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Rain barrels

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This last weekend I purchased two black food grade 55gal barrels from a local rain barrel maker. Black isn’t a color he normally has, and we figured they might hide a bit better on the side of the house. They used to contain 55gals of “Nutrisound 75”, made by Agrarian Marketing Corp. I’m hoping to get some more info from them about the product, but it looks like it’s a nutritional supplement for livestock. Judging by the smell, I’d say it’s got Vitamin B in it. I can’t see what it has currently since the label has faded pretty seriously.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to kit them out with a faucet, link them together, and figure out some type of rain diverter for getting water into the barrel. I hope to create a bit of an evolving post for this so I can detail my work on the project, what works, etc. There’s a lot of info out there about making rain barrels, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of people saying “this is what I did, and while it works, this would work better”.

First work will be this weekend. At least cleaning them out and maybe drilling holes for the faucet, etc. We’ll see.

Stay tuned.

Storage Performance Geekout

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This is a rather huge geekout, so if you’re not into drive performance on various machines, feel free to ignore this post. =) It’s original goal was to look at the performance difference between a 2009 Mac Mini, 2009 Mac Mini Server, and 2010 Mac Mini Server. It then grew to be “Let’s compare all the storage I have in my rack”.

In this, I’m going to be comparing the results from 5 different machines. They are:

  • Early 2009 Mac Mini (4GB RAM), single 320GB 5400 RPM Drive (Model: Fujitsu MHZ2120BH G1)
  • Late 2009 Mac Mini Server (4GB RAM), dual 500GB 5400 RPM Drives (Model: Hitachi HTS545050B9SA02) (RAID1)
  • Xserve 2009 (12GB RAM), dual 160GB 7200 RPM Drives (Model: WDC WD1602ABJS-43P5A0) (RAID1), and single 160GB 7200 RPM Drive (Model: WDC WD1602ABJS-43P5A0)
  • Mid-2010 Mac Mini Server (4GB RAM), dual 500GB 7200 RPM Drives (Model: Hitachi HTS725050A9A362) (In both single, and RAID1 configuration)
  • And for fun, Xserve 2009 (12GB RAM), Xsan 2.2.1 on 3 LUN (6 drive RAID5) Xserve RAID Data, single LUN (2 Drive RAID1) Xserve RAID Metadata.
  • For extra fun, Dell 2850 (5GB RAM), 6 72GB 15,000 RPM Drives (Model: Fujitsu MAX3073NC) in RAID10 (3 RAID1’s striped together).

All stats were created with bonnie++ 1.03d (1.03e will not build on 10.6.5 due to lack of support for O_DIRECT). All tests will include the bonnie++ parameters, as well as the results. The purpose of these tests is largely to see how various setups compare, and was largely prompted because of Splunk performance on various drive configurations. Splunk is largely reliant on Disk IO (IOPS mainly). Sadly I have no ability to test SSD performance. Perhaps at some point in the future. Please note, the graph below, is in logarithmic scale, so check out the labels for each bar, rather than looking at relative size (unless you think logarithmically).

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An Energy Post, thanks to a Christmas Tree

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Kill-a-Watt energy meterMy wife and I went shopping at the local hardware store for something completely random, and instead bought a pre-lit 6.5′ christmas tree. Normally $170, marked down to… wait for it… $10! Sold. Anyway, it came pre-lit with 300 mini incandescent lights. There was no option for an unlit tree at that cost, so we figured we’d just “unlight” it, and relight it. But before that, I thought I’d use my handy Kill-a-Watt (Thinkgeek right now is the cheapest place to get one, otherwise I’ve bought two of them from here) and see how much power 300 mini lights use.

The answer, 102 watts (0.34W/bulb)! That’s 2.448KHW/day (assuming 24 hour use), or $0.1133/day. Damn. Could you imagine the old days when people put C7 (5W/bulb) or C9 (7W/bulb) bulbs on their tree?! No wonder trees used to dry out and catch fire. Let alone the amount of energy a house would use covered in those bulbs.

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