Re: Power supply efficiency on older model Sun equipment

>From: D G Teed <[email protected]>
>Date: 2008/08/27 Wed PM 10:18:56 EDT
>To: suns-at-home <[email protected]>
>Subject: [Suns-at-Home] Power supply efficiency on older model Sun equipment

>I suspect many of us have old Sun equipment which
>was a freebie ejected from the workplace.  With the
>rising cost of energy, and the appearance of new
>processors and standards like 80 Plus, I'm starting
>to look at my options.  Is it better to save these
>old Sun machines from land-fill, or is it better
>to prevent coal from being burned to keep them
>in operation?

The energy consumption of these machines is likely the reason much of the Sun kit we enjoy is so freely available.

>Has anyone seen information on the power efficiency
>rating of Sun power supplies?  In my case I'd be
>curious about the Ultra 1 I'm currently running
>a web site on.

Sorry, no info that I've seen.

>I'm seriously considering retiring all my Sun hardware
>and moving to either the Intel Atom, or the AMD
>Athlon 64 2000+ (not available yet, but reviewed
>at Tom's Hardware Guide), coupled with a cheap
>80plus power supply.  I'd probably keep one Sun
>box for test drives of new Sun Solaris and that sort of
>thing, but not keep any Sun machine on 24 hours a day.

I like the Intel Atom MB (D945GCLF [0]), it supports 64 bit O/S and uses very little power, while based on a very well-supported chipset, and at $70 for MB & CPU, it is not too expensive to "try".

>Someone here mentioned the Sunfire v100 was easy on power,
>and that is pretty good, but I require something to hold
>320GB mirrored drives on my file server.
>The Intel or AMD solution is cheap, adequate for home
>server loads, and light on the power bill,
>as well as not making the house too hot.

I recently picked up a V65x server [1] on eBay for about $300 (IIRC), it was New Old Stock (a cold spare I assume) with dual Xeon CPUs, 2 Gigs of RAM (takes up to 12 Gigs, but it gets pricey), and takes up to 6 SCSI HDs in hot-swap trays (which I also picked up for $8/each on eBay). It has a 500 Watt PS (from memory), and while it is likely not 80%+ efficient, but for horsepower/storage accomodated, it seems pretty reasonable.

I don't think that most Sun desktops use that much power, it is just that the system is slow relative to the power they consume and the heat they generate.

Sun Ultra 20 [2] and Ultra 24 [3] desktops are pretty nice as well, and probably fairly efficient ;^)

Ken

[0] http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/motherboards/d945gclf/d945gclf-overview.htm

[1] http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v65x/

[2] http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra20/

[3] http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra24/