Small and Silent, the Intel Atom

I recently decided to re-visit my Home Theatre PC system and my always on home PC. Recent electricity cost increases have made the $140 per quarter it costs to run my IT systems start to look a bit much. I decided to retire my main PC to more of an “as needed” role with an always on PC being ultra low power consumption. The plan was an Intel Atom D525 PC with 4GB RAM and a solid state hard drive running 24/7 along with my NAS. It was all fine in theory.

The system I built used an ASUS mini iTX motherboard with nVidia ION graphics. Only a handful of the iTX Atom motherboards supported dual digital screens, a non-negotiable requirement. It had a 4GB RAM limitation in the chipset but this was fine for my needs. Two 2GB SODIMM chips fitted in quite neatly and the ultra small Aywun case with external 65W PSU seemed pretty good. It supposedly could accommodate a single 2.5″ hard drive and a slim optical drive. The hard drive mount was fine but the slim optical drive was a tight fit and seemed to distort the drive slightly which made it either vibrate badly or not eject depending on its exact location.

With the system up and running, the meter attached to its power supply was indicating a power consumption of 27W which, based on current prices of $0.21/KWh, equates to around $13AU/quarter, not bad. It was also completely silent with no moving parts and all passive cooling.

Take 1: After removing the slim optical drive and reverting to a USB one for the install, Ubuntu 11.04 desktop was installed. It installed and ran fine and could easily do most of what was asked of it until video playback. HD up to 720p was perfect but 1080p was jerky and not watchable.

Take 2: After Ubuntu not being able to play 1080p, I decided to install Windows 7 instead so I could directly compare the Atom performance against my existing PC. I was not expecting it to play 1080p either and I was right. All other general use was fine although zipping or unzipping large files was, as expected due to a slow CPU, very slow. I was impressed by how fast the Windows shell was, general use was perfectly acceptable, probably due to the speed of the SSD.

I still was not happy due to the lack of 1080p which meant that my experiment could not form the basis of a Media Centre PC which I had hoped it would. I took a step back and decided to rebuild with a fan. I had a brand new model CPU, the bottom of the line Intel Pentium G620 and another iTX motherboard (also with dual digital video) and case from a cancelled order. The Aywun case was too small for the heat sink and fan so I used a slightly larger iTX case with an internal 150W power supply. Unfortunately this also means a power supply fan, a small one, and small fans are noisy. I simply swapped the hard drive across and thankfully it just worked so I didnt need a rebuild. Now I have a much faster (Windows experience CPU index 5.2 up from 3.5 for the atom) small PC, albeit a noisier one that will happily play 1080p. It draws slightly more power at around 32W at rest and the components were actually marginally cheaper than the Atom (full size DIMM RAM chips are faster as well as cheaper too). Graphics performance is actually a bit worse (based on the Windows experience index), the nVidia ION has more grunt than the Intel HD graphics chipset. This is not an issue given that it is not for gaming and video playback is more CPU dependent. The next step will be to remove the tiny power supply fan and try to mount and duct a larger quieter fan instead. Perhaps I can lose the CPU fan as well and simply vent the entire case with a top mounted 120mm Noctua silent fan, it should move more than enough air and be much quieter. Maybe then it will compare to the Mac Mini….but then again, maybe not. The larger case can take a low profile PCIe TV Tuner card though.

Now my home office draws around 130-180W (with screens on) for the NAS, switch, DSL modem, VOIP box, PC and fish tank (yes its on my office UPS) down from the 250-300W it was drawing previously. This is saving around $60/quarter in electricity. Break even will be in less than a year. I get all my equipment wholesale and can claim it as a deduction but can only claim 10% of the home power bill as a business expense. The only other downside is that I now may need heating in the office in winter….

Mac Mini Home Theatre PC

I have been installing some basic Home Theatre PC (HTPC) systems for clients so decided that I needed to do my own properly. My original Home Theatre “PC” was a “play anything” Phillips DVD player. It had a USB port that served us well but it was not the easiest to use. I had to provide extra power to the hard drive plugged into the USB port which meant the drive never turned off. It ran extremely hot in a closed cupboard and failed a few times before I decided to start again.

