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Low-Power Home Linux Server?
mpol writes "For years I've been using a home server with Linux, but recently I've been having doubts about the electric bill. I'm not touched by the recession yet, but I would like to cut costs, and going from a 100-Watt system to a 30-Watt system would save me 70 bucks a year. The system doesn't need to do much, just apache, imap, ssh and some nfs, but I do prefer to have a full-fledged system, where I can choose what to install on it. I also don't really care if it's a low-power Via or an ARM processor as long as it's cheap. I'm aiming for $300 or less for a full system, which I could then earn back in about four years through power savings. I've been reading about the Western Digital Mybook World Edition, which has an ARM processor but isn't that easy to install Debian on. A Mac Mini draws about 85 Watts, so that isn't an option either. Something a bit more than turn-key would be fine, but preferably not a complete hack-job. Adding a temporary CR-ROM or DVD-ROM, or a USB disk with an iso to install from would be nice. Any Slashdotters run nice and cheap low-power Linux systems? What can you recommend?"
I'm working on getting a Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo set up with Debian Lenny. It's mostly complete, I'm rebuilding the kernel as I type to get USB printer support working. It's very compact and low-power, and has mirrored 500 GB disks, which I think is essential for any home server.
The downside is that I had to solder on a serial connection in order to get access to uboot (a bootloader similar in concept to GRUB) so I could view early kernel output and diagnose problems, log in if networking didn't come up, etc. If you can find a NAS device which supports a serial console (or at least can use netcat instead), that would be good.
One thing to be aware of is that you get a lot less CPU power with these low-watt ARM CPUs. The Linkstation Duo is great for fileserving, printing, and light email and webserving duties, but when I installed Gallery and postgres to view my photos over the web, it ran extremely slowly. That's not too surprising given it's a NAS not a full-fledged server, but it's something to keep in mind. You may only need a low-power device for 90% of your apps, but that last 10% can use a surprising amount of CPU.
You don't look like you need extensive processing power, so why not just underclock your current server? That alone will save you a pretty penny on your bill.
Also, the mac mini draws 110 watts http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_mini?aid=AIC-NAUS-K2-BUYNOW-MACMINI-DESIGN&cp=BUYNOW-MACMINI-DESIGN
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Have you looked into AMD Athlon 64 Neo or an Intel ION system?
Get a Sheeva plug its 5W and it looks like an adapter.
http://www.marvell.com/products/embedded_processors/developer/kirkwood/sheevaplug.jsp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I
Maybe something like this solves your problem? With a low-power PSU (on VIA too), you will get a low-power PC with a lot of flexibility
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Where on earth did you get 85? Are you reading that off the power brick? Those figures are meaningless for this purpose - that's the total load the PS is rated to deliver, not the average load at the wall socket.
The Mac Mini has all the components and power management features of a notebook so it's going to be about as good as you can get. For less money, the FitPC or a second-hand laptop is probably the next best choice.
You mentioned a Mac Mini, but what if you put Linux on the Mac Mini and clock it to 500 mhz? Maybe you can shut down one of the cores somehow to conserve more power.
rooooar
I've been thinking of getting one of these for similar purposes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug You'll probably need to hook up an USB drive, and what not, but still seems intriguing. They claim 2.3W idle power consumption, with no attached devices.
An old laptop will probably give you the lowest power for the cheapest cost. It doesn't sound like reliability or performance is your main concern. You can disassemble it and take out the LCD to save a couple more watts if you want, but a typical laptop draws between 10-20 watts.
Splitter!
