Bubba Two Power Consumption

[asparak]

Just a simple question really, but how much power should a brand new Bubba Two with a 1TB disk be drawing?

Its not exactly thrashing - top shows very little activity, but its drawing almost 30W peak (25.97W average over last 24 hours) and I understood that should be closer to 12 - 15W. The Bubba Storage is drawing 9W, which sounds about right.

[asparak]

I'm guessing from the lack of replies that 25- 30W consumption is normal for a 1TB Bubba Two.

[Binkem]

This should be considerably less, according to the Bubba-crew. I haven't got a power meter, so there is no way for met to check the power consumption of my Bubba.

[johannes]

Hi all,

Sorry for the late reply, but no, 25-30W can't be right, if that's the case you have a faulty unit. Also, 25-30W would mean that the case probably would have been 60-70 degrees C hot, you shouldn't be able to touch it. Normal consumption with a WD GP disk is around 7-8W (measured on 12V) or 9-12W (measured on mains).

What are you using to measure? I know that some of those cheap digital meters don't work reliably with switched power supplies.

Is the PSU very warm (can you touch it)? Is your Bubba Two warm? If you have some command line skills you can double check Bubba's (and Bubba storage's) disk temperature using [code]hddtemp /dev/<disk>[/code].

Please let me know.
Thanks,

[asparak]

Hi Johannes,

/dev/sda1 is currently running at 41C, but its quite a warm day.
Memory usage currently 91% and currently reading 243.5V, 0.91A, 21.69W on a Brennenstuhl PM220 power meter, measured at the mains. This is a recommended meter by the EU Energy Saving Council. The PSU seems fine, just warm to the touch, but not unduly so.
Over last 24 hours - low 19.7W - High 24.42W
The Bubba Storage consistently registers around 9W on an identical meter.

I have turned a lot of the services off (MT-DAAP, FTP and a couple of others), as they are not being used currently and I'm quite happy using CLI. For my sins, I'm RedHat Certified.

[johannes]

HI again asparak,

I did a reference measurement today, just to be sure. Test setup:

Bubba Two, with 2 TB internal disk. One mounted USB memory attached, and one gigabit link attached. No data transfer running, so apart from booting and some web-UI fiddling, mainly an idle test.

I am measuring on the mains side, with an large ASEA old-school mechanical power meter (the type that used to be used for house power consumption metering, used by the electric companies). It is certified and calibrated, and it is by design supposed to be immune to being fooled by inductive loads (switched power supplies).

Over one hour of test it measured an average of 8.7W, say +/-5% for my possible misreadings of the clock etc.

Adding more load (CPU load, disk access etc.) will increase the consumption, but only with 2-3W (I know this from previous tests), so this is not the explanation.

It is strange that your Bubba storage measures OK though (even though that as well is a little high, should be around 5-6W), perhaps it is something in the load signature of Bubba Two that fools your meter. There are switched supplies on the Bubba Two input that doesn't exsist on the Bubba Storage design.

I hope this clarifies things, and I'm sorry to say that your meter doesn't seem to read OK at all load types.

[kfudd]

Is the PSU very warm (can you touch it)? Is your Bubba Two warm? If you have some command line skills you can double check Bubba's (and Bubba storage's) disk temperature using

Code: Select all

hddtemp /dev/<disk>

.

Please let me know.
Thanks,

Sorry to highjack the thread. How do you install hddtemp? I'd like to check the temperature of my disks, but for one hddtemp is not installed on my Bubba 2 nor can I install it:

Code: Select all

bubba:~# apt-get install hddtemp
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.

Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that
the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  hddtemp: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7-1) but 2.3.6.ds1-13etch7 is to be installed
E: Broken packages

bubba:~# apt-get install libc6
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
libc6 is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 31 not upgraded.

Can anyone give me a hint?

[kfudd]

Nevermind, I edited my sources.list file an added some of the unstable releases. This allowed me to install a newer version of libc6 which is compatible with hddtemp. After which installing hddtemp was possible.

Glad I got it to work too... my disk was running at 53C, ouch. But it is quite hot and humid here today.
I guess that is what you get for fanless cooling.

[asparak]

If you are worried about the temperature, I use an old laptop cooler, I bought on ebay for 4 pounds and it keeps my Bubba, Bubba Storage, Wireless AP and a Cisco Switch nice and cool. Only draws an extra 3W as well.

Ambient in my office is 38C and the disks are only 42C.

I switched the PSU's around at the weekend and power draw has dropped somewhat, but is still showing 14W average, so much happier than I was. Guess its the other PSU that is the problem.

[carl]

Nevermind, I edited my sources.list file an added some of the unstable releases. This allowed me to install a newer version of libc6 which is compatible with hddtemp. After which installing hddtemp was possible.

Glad I got it to work too... my disk was running at 53C, ouch. But it is quite hot and humid here today.
I guess that is what you get for fanless cooling.

It seems that you've might have some wrong entries in your sources.list file, as hddtemp in etch doesn't require an libc6 that high version.

/Carl

[kfudd]

I cleaned up my soures.list and it installed now. thanks.