I spent a great deal of time looking at Home Theatre PC options for home. I initially decided that a Windows 7 Media Centre PC would suit my needs. I looked into making an ultra small form factor Media Centre PC to manage my significant (and growing) media library. The system initially had to handle any video media format (as well as audio although we didnt plan to use it for music), be easy to navigate and manage High Definition TV at full HD (1920×1080) via HDMI. It also had to be either cheap or re-use as many components that I already had as possible (such as an HD TV Tuner card). However, I ran into issues with SWMBO (She who must be obeyed) who had some specific design requirements (it has to be out of sight or look good). Out of site was going to be extremely difficult.

After failing to find anything that I considered suitable for a Home Theatre PC in parts (primarily a case and motherboard), I began to experiment with the late 2009/early 2010 Intel Mac Mini. I already had one my desk and thought it would make a suitable Home Theatre PC. A lack of TV tuner options (USB only) meant I had to drop TV as an integrated option. I had a Topfield PVR with USB out so I can copy and re-encode saved digital TV to the Mac Mini anyway. The Mac Mini is a great form factor for a Home Theatre PC, it is tiny, unobtrusive, has optical digital out, is very efficient. It also has an internal Infra Red receiver and (now) has native HDMI out. Its biggest downfall is a lack of Blu-Ray (the internal drive is DVD only).

I have my Mac Mini connected to the TV now and it is operating as a Home Theatre PC. It does not have an internal TV tuner (nor the ability to add one) and I do not have a USB or network tuner so it is not doing TV. It just plays downloaded and saved content from a 6TB QNAP NAS. I tried installing Windows 7 with Bootcamp to compare the two. Windows 7 is using Media Center, the Mac is using Plex. I tried using the built-in Mac app “Front Row” but it only really works with iTunes media and was not suitable for our needs. Plex was a little slow sometimes and had a habit of freezing up about once per week but is much nicer to use than Media Center. Windows 7 on the Mac Mini is a little sluggish (probably due to the 5400rpm HDD). The latest versions of Plex are completely stable and after a full rebuild (with faster hard drive, upgrade to 4GB RAM and no extra apps), it is now my permanent choice. The wireless connection was not reliable for HD streaming (even when connecting with 802.11n at 144mbps) so I had to install gigabit ethernet to speed it up. The full HD resolution did not display correctly on my TV until OSX 10.6.4 (a widely reported “overscan” issue). I bought a 1.8m mini-displayport male to HDMI male cable from Hong Kong to elegantly clean up the mini DVI to DVI then DVI to HDMI then HDMI cable mess. Six weeks after buying my Mac Mini, they released a new model with an HDMI port (Not happy). I have not connected the digital optical out from the Mac Mini so any downloaded content only plays in Stereo which is fine for most downloaded content.

The Mac Remote resembles an aluminium tongue depresser, it is too small and thin but is sturdy and it works, albeit in a fairly limited way. Plex has been designed for use with the Mac Remote and most functionality is fine. Plex remote for the iPad is a nice addition. It can act as a remote control for the Plex system on the TV or can stream media directly to the iPad (the latest Plex has a server and client component). Plex works best with strict file names and filing conventions as it tries to match media to an online database and download meta-data for it (images, information etc). This feature still needs some work but it is getting there. Any downloaded files usually need to be renamed (eg show\season X\show S0xE0x.avi) to give them the best chance of being properly indexed. My preferred renaming app is a Windows apps called “The Renamer” and since my downloads and NAS sorting happen on a Windows PC, I have not bothered trying to find a Mac equivalent.

There is no way I could build a similar spec PC in a case anywhere near as neat and compact for close to the price of the Mac Mini. That said, a custom PC would have an internal TV tuner card, plenty of hard drive space and native HDMI output. There are some nice and funky HTPC cases for PC’s if you want to make it a feature but if space and design are restricted, the Mac Mini is ideal and with Plex being both high quality software and free, it is my HTPC system of choice. My 5 year old daughter has no problems using it either.

Openfiler

I have been playing around with Openfiler for the past few weeks. Basically Openfiler is an open source, customised Linux operating system specifically designed to be a file server, or more specifically, an “Open Source Storage Management Appliance” . It has far more functionality than simple file storage though, it can be an FTP server, a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server, and even an iSCSI SAN if you need one (I used it while testing a VMWare vSphere infrastructure system). It will run on pretty much anything x86/x64 based (min spec 1Ghz processor with 512MB RAM), can interface with a Windows domain and its web based interface is pretty simple to use so anyone looking for a simple and cost effective bulk storage solution should definitely have a look at it.