A BeagleBoard is well supported by Linux and draws under 1W in typical operation. It supports USB and MMC+ for peripherals and storage, but there's no IDE or SATA so you won't be able to connect it to an array of disks, for example. For the simple tasks you want it will probably be more than adequate, but when you say 'apache, imap and nfs' that could mean anything; is it just a single user occasionally accessing files, or do you want to host complex web apps for a few thousand visitors?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm doing some ARM development and we use an OpenRD(http://www.open-rd.org/) board to compile and test some apps. It has dual NICs, a ton of USB ports, and an eSATA port. Internally it only has a 4G SATA DOM so you probably want to use some sort of external media. It comes with Debian Lenny installed, but you can install other things. The biggest pain in the ass is dealing with uboot but once you get it working its like a normal PC.
I use one of these ALIX board with a 500 MHZ Geode processor: http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?cPath=60_84&products_id=673 Uses less electricity than a night light!
The Linksys WRT54G router runs a version of Linux in an open source distribution...
Or a D-Link DNS 323 NAS box... there's quite an active hacking community using these boxes...
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
I got worried about this about a year ago. So, I bought one of those MSI wind nettop barebones systems. They are based on the Intel Atom, so it is fairly low power. I picked the single-core model in order to reduce power usage. Then I bought a pen drive and a compact flash card and an SDHC card. I put the compact flash card on the connector on the motherboard. This puts it on the IDE channel. I put the SDHC card into the SDHC reader on the front panel of the machine. I put the pen drive on a USB port. I set up a 3-way striped software raid situation and ended up with a relatively cheap, relatively fast 32 GB partition. I think that probably saved a bit of energy over installing a hard drive. It runs Linux and is pretty quick and I think pretty low power.
http://www.goodcleantech.com/2009/03/its_official_apple_mac_mini_is.php
"The mini uses only 15W while idling in our tests, and a low 34W while running the CineBench benchmark test"
I am using a eeebox at home as a file/web server and to do music and video in my living room. The first models B202 uses around 30W of power and doesnot make much noise (eay less than my fridge). There is no optical drive. It can not render full HD but 720p can still be done.
It may not be what you are looking for, but I think it is a faire reference point.
It comes pre-loaded with Ubuntu.
More info here:
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2009/07/dell-mini9-server-and-dell-mini10v.html
I would have said use a linksys router or an old pda, but when you say apache/NFS it sounds like you want a hard disk. If the amount of data is less than a few GB you can of course use a flash card instead. Hmm, in that case a PDA may be enough. Or a gumstix board (gumstix.com) or beagle board (www.beagleboard.org) if you want to get a bit fancy.
Even if going to a new system would save $70 a year, how much would a new system cost? $300? So it would take 4 yrs just to pay off. My advice? Go with a old p3 laptop with external USB drives or forget the whole thing because it's not really that cost effective.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
That sounds rather high for the Mini. Apple claims http://www.apple.com/macmini/environment.html that the new mini uses 14 Watts when idle. Typical laptops use 30-40 Watts or less when idle.
Your best bets are probably the Mac Mini, or another computer with an ultra low voltage desktop chip, an ARM processor, or a low voltage mobile processor. Laptops would be particularly good. Use an SSD instead of a hard drive. Use enough memory to cache your files so you don't have to keep hitting the drive, but don't use more than that, because memory takes power too. Don't use a display. Don't hook up unneeded devices to it - they draw power.
I just finished setting up a via epia 5000 - it maxes out at 20watts power and runs a 533mhz cpu. It retails for about $100 US.
.. and certainly others too. Lots of exciting hardware available.
I recently went through the same search, two good options show up 1) Get a mac mini. The idle power consumption is 13 watts. You get a dvd rom, intel cpu, video out if you need it etc. It costs more and the high cpu usage is 110W. Make sure to not get the older mac mini's, only the ones starting I believe last January had the low idle watt usage. And as a bonus at the end you have a mac you can resell. 2) Get a Sheeva Plug. It only costs $99 and only draws 5 Watts of power. It is arm. I myself simply put a usb stick in it loaded up debian and have been happy ever sense (So I am running at 5.5 W). Silent, low power draw. Downside it that it takes 10 minutes to setup and you can't just plugin a monitor and drop in a install cd you have to drop an install image in a sd or usb stick, but there are helpful webpages people have made showing you step by step how to do this.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Use a router supporting this. Look for a router equipped with one or more USB ports, so you can add disks and USB printers at will. Asus routers are probably the easier to hack, although I have been a bit disappointed with the quality (my experience with Asus is however limited to a WL-500g).
