I promised to publish some power measurements of my self made home NAS, so… here they are!
The CPU cores only seems to support the C1 state (loved to use C3 or C6..) for the rest I’m using powerd to throttle the frequency and ‘atacontrol spindown’ for the disks.
When the system is idle and the data disk are spun down:
When all 4 threads (it’s a dual core ATOM with HT) on the system are in use:
When all 4 threads are in use and a benchmarks is running on the data disks:
If you are wondering which components I used then take a look at my first NAS post
Disk performance benchmarks can be found here
I have two 1TB Maxtor basic drives connected to my opensolaris box. On there I run a ZFS mirror. All working well, maybe not on mega speeds but fairly enough for home use (it does stream movies to my AppleTV with XBMC over smb) The downside I discovered later, is that they auto sleep after 15minutes of being idle and I will tell you this, ZFS doesn’t like this feature… I fixed this with a crontab writing a tmp file in a directory on the disk but that gave me some unwanted problems in some cases. This morning I was fed up with it and I wanted a good solution and it seems, there is one… but the application doesn’t have a lot of functions when you use it on MacOSX it appeared… so you really need to do this on a windows computer (scary huh) so 
