Most energy efficient (home) setup

Sat Apr 14 21:26:22 UTC 2012

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco at ns.sol.net> wrote:
> The current Mac mini "Server" model sports an i7 2.0GHz quad-core CPU
> and up to 16GB RAM (see OWC for that, IIRC).  Two drives, up to 750GB
> each, or SSD's if you prefer.

The Mac mini server is quite intringuing with that low power
requirement . Unfortunately...  16 GB   _Non-ECC_ memory.  I sure
would not want to run a  NAS VM  on a server  with non-ECC memory that
cannot correct single-bit errors,  at least  with any data I cared
much about..

When you have such a large quantity of RAM, single-bit/fade errors
caused by background irradiation happen often, although at a fairly
low rate. Usually on a workstation it's not an issue,  because there
is not a massive quantity of idle memory.

If you're running this 24x7 with VMs and Non-ECC memory,  it's only a
question of time,
before silent memory corruption results in one of the VMs.

And silent memory corruption can make its way to the filesystem,  or
applications'  internal saved data structures  (such as the contents
of a VM's registry database).

True can be partially mitigated with backups;  but the idea of  VMs
blue-screening or ESXi  crashing with purple screen  every 3 or 4
months sounds annoying.

> 12 frickin' watts when idle.  Or thereabouts.  Think about 40 watts
> when running full tilt, maybe a bit more.

-- 
-JH