This probably sounds ridiculous but I have an old rackmount PowerEdge 1950 I am trying to set up as a low-power Minecraft data backup / deduplication server, using Ubuntu, the SSH virtual file system, cp -al hard linking, and rsync --delete-before
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I see that if I keep pulling out components the power consumption keeps on going down, yet it is still doing blazing fast doing SSH backups.
I've whittled it down to a single 1.6 ghz 4-core CPU, 2 1-gig memory modules, 1 power supply, low-power memory mode in the BIOS, and with all that, it's running at about 130 watts idle.
Next up is to see about setting it to power up on a timer before the nightly backup occurs, and then power down after the backup job completes, to save even more energy. I don't know yet, if there's a way to remotely power it up over the Internet on demand for data restores.
Also, I don't know if the hard drives must spin all the time with a PERC controller... apparently yes. I may try switching to non-PERC linux md RAID so the drives can spin down when idle. (I realize what a joke it is to do this when I have a PERC controller with battery backup, but the goal is energy savings.)
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So anyway, I have found that if I remove the second 1.6 ghz 4-core processor it still boots fine without any POST errors. However, this leaves the CPU interface pins exposed in the socket, and I'm uncertain how to proceed as I don't want contaminants getting in the exposed CPU socket.
Should I just wipe the thermal paste off the 2nd CPU heatsink and install it over the empty CPU socket as a cover? I don't know if there's any risk of it touching the socket pins due to the spring pressure on the heatsink.
Is there an official cover that Dell makes to go over an empty 1950/2900 CPU socket?