Get a netbook with an SD card slot that can be boot off of.
Just get a low-end Eee PC; configured right, they consume only a few watts.
If you want something even cheaper and smaller, get an NSLU2 (but they're a little more work to install on).
I would probably go for a VIA Nano mini ITX platform with Linux installed on a Compact Flash and a Green 1 or 2 TB WD hard drive with aggressive sleep settings.
A.
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4933703&CatId=333
/srv/media. The box provides NFS and SMB shares to 2 desktops, 2 laptops and a Myth TV Box that's hooked up to the 42".
I have a box similar to this one shown, with a pair of 1TB WD Scorpio drives running it, one disk gets used to system partitions and home directories, the other is mounted at
The only thing I haven't been able to do with it so far (time has been a factor, and I haven't been able to research it properly) is DLNA streaming to work properly to the PS3. Time has been a factor and I haven't really looked that closely.
I wish I was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off...
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug runs a 1.2ghz Marvell PXA 270 ARM, and costs $99.
The UD-160A gives you a full set of ports (4x USB2, VGA-out, 10/100 Ethernet) thanks to DisplayLink drivers. Price: $90-ish.
If you don't need a screen, you can get away with a 4x USB2 hub ($8) or a 7x USB2 hub ($12) and spang on peripherals as you need.
Then, if it turns out that you do want a screen after all, you can always go for a Doublesight DS-90U USB 1024x600 screen, again, using DisplayLink free software drivers.
There are plenty of other ARM-based low-power CPUs with at least 512mb of RAM: the beagleboard and the IGEP-v2 go for $100 appx at 600mhz.
I have a Compaq low-profile Presario P3. It's tiny (about 3 inches tall and about 12 inches on a side) and consumes very little power - about 20-25 watts.
1 Ghz CPU, 512 RAM, 100 Mb Ethernet, 250 GB HDD, worth about 20 dollars w/o the HD, been my "mini" server for years now running CentOS 4.
Tough combo to beat....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Save money in other places first, have you replaced all your light bulbs with CFL's yet? You won't notice the difference between a 100 watt incandescent and the equivelant 24 watt CFL, but you probably will notice the difference between a 100 and 30 watt server.
We went from having 2 computers with a server and a laptop to having 2 laptops, a base station and no cables. With today's 1TB 2.5 HDD and easy sharing through wireless N, it's relatively simple, efficient and in the past 3 years, we saved a crapload of money since we don't even come near a 500W power supply recent towers (nearly) require. When we wish to have access to our data from home without our computers, we leave them open and they are shared through our router. Otherwise, we have our computer with us, so we don't need to connect to them ;)
However, for your question, most vendors have small busyboxes with potential to plug a 2.5" USB-powerede external HDD, with hacking potential for more. If you want more (as you advertise), go to your local cheap used hardware store, get a netbook someone got tired of, and put additional HD. It should solve your problem.
Yoggie Open Firewall SOHO.
Try a mini-itx C7 processor and MB combo.
These processors are typically soldered, but run very cool, and generally fanless.
I have a VIA-C7 at 1.2Ghz, with a DVD+RW, and 500Gb HD, and the whole system uses only 24W under full load.
C7's are basically PIII class processors, but have hardware accellerated encryption making them 20-30X faster than even a P4 at AES, MD5, SHA, etc.
The boards have everything you could possibly want, USB 2.0, Ethernet [GigE], Audio, Video [integrated] , and even a PCI slot.
at 17mm x 17mm these boards can fit anywhere. DC powered at 12V. Cases and powersupplies will be more expensive due to the size, but well worth it, they can look very nice on even a small desk.
