03.21
I wrote recently about a small Linux machine that I had built to act as a SOHO NAS. The machine worked well with one exception: the very noisy power supply (louder than the quad-core workstation that sits beside it). For my sanity, I’ve now replaced the stock supply with a silent unit. On request, I’ve also measured the machine’s power usage, hard drive temperatures, and taken a few photos. Read on for the updates.
Covers Off!
With a simple inline power meter (thanks Steve, I will return it … someday), I measured the NAS power draw at the socket as between 35-45W depending on what it was doing. That’s not bad considering it has a dual core CPU, 2GB of DDR3 RAM and three physical hard drives in there. hddtemp reported all three hard drives running at between 32-35C with the extra case fan disabled.
Armed with the power figures, and after some consultation with the helpful folks at lintx.com, I decided on a PicoPSU-90 coupled with a 60W power brick as sufficent for a replacement, and silent, power supply.
It was reasonably tricky to remove the existing PSU unit from the CiT S003b case. There were a number of hard to see (and reach) screws that had to be taken out in order to remove an outer case panel that was covering access to the PSU screws. In comparison, fitting the PicoPSU was trivial, and I even managed to mount the power brick internally to the case and reuse the existing IEC inlet for a very tidy result.
 CFIDE boot drive (left) and PicoPSU (right) |
 Internal 60W Power Brick |
And the best part? It’s now totally silent. Apart from the whiny CPU fan that’s now audible.
More photos are available here, or check out the original article for more construction details.
Thanks for measuring the power drain. Comes in at around £45/year to run, which isn’t bad!
My CPU is running up to 39 degrees Celsius, I’m not sure, but it may have gone up to 41/43 at one point. How’s yours averaging?
I bought a brand new ZyXEL GS108B 8 port switch from Amazon, which looked amazing on paper: low wattage, attractive case, reliable, £10 cheaper than alternatives… etc. But when I plugged it into my D-Link Router (w/dhcp) and the rest of my network it just started to reboot every couple of minutes. Can I also ask what are you using?
How are you measuring CPU temperature? lm-sensors / sensors-detect doesn’t seem to work on my machine so I can’t tell.
I’m using a HP ProCurve 1410-8G 8-port GbE switch and a Draytek Vigor 2820n router, and it’s been a rock solid combination.
The sensors have to be configured: here’s a ubuntu article which may work for Debian.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SensorInstallHowto
The switch was just a faulty item.. the new one seems to be great.
I purchased the case that you’re using and with the stock PSU my temperatures shot up to 44c very quickly without the case fan on. With the case fan (which is quite noisy, I’m now idling at 40c-41c)
The plan is to splash out on a PicoPSU which I think will also bring the temperature down in the case because the 300W PSU seems to vent hot air over the CPU/heatsink.
As of yet, I haven’t found anyone who has replaced the stock 40mm cooler on a D525 board, but there may be a fan out there suitable which doesn’t have the high pitched tone.
I’ve already run sensors-detect as described in that article, but it says it can’t find any sensors to configure. I’ll have to check in the BIOS to see if I’ve disabled them (not sure if you can even do that!).
If you want any sensor config files from my machine, let me know and I’ll email them to you.
In the meantime, a quick reboot and look in the BIOS will show you how you’re doing at least from the point of view of IDLE temps.
Thanks, but it won’t help – I figured out the problem.
I used a later version of sensors-detect and it found an “ITE IT8720F Super IO” sensor, which requires the “it87″ kernel module. Unfortunately it seems my kernel is too old and its it87 doesn’t support the IT8720F chip. I have 2.6.26 and the support is added in 2.6.28.
Kernel upgrade required.
I upgraded the NAS to Squeeze, which installed a 2.6.32 kernel and got the it87 sensor module working. With the CPU idle, temperature readings are as follows:
temp1: -55.0°C sensor = thermistortemp2: +63.0°C sensor = thermistor
temp3: +46.0°C sensor = thermal diode
I imagine the “thermal diode” reading is the CPU temperature. With the CPU at 100% it rises to 52°C.
temp1 = I couldn’t find out.
temp2 is the chipset temperature
temp3 is the CPU temperature. The Atom D525 an run safely up to 100C according to Intel.
@Alex Ellis
I’d be interested in your lm-sensors sensors.conf file. I’ve modified mine to label the temperatures and fans and set the max CPU temperature to 100C. However, if you know more information I’d love to have the sensors running more accurately as I’m currently getting 2 warnings on voltage and I really have no clue where to start looking to figure out what in0-7 are supposed to be.
If you could post the relevant sections here it would be great.