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No ECC.. hmm. Maybe my data at home isn't that important, definitely not $$$ mission critical. Curious what the power draw is with an older Thinkpad like this

No ECC.. hmm. Maybe my data at home isn't that important, definitely not $$$ mission critical. Curious what the power draw is with an older Thinkpad like this while idling and under load. Edit: thank you nequo.

gymbeaux 4y ago
In my research, there’s a lot of conflicting info about ECC RAM, but it seems like it’s not able to guarantee data integrity over long periods of time, but for enterprise situations, the relatively small premium is worth having if it prevents even one bit flip. As for power draw, a Sandy Bridge laptop will probably draw around 25-30W idle and 50-60W under full load (excluding any GPU)
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  As someone who got f*d up with Root CA failing, because the writes* to HDD were sucessful, but reads were not...
- kiririn 4y ago
  For home use you’re mainly buying ECC for it to ring alarm bells when a stick spontaneously fails, and to avoid the data loss nightmares and corruption spread to backups that follow
- gymbeaux 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is all 100% correct so why are the haters hating? Anyone who has googled around on ECC info knows that there are many arguments on forums about what ECC RAM does and how valuable it is and when. For example, colloquially, you NEED ECC RAM for ZFS disks, however even ECC RAM can only compensate for so much. Power draw figures are on-point.
nequo 4y ago
> Curious what the power draw is with an older Thinkpad like this while idling and under load. It is specifically detailed in the post: As a result of all of this, the T430 is very quiet while using about 10-12W of power while idling. Under the maximum CPU load generated by `stress`, the total system power usage is around 34W.
mftrhu 4y ago
> Curious what the power draw is with an older Thinkpad like this while idling and under load. I have an X230i running Debian, and I got it to idle - screen on, backlight low, no browser open, Emacs and Syncthing running - at around 8 W. It gets up to ~10 W with light usage - i.e., a few browser tabs open - ~13 W at 40% load, and ~17 W at 75% (I tested the last two with x265 video playback, which doesn't get hardware acceleration on Ivy Bridge). The i3-3120m in it should have a TDP of 35 W, but I don't think I ever saw it draw that much.

gymbeaux 4y ago

In my research, there’s a lot of conflicting info about ECC RAM, but it seems like it’s not able to guarantee data integrity over long periods of time, but for enterprise situations, the relatively small premium is worth having if it prevents even one bit flip. As for power draw, a Sandy Bridge laptop will probably draw around 25-30W idle and 50-60W under full load (excluding any GPU)

justsomehnguy 4y ago
As someone who got f*d up with Root CA failing, because the writes* to HDD were sucessful, but reads were not...
kiririn 4y ago
For home use you’re mainly buying ECC for it to ring alarm bells when a stick spontaneously fails, and to avoid the data loss nightmares and corruption spread to backups that follow
gymbeaux 4y ago
I'm pretty sure this is all 100% correct so why are the haters hating? Anyone who has googled around on ECC info knows that there are many arguments on forums about what ECC RAM does and how valuable it is and when. For example, colloquially, you NEED ECC RAM for ZFS disks, however even ECC RAM can only compensate for so much. Power draw figures are on-point.

nequo 4y ago

> Curious what the power draw is with an older Thinkpad like this while idling and under load. It is specifically detailed in the post: As a result of all of this, the T430 is very quiet while using about 10-12W of power while idling. Under the maximum CPU load generated by `stress`, the total system power usage is around 34W.

mftrhu 4y ago

> Curious what the power draw is with an older Thinkpad like this while idling and under load. I have an X230i running Debian, and I got it to idle - screen on, backlight low, no browser open, Emacs and Syncthing running - at around 8 W. It gets up to ~10 W with light usage - i.e., a few browser tabs open - ~13 W at 40% load, and ~17 W at 75% (I tested the last two with x265 video playback, which doesn't get hardware acceleration on Ivy Bridge). The i3-3120m in it should have a TDP of 35 W, but I don't think I ever saw it draw that much.