RAM is a bit limited at 2Gb, but that should do.
I think you're after a plug computer ( http://www.marvell.com/featured/plugcomputing.jsp ) and just don't know it yet. Super low power, ARM-based system that can (easily) run debian + an apache stack, along with whatever else (well, within reason) you need. http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-kit-us.aspx has it for $99; you can get a European or UK version as well.
Be careful about mentioning 30 watt power supplies. My whole system just got withdrawal shakes even thinking about it. I had to open a few more apps and max out the CPU just to calm it down.
Look at http://www.lex.com.tw. Lex has got many small systems which run perfectly Linux and OpenBSD. Some of them are fanless - the alu case doubles as cooling block for the CPU.
Check out the Bubba|Two Server. Its a PowerPC-based NAS running Debian Etch with with 2 x 1Gb ethernet ports, 2 x USB and 2 x eSATA ports.
Where are you getting 85W for the Mini? Maybe under load it's that high, but at idle it's much less. Apple publishes power consumption numbers on all their consumer systems, and the mini pulls 13.5W at idle load (aka. "apache, imap, ssh and some nfs."). Not to say you couldn't do even better with some other lower-power ARM- or ATOM-based options on busybox, but for your specs the Mini is certainly a contender.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Newer stuff to consider: qnap 419 (1.2 ghz arm), openRD client (1.2 ghz arm), sheevaplug (the walwart computer)
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Measuring the power draw of my (admittedly four years old) Mini, I have trouble getting it up to 65 watts. And when not doing anything in particular, it fairly quickly drops off into the 15-20 watt range. Averaged over the whole day, it comes in pretty close to your 30-watt target. But even the minimum configuration costs much more than you want to spend, new. I would also comment that I have been regularly frustrated when porting assorted software packages to OSX; I find myself doing more and more "UNIX" things in a VirtualBox VM running Ubuntu.
I've been using a TS-7800 from Technologic Systems for a few months, running it off of solar panels. It draws 4 watts and has half a gig of flash on board and an SD card socket. It runs cool without even so much as a heatsink, let alone a fan. Gig-E, 10 serial ports, 6 A/D, more digital I/O than I could even use, and USB. Runs Debian. Buy the development kit - the slight extra cost is worth it.
I just bought a fit-PC2 (linux) with semi-intentions to do what you're wanting to do. It's pretty nice, I've been booting from USB into fedora 11 but haven't got the poulsbo chipset video working, yet. Of all the gadgets I have fooled with (not a large number) this one installs 'normal' linux distros much better, except for the video driver (google poulsbo). It draws 8w max when it's bttw and you can get one for just over US$300 at amazon.
I have plenty of common sense, I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3562&p=12
According to this article, it's between 25-30W, and it fits into any standard Mini-ITX case. Couple it with a low power hard disk or CF drive and it'll be very power efficient. It's also possible to run it completely passively cooled, and if you wanted to use it as a media frontend, it'd be more than capable. You can even get a version that comes with it's own external power brick rather than a PSU.
http://www.revogear.com/ Basically a Buffalo External Hard drive enclosure with 128mB of RAM. I use mine as NFS server, print server, scanner server, DNS, VPN, DHCP server, Slimserver, Haupauge video server, Gallery 1.5 photo server and probably something else I left out.
300 dollar? you could pay the 70 bucks extra for the old system 4 years for that...
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
Been running a Jetway VIA box for about six months in a home server role - just added ram, a big cheap HD, and Ubuntu. Installed the OS over the LAN with PXE. Works just fine so far. Meets your budget. Haven't tested actual power draw though. It's small, reasonably quiet - an internal fan for the CPU but the power supply is a fanless external brick. No Ubuntu compatibility hitches at all, so Debian should be fine too.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
http://www.linutop.com/linutop2/index.en.html
amd geode is really slow but takes about 5 - 10 watts. i use it as a router and want to put more stuff on it soon.
intel atom takes up to 40 watts iirc but is kinda fast compared to amd geode. also there is a big variety of boards out there. some are shipped with a pci-e16x slot - you could add a raid controller or something like that...
also the atom boards with the nvidia ION brand can do HDTV playback - so it would also be applicable as a media center...