I had a test server (2x Xeon 2.8, 4GB RAM and 4x200GB SATA drives in RAID 5) to try it on. As I already had hardware RAID, I didnt need to implement software RAID but as it supports software RAID 0,1,5,6 or 10, I could have. One thing that caught me out was a limitation of 4 primary partitions on the drives. Apparently a normal implementation would have the Openfiler system (by default this is 4 partitions) on a single drive or array and it would be separate from the data storage. It is not recommended to have the OS and the data on the same disks as a restoration may be more challenging. As I already had a 4 disk RAID array ready to use, and this was for testing only I just installed to that and therefore I could not use any of my drives for data which kind of defeated the purpose. A reinstallation on the same array but with a manual partition creating an extended fourth partition rather than a primary gave me over 550GB of usage storage. Following the basic installation instructions, I found it relatively simple to create a usable NAS box. I did not add it to a Windows domain but think that it would actually be easier than having to configure the Openfiler device as its own LDAP server. FTP was also pretty easy to get up and running. You dont need to know any Linux at all, the initial installation is graphical (unless you want console) and after the initial installation, all configuration is done via a web browser.

Apparently if you plan to use it for production block level storage (iSCSI, SAN), you apparently should use a second network interface for management although in testing, I have not bothered and simply use it across my network with only minor performance issues. It is actually easier to set up as an iSCSI target than it was for NFS or FTP and is simple to connect to VMWare ESX (although I did need to reboot it after re-mapping LUN’s before ESX could connect to it as an iSCSI target even though it could see it). I also had no problems connecting my Windows 7 laptop to it either using the built in software iSCSI initiator with pretty good performance (30-50MB/s over gigabit ethernet)

To set up openfiler as an iSCSI SAN:
1a. Create Physical volume on a single disk OR
1b. Create RAID volumes on multiple disks and create array
2. Add volumes from #1 into a Volume Group
3. Create an iSCSI volume in the VG from #2
4. Start the “iSCSI target server” service
5. Add a network entry for the client machine (or local subnet if private) at the bottom of “System > Network Setup”
6. Click “iSCSI Targets” on the Volumes page
7. Click “Add” to create a new target.
8. Click “Lun Mapping”
9. Click “Map”
10. Click “Network ACL”
11. Change the combo box for your network to “Allow”.

I am not sure if I would roll this into production just yet but for a backup storage system, or bulk storage of non-critical files (I used to run a 250GB iTunes server at a music publishing company that could definitely benefit from this type of flexible storage), it could be very useful. There are purely commercial alternatives for production use such as Datacore SAN Melody but there is an active userbase of Openfiler which should be able to assist with and commercial support options are available if required.

Daily Backups

Regular backups are very important for anyone, especially businesses. While a home user may lose some music or photos if their backups are not up to date, a business may lose invoices, orders, emails etc which cannot be replaced and may have a long term effect on the business.

You really cannot go too far with backups, depending on your risk profile and budget, your backups may be a simple file copy once per day or real time backups pushed to multiple locations. Obviously the more you do the more it will cost but the lower the risk of data loss if something happens.

Before I go into the options, don’t think that it wont happen. It will. Hardware fails, computers die, laptops get dropped or stolen, power spikes occur etc. If you go into this expecting the worst, you are usually in better shape when it happens than those who are not ready for it. Once you have had a significant failure and your backups are not good enough, you tend to take it more seriously in the future.

