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Low Powered SOHO Server?
meroo asks: "I am building a new home that is completely solar/wind powered. I need to conserve power wherever I can, but I don't want to leave all my tech toys behind. I need advice about building a low power, Linux based, file and print server. It should be scalable to more than a terabyte of storage (we are video artists) with at least four HDD bays for flexibility and data redundancy. I would like advice on processor/mainboard combos, low power HDDs and a distro with the best power management to bring this thing down to idle when we are not using it. The server will be accessed via our laptops (Mac OSX and Ubuntu), a future home theatre PC and visitors assorted laptops. I've been looking at using laptop components, miniITX and professional server solutions, but now I'm thoroughly confused. Has anyone on Slashdot been faced with this problem before?"
Purchase a little dongle to test how much power your utilities consume while you plan this project. I'd much rather have empirical knowledge about power consumption on a given system rather than trying to piece together information from shottily written technical documents on the internet. My family owns one of these devices from http://www.seasonic.com/, and I recommend purchasing something from their S-12 power supply line. Supposedly they have the highest ratio of power drawn to power consumed by the system, and all of their gear is tagged "80 plus" for 80% efficient or better. Also see this article: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article261-page1.htm l.
If someone drops a fort on Will, he makes a reflex save.
Look at the Soekris boxes. They are low-power and quite powerful. THey are also tiny.
Use laptop hard drives (5400 rpm) in USB enclosures. They will run off of USB power.
Maybe use some of the Maxtor external Network Attached Storage devices. I belive these will allow additional USB devices to be attached and shared.
The only place you will need power is in the computer attached to the TV/entertainment center. You don't want video skipping during playback. With the newer codecs, the CPU is heavily taxed. My 800mhz laptop can play AVIs and MPEGs, but if I open a browser while watching vids, the video will skip really bad.
As far as desktops, look at a powerful central server with smaller VIA-powered clients.
Look at cross-wiring your fans for 5v vice 12v. That'll reduce the power draw.
Get the smallest power supply that will feed that box. No need for a 400w supply with only 150w worth of devices.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
If you only need streaming video, laptop HDs should work for you. If one does not have enough throughput, then set up each two drives as a RAID-0.
.5 A and 1.0 A power draw. Performance varies dramatically, and power draw only loosly corelates with performance, so you need to benchmark.
If you care about ever last bit of power, don't set up a RAID-1, and make sure you do your backups.
Also, to keep power consumption down, segment your storage, so power management can spin down drives that contain data you aren't using.
In general, the laptop HDs I use in my various projects very between
ICP Vortex RAID controllers are much faster, and more stable, than any others I have used before. Intel purchased the company, and it appears they may have since sold the division to Adaptec, so now you may not still be able to purchase them under the ICP Vortex name.
I work with US Navy AUVs so power efficiency it a good part of my work. You are going to run into problems as your storage batteries only have so many amp/hrs of capacity and depending on the type you use deep cycling may not be an option. The best options for power efficiency use embedded processors (yes running linux. I even have a tux sticker on the side of it) and solid state hard drives (expensive) that don't draw hardly any power until you read or write to them. Then again you don't exactly get video editing caliber performance from the setup. You're not going to get around the power draw of the file server. If you need a lot of hard drives mini-itx limits your expandability due to lack of PCI slots for controller cards and such. My take... improve your power generation and storage capability to provide the power to the systems. You're not going to get much out of a video editing server/system otherwise.
It sounds like you are going to be doing the majority of your work on you laptops and what you are looking for is a large file server.
VIA has some great micro/nano-ITX boards with power saving in mind. Many of which can run with out a fan. Combine that with a few 120g notebook hard drives (Toshiba has a 120g 4200rpm drive for under $200 on http://newegg.com/
Last I heard Ubuntu was still the king of powersave mode in Linux. Most of the people I know who have set up fileshares have used Samba.
