low power linux PC?

[Star]

>  I've got a set of the Western Digital 'Green' drives coming in
>  tomorrow (whoops...today now):
>
>  8.5 Watts - only 5400 RPM though (so I'm expecting to cache
>  aggressively).  I'm trying to build a quiet, powerful 1U server so
>  every Watt counts in keeping the fans slow (quiet).  We'll see, WD's
>  haven't been so reliable for me.
>

At work, we recently deployed a storage server in the data-center
stuffed full of 1T Green Drives, and I've gotta tell you:  Far more
then I expected out of them.  They can boost performance up to
"nearly" 7200 rpm's when demand is high (power curve goes up with it).
 Since we're using them primarily as NFS mounts over Gigabit Ethernet,
the bottleneck hasn't been the I/O.  They're currently configged in
RAID-10 (software) with ext3 FS's.  Haven't really noticed a huge
difference in cache usage from our older choice of drives.  It's only
been a few weeks with them, so I can't speak to the longterm
reliability, though.


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