* Hard Drive Backups

As a bare minimum, and I mean bare minimum, a portable hard drive is a cheap and convenient option to back up your data from one or more locations. It can be a bit manual and does require some discipline but is much easier than burning to CD/DVD. Many come with backup tools but having seen some of them in action, I recommend using a simple backup script to maintain full control over the backup process. Windows (from Vista onwards) ships with a utility called Robocopy which, while small, is one of the best free applications ever to come out of Microsoft. Older versions of Windows can also use it but it needs to be downloaded as part of the Windows 2000 or Windows XP “Resource Kit”. To use it, simply create a folder (call it “scripts”) and create a blank text file, call it “backup.bat”. If you have Windows XP or earlier, you need to put the robocopy.exe file into the same folder. You need to edit backup.bat (right click and edit or it will try to run it). The way you use it is to call robocopy, give it a source location and a destination location and tell it what you want it to do, one command per line. eg robocopy “c:\email” “f:\email” /MIR will use robocopy to “MIRror” the c:\email folder to f:\email assuming that your portable hard drive is allocated drive F:. The /MIR or “mirror” option will delete target files if they no longer exist in the source. This is useful to ensure your backup drive doesnt grow bigger than your data drive but you run the risk of data being lost if the source file get accidently deleted then a backup is run. A better option for a portable hard drive is to have two backups pushed to it, one with the /MIR switch to mirror it and one without which will copy changed files and new files but will not delete anything.

Other Robocopy options can make your backups work better or be a bit more flexible. eg

• robocopy “source folder” “destination folder” /MIR /w:2 /r:2 will wait for two seconds (/w:2) and retry twice (/r:1) if a file is in use and cannot be copied. The defaults are wait 30 seconds and retry 1,000,000 times which will not always be useful.
• robocopy “source folder” “destination folder” /S /log:logfile.txt will copy from the source to the destination including subdirectories (/S) (but not empty subdirectories use “/E” if you want empty subdirectories as well) and will log everything it does to logfile.txt
• robocopy “source folder” “destination folder” /S /XF *.txt *.tmp will copy but will exclude files (/XF) that end with “txt” or “tmp”

Other useful switches are /XD (eXclude Directory), /MOVE (MOVE files and folders, ie delete from source after copying) and /PURGE (delete destination files that no longer exist in the source – used with /E has same effect as /MIR)

A full list of Robocopy options can be found by opening a command prompt and typing “robocopy /?”

The next step up from a USB/eSATA hard drive for disk based backups is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. This can be a single drive like the USB connected on or can be a RAID array connecting via NAS, FTP, iSCSI etc depending on your needs and budget. Openfiler can convert pretty much any hardware to a NAS device that Robocopy or another backup system can access for backup storage.

* CD/DVD backups

If you need or want archives of your data for long term storage, DVD backups are cheap and relatively reliable (CD’s as well but since DVD burners and blank DVD’s are so cheap, there is little point persevering with CD’s). A standard blank DVD holds 4.3GB of data which should cover most of your important stuff (documents and emails) for some time. They take up very little space and are readily readable. They do, however, require more work to create, the process cannot be as automated. DVD burning software like Infrarecorder is required (most DVD burners and PC’s will come with some form of burning software which will usually suffice). You will need to know where your data is stored and how much space it takes up.

* Tape Backups

If you have a lot of data and need archiving, the most cost effective solution is a tape backup unit. They are relatively expensive to buy but in Dollars per Megabyte, they are very cheap. The tapes are also very portable which makes it easy for you to transport your data if required (having the most recent tape in your bag each night is better than leaving your tapes onsite if there is a fire!). Tape drives run from a few hundred dollars for slow DAT format tape drives which will do 20GB or so, up to a few thousand for a high speed LTO 4 format tape drive that can hold over 1000GB of data on a single tape (the tapes are more expensive too). They also go much, much higher than this if you decide to opt for a tape library where the backups can span multiple tapes and tape changes are done automatically but I am not going to go into Enterprise class tape libraries here. My rule of thumb is to calculate the storage space you need now, at least triple it and buy a tape system accordingly. While it is possible, I strongly recommend ensuring that your backups dont run longer than a single tape over the lifespan of the tape unit and tapes (you should be able to assume that a DAT drive will last at least 3 years and LTO 4-5 years, the tapes will last longer than this).

* Offsite Backups

There are a number of backup services which, for a fee, provide a quantity of space on the internet where you can upload your files to keep a copy offiste where you can access them as you need them. While they are generally considered reasonably secure, if you are uploading sensitive information, your data should be secured before uploading. Zip archives can be secured with powerful encryption, 7Zip has this functionality built in, simply select the encryption option and put in a secure password and the file will be both compressed (for easier upload) and securely password protected.