Get a 1000mbps ethernet card for it and hook it up the the router. The low hard drive speed and power save functionality will likely give you a bit of latency, but once it starts pulling sequencial data, it should be fine. There was a great article about low power solutions, I think I saw a link to it on http://mini-itx.com/ and they had some storage arrays running under 30watts IIRC)
And let me commend you for your excellent drive. Energy conservation is a great field for both professional and financial improvement. With new integrated home systems like Solar Shingles and improved energy efficiency designs we can greatly reduce the growth demand on grid power.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
You didn't mention scale of your alternative energy. The last place we lived was totally solar powered,IIRC it was 2.6 kw in full sun, plus days worth of battery bank storage, and if that went out there was a big diesel genny but we hardly ever used it. For the owners of the estate, "them", and us,"the caretakers", we ran everything we wanted to run from freezers to fridges to multiple normal full tower computers to large screen TVs and dishwashers and vacuums and..you get the picture. The only way you could tell this wasn't a normal grid-only place (besides the solar arrays in the backyard) was when the grid power went down in the 'hood and we still had all usual power. Very, very *nice* then. You really appreciate it then, you can see that having onsite power production is just slick. It just depends on how much wattage you are installing with the PV and wind genny that determines your needs and wants with various gadgetry. If you have two panels and the smallest wind genny, well, a modest laptop or mini-itx system would have to suffice. 20-40 panels large with equivalent battery bank and a few thousand watt wind genny, you can go quite "normal" and run about whatever you might want within reason.
I did learn some tricks though, the primary one is timing for heavy loads. If you schedule your most demanding electrical loads for mid-day, between 11 AM and 1 PM, that is when you have peak power usually. Like, then is when you run the washing machines or water well for showers and watering the garden, etc. Stuf like that, common sense. You do learn to turn off excess lights or use compact fluorescents. In fact, the on/off switch is your friend, you can save an amazing amount by just being consistent in use and developing "muscle memory" for hitting OFF when you really don't need to run some gadget. "Idling" adds up quick! Arrange chairs so when you are reading you can get natural sunlight from a window. And have enough storage batteries! Nothing worse than be having a nice sunny day and be producing *too much* power and no place to put the excess. And those extra batteries will get your through cloudy days, plus they will last longer if you aren't "deep" cycling them. Shallow cycles make your batts last much longer, that and be sure to install a "desulphator" on the batteries.
With that said, have you been to solarpc.com? Off-grid puter experts of the low-watt kind.
Sun has a new 1U server out that is pretty slick. It uses 2.5" Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives that "offers IOPS performance increase and 58% power savings compared to today's 3.5 inch drive."
Additionally, this server uses up to two dual-core AMD Opteron CPUs which offer 1.9 times the performance of 2-way Intel Xeon servers at up to a 56% power and cooling savings.
The power supply is fairly forgiving: 90-264V AC (47-63 Hz).
I would also advise you to look at some of the telco-targeted servers that run off of DC.
Chris
Get a big-ass generic tower case with a good PSU.
Mobo/CPU
Get a Socket 478 ATX motherboard and find a Northwood Mobile Pentium on eBay for it. Some mobos support down-volting. I have one of these in an ASUS Pundit for home theater PC, it runs on 1.2V and is cool to the touch without fans. OR, get a supported ASUS mobo, the Socket 478-479 adapter and a Dothan Pentium-M. Get a mobo with built-in graphics or run headless. Clock it down, the fileserver won't need much CPU anyway - but it will be on and draw power 247 so any savings here will be helpful in the long run.
Disks
2.5" laptop drives won't get you to the terabyte range so get three 500 gig 3.5" drives and RAID-5 them. Linux software RAID won't expand easily so either invest in real RAID hardware, build the array large enough to not need expansion in the foreseeable future or use another scheme, like LVM + RAID. Keep copies of current and recent projects on your client computers - that's cheap and easy backup.
Network Filesystem
Samba. Only thing that will work fine with both Wintel and Mac laptops and other clients. For server-server communications I use NFS but in your case it would just be an extra thing to setup with no benefits.
NAS
OR, just get a big-ass NAS box with enough room in it. More money and less flexibility but much less hassle setting it up and less power consumption compared to the home-made linux server box.
BUT, if you also need mailserver, webserver, ftpserver, whateverserver down the line you might as well go with the full server or you'll need both the NAS and the server side-by-side.
Money for nothing, pix for free
These are all very low power, no noise, takes minutes to set up (except if hacking them, of course :), Just Work.
Good luck!
-Henrik
I'm in a Unix state of mind.