Posted: 2026-03-03
Loki is my first host, and likely first of two, to feature a mutilated HP heatsink. The previous post covers that.
Despite how it looks, it does appear to work with the 4256EE! (35W TDP, which is quite low for a Opteron.)
I wasn't planning on racking another server, but we had to drop off a friend at the Spokane Airport, which is right near Neutron, so it seemed like a good time.
I only racked Loki and everything went smoothly, sort of. One cage nut gave me grief, the bottom right one. I just left it. I am still hoping to get rails for the CSE-512 chassis, but don't know quite what to get. I messaged an Ebay seller about it and will probably bug them again.
Loki pushed the PDU to read 2 amps. I decided to power on the spare host at the same time, still at 2 amps. I might power it off, but figured I'd have it on for the time being in case I need to do any testing. (Wake On LAN might be handy here, or IPMI.)
In putting Loki together, I installed OpenBSD on a 1TB Western Digital RE4 drive. I was really disappointed with the power figures. Found a spare Samsung 850 PRO 1TB SSD, so decided to install it, mostly to keep the power use down. As a benefit, it should have much faster disk performance!
For the curious, here are the figures with the RE4:
And with the Samsung 850 PRO:
About 7W difference! In my testing, the Velociraptor 1TB drives have similar power use to the 850 Pro. At least on my cheap meter -- I would tend to assume the 850 PRO would be lower, but maybe not. It might also be slightly higher at idle and slightly lower at peak, but this testing is far from scientific. Precise enough to notice the RE4's usage, though!
Anyway, this time I was able to take some pictures.
