Low consumption PC for a PCIe 4x SSD
 

This PCIe 4x SSD seems just right for me. Is there a low consumption PC that has the necessary PCIe 4x slot to take this SSD? Consumption is important because it will be run off a solar off-grid supply.

I looked at Asus EEE PC family but found nothing. What else is there, known for its low consumption?

If you need to boot from that, you'd need a supported board that both can boot to pci and is known to boot to linux in pci. Those revo drives are meant for high grade server and workstation stuff. I think you'd be better off with a normal sata ssd.

How do you find out if a given mobo boots linux from a given ssd?

Only by some web report. One can tend to feel confident that one might work with clones of commercial reports such as a RH clone should work as well as OpenSuse might work. See some of the reports on sites like newegg also.

From an energy point of view those boards are not close to some of the intel ssd's numbers.

For the same money, does raid with intel ssd's outperform the revo PCIe 4x card?

Depends on which revo and what raid. The very top line revo's are some of the fastest anywhere but I don't think you can use true hardware raid. Software raid may suit a backup plan but it may consume more resources than it offers for speed.

I'd think for the money and stability I'd still go with a hardware raid card and ssd drives.

Power consumptuion is pretty high on that SSD.

Intel Atom and AMD Fusion CPUs are the current x86 'low power, low power consumption' systems to get. Be warned, the new D 2XXX atom CPUs have very poor/unusable GPU drivers with linux. The AMD 'E' series (E-300, E-350 or E-450) have better GPUs and are slightly more efficent than the older (supported with linux) intel atoms.

Asus EEE PCs are laptops/notebooks/netbooks. Are you looking for a laptop, or a low power consumption desktop?

Comparing with the 480Gbyte OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 claiming up to 1500 Mbytes/s sequential read for $650. What's the best performing hardware raid with intel ssd's for $650?

You have us in a corner. You can't get the fastest and the lowest power at the same time. Which do you need to have?

That board is one of the fastest and should be used in a very high end system for those numbers.

You misunderstood. I asked what was the fastest raided ssd for $650, not the fastest and lowest-consumption one. Consumption of the ssd is not a concern because it never gets huge anyway, not for $650. But drive performance is critical in my application.

That is almost impossible to answer. There are various level SSDs, 'consumer' and 'enterprise' are the most common.

Consumer SSDs are built for speed. Enterprise SSDs are built for reliabilty.

To use intel as an example, Intel 710 series( enterprise) 100GB SSD is about $400-500. A Intel 520 series (consumer) 120GB is about $120-150.

So for $650, you could have several Intel 520s in some RAID setup. It would be much faster than a single 710 series. The 710 series would be more reliable though.

If it was me, I'd be going for a single Intel 520. They are almost as fast as a revodrive-

http://techreport.com/review/22663/o...-state-drive/3
http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_520_review

Much simpler setup, no need to have a bigger case (many low power consumption computers are in slimline/SFF cases that will only take 1/2 height cards), lower power consumption and much cheaper.

BTW, what is with going for the highest read/wite speeds you can get? Its nice to have a fast drive, but with any of the low power consumption computers around, spending 4-5 times as much on a faster SSD will make about zero real world difference. The low power CPUs havent got enough CPU performance to make the much faster drives worth it (in almost all cases, you might be an exception)

The Intel 520's benchmark result is 411 MBytes/s, whereas the 480 GB revo result is 894 Mbytes/s. Any other contestants?

Well I wasn't thinking of 18 Watt computers like the eee pc, 100-200 Watts is probably low enough.

Never think that comparing between 2 different hardware tests (on slightly different hardware) is a yalid comparison.

You are also comparing apples to oranges. The 894MB/sec result is with HD Tune Pro, Random Write. The 411MB/sec result is with HD Tune (non-pro version) and its an average read speed.

If you have a look at the legionhardware test, you can see that the 240GB revodriev is only a little faster than the 480GB revodrive.

Then if you check the techreport test, you can see that the 240GB revodrive is only a little faster than the 240GB intel 510/520 series.

So after asking specificly about low consumption compuiters, now you've decided that a full power computer is OK? Is this bcause you have your heart set on a revodrive?

If you are like the people I know who are on offgird power, having a low power consumption computer makes more sense than throwing large amounts of cash at a revodrive. You can get the advantages of a fast SSD at a fraction of the revodrive pirce.

This is from the legionhardware test:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...9&d=1351359244

The 480GB revo is much faster than the 240GB revo. The 240Gb revo is a little faster than the 240GB intel 520, at the other site. Writing is where most ssd's show the lowest performance, and the 480GB revo beats them all when it comes to writing.

100W is not a full power computer, typical power supplies for pc's nowadays are much bigger.

Not exactly, I have my heart set on the 850 MBytes/s random write. Any alternatives at this level or higher?