Heat and Noise
I moved my shuttle into the living room and the fan whine is now really getting to me. Tried adjusting the BIOS but I can't get the fan to spin less than ~1950RPM (according to lm_sensors) even with the CPU temp in the low 40s. Having discovered that I can get a quieter replacement for only a few quid, I think I'll just go-ahead and try swapping it out.
I've also been thinking about heat in general and am looking into using kernel laptop_mode to manage disk spindown much like I do on my Linux laptops. I wouldn't want the disk spinning up and down every 10mins but an hourly duty cycle may work. Based on 50000 start/stop cycles and a 5yr lifespan, the disk should be able to manage an average of 27 per day over the course of it's useful life...
Playing with smartctl and hdparm, I noticed that the acoustic mode of my 200Gb Seagate Barracuda (ST3200826A) was set to fast rather than quiet. However, hdparm was unable to change it:
Don't know if this is an incompatibility with my disk or an issue with the ATIIXP controller... Any thoughts? It's not like the disk is noisy during normal use as I can't hear it above the fan but I'm still interested in quietening down the head-seeks if possible.
I noticed my drive chattering to itself every now-and-again during idle and thought this might be internal smart testing. Sure enough, if I turn off auto offline testing (smartctl -o off /dev/hda), the chattering stops. I guess I caught it during one of it's 4hourly testing cycles... I think I might disable this feature for certain parts of the day as the additional disk activity is unnecessary.
Using the p4-clockmod cpufreq driver, I'm able to control my CPU speed in increments from ~300MHz to 2.53GHz. I couldn't get the acpi cpufreq driver to load and the speedstep driver doesn't appear to work but it may need enabling in the BIOS. Using the userspace cpu-frequency governor with an app like cpudyn or cpuspeed should enable intelligent cpu performance management and consequently reduce heat and power when the system isn't busy.
It's all a compromise between performance, heat and noise. For this project, I'll be trying to minimise noise by managing performance as much as I can.
I've also been thinking about heat in general and am looking into using kernel laptop_mode to manage disk spindown much like I do on my Linux laptops. I wouldn't want the disk spinning up and down every 10mins but an hourly duty cycle may work. Based on 50000 start/stop cycles and a 5yr lifespan, the disk should be able to manage an average of 27 per day over the course of it's useful life...
Playing with smartctl and hdparm, I noticed that the acoustic mode of my 200Gb Seagate Barracuda (ST3200826A) was set to fast rather than quiet. However, hdparm was unable to change it:
# hdparm -M 128 /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
setting acoustic management to 128
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD:ACOUSTIC failed: Input/output error
acoustic = 0 (128=quiet ... 254=fast)
Don't know if this is an incompatibility with my disk or an issue with the ATIIXP controller... Any thoughts? It's not like the disk is noisy during normal use as I can't hear it above the fan but I'm still interested in quietening down the head-seeks if possible.
I noticed my drive chattering to itself every now-and-again during idle and thought this might be internal smart testing. Sure enough, if I turn off auto offline testing (smartctl -o off /dev/hda), the chattering stops. I guess I caught it during one of it's 4hourly testing cycles... I think I might disable this feature for certain parts of the day as the additional disk activity is unnecessary.
Using the p4-clockmod cpufreq driver, I'm able to control my CPU speed in increments from ~300MHz to 2.53GHz. I couldn't get the acpi cpufreq driver to load and the speedstep driver doesn't appear to work but it may need enabling in the BIOS. Using the userspace cpu-frequency governor with an app like cpudyn or cpuspeed should enable intelligent cpu performance management and consequently reduce heat and power when the system isn't busy.
It's all a compromise between performance, heat and noise. For this project, I'll be trying to minimise noise by managing performance as much as I can.
posted by Mezzanine at 1:23 pm
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