@To do..

To do:

1. Investigate the problem with the CPU fan
2. Test a 3TB HDD
3. Underclocking/Undervolting (have to install an OS for this)
4. Measure the system's power consumption (before and after underclocking/undervolting)

1) The problem with the CPU fan is due to the motherboard's default settings. I think it is rather strange that the motherboard force the fan to run at 100% speed by default. But well, problem solved.

2) Yet to test.

3 & 4) The numbers are in, but sad to say, undervolting and underclocking doesn't help much. At default settings, the system (minus HDD) as a whole consume 31W at idle. After my attempt to underclock and undervolt, it runs at 29W idle. It seems that the main power draw might not be the CPU, could be the motherboard. Probably I am not doing it right, shall revisit this again.

BTW, previous post showed that my system only have 3.5GB of ram, that is because the MB allocate 512MB to the GPU, I have changed it to 32MB.

A little head up about RAID. One thing that we should keep in mind is that, RAID or no RAID, there is a 100% chance that we might lose our data, and what RAID does is to minimize the probability. One big disadvantage about RAID is that we pool all our data together, if the whole RAID fails, we stand to lose everything. Yes, everything. If you have 5 independent disk, 1 fails, you lose 20% of you data. So is RAID really worth it? I'll leave it to you to decide. If you ask me, RAID is still worth it, but if you have really really important data, backup.

Also, keep in mind that larger disk takes longer to heal, and healing is very stressful for the remaining disks. The system needs to read all the healthy disk in order to re-compute the data/parity and store it to the new disk. 5 disk setup means the healing needs to read 4 disk in order to regain back the data/parity in the lost disk. So if you are planning to use really big drive, 5 or 6 TB, you might want to consider RAID6 (RAIDZ2).

Shall get my HDD soon and wrap up. :)