Bubba power consumption without hard drive?

[w00t]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking into getting one of the Bubba v1 boxes, but thinking of putting 2x compact flash cards inside (linked by a CF -> ATA converter.)

As far as I understand, most of the power consumption of the Bubba comes from the hard drive? If I were to use this compact flash solution, how much energy could I save by not having a hard drive?

Thanks

EDIT: Should have looked more carefully. Found this: "Consumption without disk is only less than 1W measured at the 12V inlet, but probably 3-4W on the mains power adapter since it gets less efficient with less load." Pretty amazing!

[johannes]

Yes, you should be well below 5W, probably 2-3W measured on the mains inlet with two CF cards.

[squeak]

w00t: did you manage to get your compact flash set up to work? I am trying something similar but can't get past the installation process. The process seems to get to the third phase of usb memory stick reading (at about the two minute mark) and then nothing much else seems to happen, just the front led keeps flashing.

[albert]

Any updates on this, as I am quite interested.

Of course the filesystems need to be mounted with the noatime option, I am bit more worried about the swap partition on the compact flash. As of speed, hdparm shows about 20 MB/sec for the internal harddisk (I assume the system throughput is the bottleneck). But nowadays you can get a Kingston 16 GB CF for about 40 Euros with speeds of 20-25 MB/sec read/write, so the disk speed issue is not a problem.

So again, anyone already tried it?