I was able to spend a little more time gathering some numbers around performance and power usage over the last couple of days so I figured I would share a little bit about what I was able to learn from the build I described in part1.

Power usage:

After purchasing a ‘Kill A Watt’ from Home Depot, I set out to try and determine how many watts were being drawn by my mini-itx NAS.

Luckily the ‘Kill A Watt’ is a device that is very easy to setup and use, so it did not take me long to discover the following: the server consumes around 50 watts during start-up. After the boot-up process has finished, the power consumption levels off to right around 34.5 watts.  According to the Kill A Watt, that amounts to less then $3.00 per month…not bad as far as I am concerned.

Various attempts to lower that usage even further resulted in very little drop in that number, I believe that I could have knocked off a couple of watts had I removed one of the DIMM’s and ran the server with 1 DIMM and 2GB of RAM instead of 2 DIMM’s and 4GB of ram. I decided that having the additional RAM was worth the few extra watts that could be saved.

Network performance:

Using a Netgear Gigabit switch and a couple of cat6 cables I was able to achieve transfer speeds of 29 MB/sec over samba between FreeNAS and my Mac laptop. Throughput numbers over my Linksys 10/100 WRT54G wired network ports were less stellar, I saw throughput of around 7.1 MB/sec.  The wireless numbers were not as good as I had hoped, however they are probably what I should have expected for a shared 802.11g link, between 1 and 2 MB/sec.

Being that this is an ‘archive’ of sorts I can certainly live with those numbers for now, my main focus on this particular project was stability, reliability and redundancy.