That is an interesting thought. My newest desktop is an HP EliteDesk running a core i5 and is rated at 37W. It for sure runs cooler than what it replaced
The problem with the Esprimo is that it isn't in a case that will take two 3.5"hdd That rather why a Pi is preferred - I can maybe get an empty rack mount case and fit everything in it.
But it is food for thought.
On power consumption terms that switch must be hungry too. If it has a fan it must be taking a good few watts.
I like the TP-Link Easy Smart range because you get extra features like port mirroring and VLAN tagging. Going rate for a 16 port one on ebay about 30-60 quid, eg with PoE:
If you've only wire 2 pairs per socket that will prevent doing gigabit though.
Theo
Oh no, me mate and I wired the whole house to full CAT5/structured cabling standards . BUT that isn't necessarily good enough for gigabit. Cable might have too much attenuation.
Many domestic installations don't get anywhere near the 305m that's the max in the ethernet spec. So you can get away with out of spec cabling because the spec expects the attenuation from 305m but you only have 30m.
Try it and see? Patch a couple of ports together (without using a switch), put a machine at each end and see if a gigabit link will come up and stably pass traffic. You might be surprised.
Theo
yeah. Some of the links almost certainly would, But I checked the watts on the one I have. Its pretty low - less than 20 - and I think I wouldnt save much more than 10 watts. And to find one that would physically fit was as much money as a PI4B or more
So I am afraid Gigabit ethernet has been relegated to the 'nice to have, some day' category
Yes, my experience is that tens of metres of home made (by me) CAT5 UTP cable does gigabit quite happily.
Not necessarily. I run USB powered 2.5in hard drives from raspberry pi's. Some are the Western Digitial USB external drvies, and others are run from USB powered USB-SATA converters.
I also run 3.5in sata drives - but then you do need powered USB <-> SATA.
And if it's cat5E then 100m or more works
I am not sure what my longest run is. Could be around 50m Anyway, 'fast enough and not power hungry enough' is my current feeling on what I have
The limit is 100m for 100BaseT/1000BaseT. Cat5e is good enough for 100m
1000BaseT, and lower-quality cabling should work for shorter runs.Standard 4-wire telephone cable (star quad) works for >30m 100BaseT, although the standard requires Cat5, twisted pair cable.
cu Michael
I *think* 305m was 10baseT? Mmm. no. it seems ALL twisted pair ethernet is characterised as 100m..it must be a delay issue rather than attentuation when doing all nodes traffic.
Wash yer mouth out with soap...
When I did mine, the problem I had was kinks in the wire, due to twist from unrolling it badly, and the pulling it tight. Something about bend radius. I found them and it is OK now.
Yes, sorry, I shouldn't have over generalized my own experience.
Nominally, the total power available from a rPi USB, for peripherals, is enough. I couldn't get it to work, reliably, but others may have a better power supply to the rPi and may have a lower power 2.5" HDD.
My HDD is old, taken out of a new laptop about 10 years ago. Back then it was cheaper to buy a laptop with an HDD, and replace it with a SSD, rather than just buy one with an SSD, for some bizarre reason?
So I had the HDD just lying around and repurposed it for the rPi, it's been running for 4 years, as a NAS, which has exceeded my expectations.
I got lots of that. probably. But it all works at 100...
No. For 10Base2, the limit was 185m, while 10Base5 (thick ethernet / "yellow cable") could go up to 500m.
There is both attenuation, as well as maximum round-trip time so that collisions are properly detected everywhene on one segment.
I would not install such an abomination, but if the wire is already in the wall, it is worth a try. At my mother's house, it works just fine.
cu Michael
On 01/10/2023 11:17, The Natural Philosopher wrote: adius. I found them and it is OK now.
Yeah, mine initially worked at 100 Mb/s, I untwisted the kinks, and then it worked at 1Gb/s. Probably lesson 101 for professional cable layers, but it confused me. I was thinking length, when it was just kinks.
You have to respect the bend radius. I said this to our Sparks and I think he was impressed.
While I was a SLAC we were using some 10Base2, and one physics group managed to screw up one of the segments. Their offices had been wired, but they decided to extend the segment down to the experiment, without asking anyone. And they used their quite thin 50-Ohm coax, which they normally used in patch cords in their equipment. Well of course this was quite a long extension with a consequent high DC impedance, which messed up the collision detection.
And this was not all. They had a quest to "tidy up". Now those who remember
10Base2 will recall that the cable would have a T-piece inserted in it at the workstation location, and the T-piece was plugged into the ethernet socket on the back of the w/s. These physicists didn't like this, as it meant the segment entered their office and then left it again. So they moved the segment and its T-piece out of the office, and connected a length of 50-ohm coax from the T-piece, into the office and then connected that to the w/s. Much tidier. This, it seems, messed up the cable impedance so they got lots of reflections and packet loss.
you do get reflections off kinks.
ANYWAY, no switch upgrade.
I have decided that a headless Pi4B with 1GB RAM and some powered SATA cables will do the biz.
Big issue will be packaging, and Ive stretched the goodwill of the mate with a 3D printer a bit far..I hate itzy bitsy usb wall warts, and stuff in separate boxes...
So a case with room for two 3.5" HDDs, the Pi4B, and a built-in PSU? 3D printing all that might stretch any friendship. Why wouldn't you just bung it all in an old desktop PC case, with a PC PSU left in to power the HDDs and manually wired up to power the Pi4 (you'll need ground the standby signal wire to make the PSU turn on)?
The powered aspect is what makes USB-SATA adapters more expensive. Those that come without power supplies are dirt cheap on Ebay, although the cheap ones might not be reliable (I can confirm that they're Linux-friendly though).
2.5 inch drives will spin themselves down automatically as they are aimed at laptops, or I should say were, given everything has a SSD these days.
I used to use my ASUS router which had a USB3 port to attach a drive to work as a HOME NAS, but when the Pi 4B came out with gigabit Ethernet and USB3, I moved it over to that as it was much faster and allowed Linux friendly NFS as well as SMB.
The drives I've been using are Samsung M3 and later sold as Maxtor M3 USB3 drives, instead of being SATA drives in a USB caddy these just have USB interfaces so are very low power and spin down quite quickly.
I've recently replaced it with a Samsung T7 portable USB SSD, which eliminates the slight spin up delay every time you access the shared drive. The Maxtor M3 is now on another Pi 4B as a nightly backup to the SSD, and the original Samsung M3 on a Pi 3B is a weekly off site backup.
My Pi 4Bs are all in cases and I use 40mm rather than 30mm fans to keep these cool and quiet.
---druck
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