In my original NAS post I forgot to mention that I had done some measurements on power consumption. Since this is critical for a 24/7 system, I'd like to share my findings:

  • idle, disks spinning: 30.5 W
  • idle, disks standby: 24.0 W

Hardware as described in the post, disks are 2 x WD20EARS and 2 x WD10EARS.

I recently also did a crypto benchmark which yielded quite impressive results (for that low-cost type of CPU):

alex@nasbox:~$ cryptsetup benchmark
# Tests are approximate using memory only (no storage IO).
PBKDF2-sha1       155298 iterations per second
PBKDF2-sha256      94160 iterations per second
PBKDF2-sha512      62060 iterations per second
PBKDF2-ripemd160  144352 iterations per second
PBKDF2-whirlpool   76204 iterations per second
#  Algorithm | Key |  Encryption |  Decryption
     aes-cbc   128b   465.8 MiB/s  1080.0 MiB/s
 serpent-cbc   128b    42.8 MiB/s   140.0 MiB/s
 twofish-cbc   128b   104.1 MiB/s   118.1 MiB/s
     aes-cbc   256b   354.0 MiB/s   862.3 MiB/s
 serpent-cbc   256b    45.1 MiB/s   141.1 MiB/s
 twofish-cbc   256b   106.5 MiB/s   117.0 MiB/s
     aes-xts   256b   881.6 MiB/s   883.6 MiB/s
 serpent-xts   256b   138.5 MiB/s   139.2 MiB/s
 twofish-xts   256b   117.6 MiB/s   117.1 MiB/s
     aes-xts   512b   750.1 MiB/s   751.4 MiB/s
 serpent-xts   512b   139.5 MiB/s   139.2 MiB/s
 twofish-xts   512b   118.5 MiB/s   117.0 MiB/s