Actually, Xeon E3s are just slighty different Core i CPUs, which means that from the Haswell (4th Gen) and above they only consume fractions of a watt when idling (less than your C2D T7300 btw).
The energy consumption of a CPU (or even a full system) is not dependant on the name of the series it is marketed in.
Or to put it differently: I have a system with an i3-4150, changing this to a Haswell Xeon E3 will not alter the idle power consumption since the power consumption comes from effeciency (or lack of such) of the on-board-VRMs, power supply and other factors.
my xeons are 40 watt pr cpu at max power consumption… but 10 years ago those where something like the cream of the crop in regard to low wattage processing.
duno how they compare today tho… ofc a storagenode doesn’t need much processing. i i could most likely manage with like 1 core being active… most of my power consumption are from my fans
yeah i have been kicking myself for buying a 2U rack case many times… should have been 4U so i could use 125MM fans
not quite sure what the best solution is… really there is some sensor stuff thats broken or poorly configured, that should keep the fan’s at a lower rpm when not needed… but they will just start to cycle up and down between to low and to fast so i turned it off until i get around to actually fixing it if possible…
its high on my list… but also it would mean at the very least hours of downtime while i try to trouble shoot the problem maybe take the whole thing apart… if it can be solved…
sure other fans might be more efficient and less noise… but that would most likely also mean less airflow… which is what keeps my hdd’s cool… so i’m not sure there really is a right choice here… so i just ended up leaving it until i’m wiser lol or get annoyed enough by it…
Odroid HC2, running ubuntu 18.04 LTS, storage is 8TB Seagate Ironwolf (actually 6,8TB after ext4 format and leaving some free space for trash), 3TB used atm. CPU usage never reaches 100% of single core, RAM usage is below 200MB.
Compact, cost and power efficient (12V * 2A power supply) headless solution.