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Few questions b4 I get a Bubba

Got problems with Bubba? Then this forum is for you.
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nurbz
Posts: 1
Joined: 12 Feb 2008, 09:38

Few questions b4 I get a Bubba

Post by nurbz »

Hi there,

Bubba seems to be a very nice device, but I've got few questions before I buy one.

1) Wake on Lan: does Bubba support wake-on-lan? When there is no active download, or I dont access the files on it, I'd rather like to have it switched off.

2) Is there a sleep mode, or something like that? Say I access few files, and once I find what I need, I dont access Bubba for few hours. Does it go into a sleep mode/ultra low-energy consumption (i.e. even lower than the advertised 10W)? Alternatively, is it possible to make itseld switched off when it is inactive for x amount of time?

3) Is it possible to install a 2.5" HD, rather than a 3.5"?

Thanks in advance

Alex
Pressurized
Posts: 53
Joined: 11 Jun 2007, 17:12
Location: East of England

Post by Pressurized »

In advance of posts by wiser users...

1) I don't know

2) It may be possible to have bubba monitor itself and, when activity drops below a certain level, power down. A more elegant way may be to power down the HDD after a period of no access. Bubba comes set to run it continually. This setting can be changed but the downside may be to have it starting and stopping a lot which is reckoned to cause more wear than it running always.

3) The HDD is a standard IDE. Any adaptor that converts to a 2.5" drive ought to work.


For what it's worth, 10W is noise against the background of power use in a typical house. We're talking about £10 to £15 a year, I reckon. Computing doesn't get more frugal than that. This is one hell of a piece of kit.
Clive
Posts: 164
Joined: 07 Mar 2007, 07:15

Post by Clive »

Pressurized wrote: For what it's worth, 10W is noise against the background of power use in a typical house. We're talking about £10 to £15 a year, I reckon. Computing doesn't get more frugal than that. This is one hell of a piece of kit.
Yep, I totally agree with this statement. I would never want to have Bubba powering down and waking up again. I use mine as a mailserver so it is constantly being connected to, to download the acres of spam it receives each day :-)

If I was using it as a fileserver then I would get annoyed at the delay for the wakeup on LAN.

As you say 10watts is nothing and this benefit far out weighs many of the other issues relating to transfer rates or whatever.
Ubi
Posts: 1549
Joined: 17 Jul 2007, 09:01

Post by Ubi »

Yeah.
We actually start to use bubbas to replace secondary dns servers and monitoring machines. The difference in energy consumption pays for bubba within two years =)
I have mine stashed in a cupboard. I do hear the HD spinning when its really silent. It helps to put extra padding underneath to reduce that to even lower levels

Ubi
johannes
Posts: 1470
Joined: 31 Dec 2006, 07:12
Location: Sweden
Contact:

Post by johannes »

Yes, I agree with all of you, power-down isn't really an option for us. There are a few additional reasons for that:

Powering down the CPU would only save about 0,5 W, leaving disk spin-down the only reasonable option (thus keeping Linux alive). However, due to the nature of Linux (logging etc.) and all the server applications running it's hard to keep any longer spun-down-times. Spinning up and down the disk too frequent shortens the disk's life-time, so we decided to keep it spinning constantly. However, if you wan't to try doing this, read more here.

Also, my home PC uses 16 W in standby mode (turned off, wake on lan etc. disabled). The only way to get it below 16W was to cut the mains power, so we found 10W was good enough.
/Johannes (Excito co-founder a long time ago, but now I'm just Johannes)
Cheeseboy
Posts: 789
Joined: 08 Apr 2007, 12:16

Post by Cheeseboy »

Hello,

Regarding question 1. Wake On Lan,
I just tested it. A Bubba that has been shut down, but still has power and active NIC does not start up on the standard WOL packet.

But, as all of the previous posters have been trying to point out: the point is moot, the Bubba should already be on, so there is no need to power it up.

/Cheese has now lost the uptime competition again...
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