Re: Living in NGL: was: [gentoo-user] NAS and replacing with larger drives

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 4:53 PM Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> It took some digging around but I found out it is a AMD Phenom 9750 quad
> core.

You might want to hook a Kill-a-watt to that and see how much power it
uses.  Those older AMD processors were really inefficient.

One thing I've come to appreciate with anything that runs 24x7 is to
consider the energy bill to run things.  That's why the bulk of my
storage is running on ARM SBCs.  Those things use almost no power when
idle, while even a modern amd64 system will often use more at idle
than an ARM will at full load.

Most of the newer CPUs are MUCH better in performance per watt as
well.  A server that uses just 50W 24x7 costs about $65/yr (and I have
pretty cheap electricity due to a 1yr contract - odds are it costs
quite a bit more for most of this list).  That's a fairly significant
amount of money so it can pay to optimize things, especially if you
replace what was a power-hungry performance CPU from 10 years ago with
a lower-end CPU from today that probably has double the performance
for 10% of the power draw.  Obviously if you want bleeding edge the
electricity bill won't cover the up-front costs, but lower end CPUs
are very cost-effective and efficient compared to really old systems
that people tend to use for these kinds of projects.

-- 
Rich