[DavidA]

SSD has no moving parts, so less power?

[HansP]

i have the progs running in background with win 7 on Amd E350
works like a charm

i put my XBMC to do screensaver BLACK screen after 5 minutes

when XBMC has the screensaver on , CPU use drops to 2% and less !!!!!

[poofyhairguy]

My solution is to just pay a little extra for renewable energy from the electric company.

[teaguecl]

But then your talking about getting two separate units. Regretfully my bills are keeping me from going that far. Would be great to work up to that but I cannot just go out and get two setups.

I am firmly in the "two unit" camp.
machine 1: A very thin frontend connected to my TV, running XBMC, with no storage, wired ethernet, low power and silent. I recommend the Shuttle XS35GT with Openelec on a USB stick for this.
machine 2: low power NAS, unRaid is great. Possibly running sickbeard etc., though I tend not to.

Some people hate this style setup, and want everything in one box - but they're wrong
The frontend machine can be turned on/off via remote and draws no power at all most of the time. When it's running it's very low power anyway.
The NAS should be designed to be low power also - if done properly this machine doesn't have to do much. I leave mine on 24/7, but if you picked the right motherboard you could have it turn itself on/off automatically. For example, tell the bios to turn on at midnight every night. Have sickbeard turn the machine off when it's done downloading for the night. Have you're XBMC frontend wake it up when needed using a Wake-on-lan ping.

My recommendation is to get a thin frontend, and use your current desktop for the fileserver/sickbeard. Save up some money, and add an NAS later.

[Subliminal Aura]

SSD has no moving parts, so less power?

Don't believe the hype ... a 2.5" mechanical uses a comparable amount of leccy to an SSD

But if it's running downloading while your away it really not idle right?

Agree

i would call the state of downloading active idle.

cpu and graphics won't be used much, but HDDs will keep on spinning.

Disagree. CPU will use 'much' especially if you're a hardened torrent user who opens thousand+ connections and don't forget about the power bursts you get from auto unpacking and package checksums with sabnzb+

---

The build in my sig was solely for the purpose of building a htpc/NAS combo which consumed as little power as possible but had enough grunt to be a fast gigabit fileserver too. Not pictured I have attached 2x2TB drives externally via the SATA cables

1x2.5" SATA - OS - Always spinning ... can spin down if I force ubuntu to log in memory. I've done this before so know how.
1x3.5" SATA 2TB - Downloads + Critical Data - Spins down if idle for 15 minutes
1x3.5" SATA 2TB - Sorted movie archive - rarely used - Spins down if idle for 2 minutes

So most of the time both drives are spun down, providing temp files and directories being monitored for new .torrents/.nzbs/rss reside on the main OS drive

root@media:~# tail -10 /var/log/hd_spindown.log
2011-09-30 21:56:01 sdc already spun down
2011-09-30 21:57:01 sda is in use
2011-09-30 21:57:01 sdb already spun down
2011-09-30 21:57:01 sdc already spun down
2011-09-30 21:58:01 sda is in use
2011-09-30 21:58:01 sdb already spun down
2011-09-30 21:58:01 sdc already spun down
2011-09-30 21:59:01 sda is in use
2011-09-30 21:59:01 sdb already spun down
2011-09-30 21:59:01 sdc already spun down

My draw in this state is 20W. Unfortunately the machine also controls the home electrics / cctv and uploads energy readings so needs to be on 24/7 had it not then I would have had a cycle every hour or so where it would sleep and wake up to check for new downloads (this is probably very bad for a harddrive)

Oh and for you linux lovers - use 'powertop' to gather what is consuming most of your power

[QLink]

Disagree. CPU will use 'much' especially if you're a hardened torrent user who opens thousand+ connections and don't forget about the power bursts you get from auto unpacking and package checksums with sabnzb+

dont know how much cpu "your downloading method" is using.

i use utorrent for downloading and even if i load @full speed (~16MBit) i dont get more than 3-4% cpu utilization... thats why i said cpu won't be used much.

[Subliminal Aura]

dont know how much cpu "your downloading method" is using.

i use utorrent for downloading and even if i load @full speed (~16MBit) i dont get more than 3-4% cpu utilization... thats why i said cpu won't be used much.

The bandwidth used is irrelevant. It's the number of connections that you have that adds the load. Not sure if utorrent allows you to bump up this figure as it's been a very long time since I used it.

If you have > 30 active downloads with thousands of end points in use - your CPU and disk will feel the pain. You've obviously never used p2p in anger have you?

[g725s]

I am firmly in the "two unit" camp. SNIP

I'm leaning in this direction. I want to put all my DVDs "and" CD's onto hard drive. I already have 8TB of media and could easily see tripling that in not too far off future, with more as time goes on. My current PC is maxed out as far as drives go.

So what would be a Eco Friendly UnRAID system with room for a lot of drives? I've been mostly looking into the XBMC side so far and have not done much research on UnRAID yet, but read that drives that are not used power down.

[QLink]

The bandwidth used is irrelevant. It's the number of connections that you have that adds the load. Not sure if utorrent allows you to bump up this figure as it's been a very long time since I used it.

If you have > 30 active downloads with thousands of end points in use - your CPU and disk will feel the pain. You've obviously never used p2p in anger have you?

i have 705 torrents in queue, but since i am using bittorrent (~10years) it never happened that more than 10 ppl at the same time are downloading from me.
maximum number of connected peers per torrent is set to 125.
global maximum connections is set to 600.
number if upload slots per torrent is set to 1.
maximum number of active torrents 1500

i'm doing fine with this setup

utorrent is showing this stats to me:



so, i am using bittorrent since a pretty long time, but it looks like not as much and as heavy as you do. all i wanted to say is that from my personal experience there happens not that much cpu utilization. (<10%)

[Subliminal Aura]

so, i am using bittorrent since a pretty long time, but it looks like not as much and as heavy as you do. all i wanted to say is that from my personal experience there happens not that much cpu utilization. (<10%)

I also use bittorrent and 10% sounds about right for your setup but bump up the settings to 1000s of connections per torrent and you'll soon see what I'm talking about - you should see 50% easily

Obviously bringing this back on OT do you see 10% as being idle - I certainly don't as it's more than enough to keep a CPU throttled up under speedstep which is not good for power consumption

[Subliminal Aura]

Interestingly here's a chart from last night where I downloaded a couple of large torrents on my celeron based htpc

CPU usage looks high for just a single torrent - also note the very high system usage but still it's not enough to cause concern. Had this been running on an arm based media player it would have killed it