn't very good. The mac is running about 35W when it's not doing much, and I'm sure the Buffalo wasn't far off.
I was put off trying another one anyway - obviously, in theory it's a good idea.

The best solution would be a router with it all bundled in, as that's on all the time anyway.

Any free software recommendations for shifting partitions between discs on a Vista64 machine?

Agreed. I don't know of any that'll do RAID though, or many with even a single HDD except for Apple's reassuringly expensive Time Machine.

The Time Capsule you mean Doc

So you can set them up as a dirty torrenting NAS drive then?

Oh, dunno about torrent, actually. Probably not. You can share the drive to more than just Macs though, I believe, and use it as a NAS.

I have a plan.

I've ordered a new 1TB drive. This will allow me to run the computer with 3 hard drives instead of 5, getting rid of an old PATA drive that must be a bit thirsty for power. I'm going to remove the graphics card and use the onboard and swap the CPU with the one in the media centre. I'll drop to one case fan and get cool and quiet working properly. That should be enough

Sounds like a good plan. See if you can set some of the drives to spin down when they're not needed, that saves a few W too. (Oh, is that what "cool and quiet" is?)

No, Cool and Quiet is the processor. Do drives spin down on their own, or do you need software to tell it to?

No, that's an AMD brand name for CPU throttling tech -- both the CPU itself, and the fans associated with it.

Did you know the new Intel i7 chips, when running intensive single-core apps, can turn off two of three of the four cores completely then overclock the main core (and still remain within overall heat spec, because half the chip is idling?). That's bloody clever, that.

Usually, they default to spinning down. It's under power options in the control panel in Windows.

I think it's software. On the mac it's in the power options, a slider to adjust the time.

BTW I as still happy with the WD Greenpower as mentioned in this thread: viewtopic.php?style=5&f=3&t=3207&p=186128&hilit=western+digital#p186128

Been switched on since then with no trouble so far.