It just takes minutes to install debian lenny on the arm laptop
You really cannot beat a laptop for the sub-30 watt range in terms of compute power and actual power consumption. The Mac Mini, as mentioned by many above, idles at about 12-13W (in my experience) and has about 4x the compute power of a dual core atom board, which idles at nearly twice as much. I can't say for sure, but being essentially a laptop shoved in a 6x6x3 box, I suspect you'd get similar power usage from (m)any other comparable systems.
It's really a question of how low you want to go. If 13W on average is not too high and you want the ability to spike to many times the amount of work that can be done at that wattage, a laptop/mini is the way to go. If you want consistent, seriously low power utilization with limited CPU power, you're going to need an ARM, Geode, or other embedded processor.
I spent quite a while looking into mini-itx boards, Atoms, VIA cpus, etc, and in the end found that a laptop or mini beats all of those options both in power consumption at idle and maximum potential performance. The only way you'll go lower is with something embedded, and then you're giving up much functionality, a large amount of performance.
* you want lots of RAM (high buffer cache);
* you want a CPU with good cpufreq support (any ACPI-compliant CPU will do);
* you want SSD (yes, they're expensive, but the cost of a simple seek is far less than rotating platter disks, and in case your machine just wakes up, SSD has close to zero seek time);
* you want a kernel compiled with "ondemand" CPU frequency governor as the default;
* you DO NOT want "drowsy ACPI states" (sure, it saves power, but you want to SSH in: if the machine's not there, what's the point? WOL won't help, that's my experience with it - either the machine is constantly up or it's down long enough before it answers that it turns out highly frustrating);
* you want a hardware router in front of your machine, with packet filtering ability (this router will do preliminary packet filtering before said packets even reach your machine - and see above).
ASROCK ION 330 NETTOP
All in One ITX small factor PC. Takes only 30W of power. Some specs:
- dual core Intel Atom 330 CPU (1.6GHz)
- 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD, DVD, 1000BaseT ethernet
- Nvidia ION chipest + HDMI out makes it ideal also for multimedia
I'm using it as HTPC (Home Theater PC) running Ubuntu Linux + XBMC, but it can be good also as file server.
I have also some other devices described in this thread (EEE netbook, WRT54G router, DLINK NAS) but in most cases they have disadvantages like: i386 incompatibility, impossible to run mainstream linux distribution, CPUs and system boards are not powerful enough
http://totl.net/Spud/
These guys did it and it's powered only by potatoes.
For a general (not compute) server, I'd recommend just using an inexpensive nettop like the Asus EEE. I measure (Kill-o-watt meter) mine at 14W. If you need more than SD cards for storage, get a USB external HD. Or you could try some hacked NAS.
The nice thing about the nettop is you can take it with you if you want, or use it as a full machine my plugging in LCD monitor, kbd, and mouse.
check out www.cyrius.com/debian/orion/qnap/ for this. Especially the TS-109 has good power specs (14W under load), and there is a Debian Howto on the referenced page. The system has a 500MHz ARM cpu. Its newer sibling, the TS-119 has a 1.2 GHz cpu but I couldn't find power specs for it (only that is has a 36W power supply).
grab a second hand thin-client from ebay then reflash it with a linux image and use it as a server. They're cheap. Typically they are fanless Via c7 or Geodes; so, they're low power. Do your research first, some use CF cards but others have flash on the circuit board, which makes reflashing them harder. I've found some of them actually have a 44pin ide header and use a CF card adapter; so, you can plug in a cheap laptop harddrive. In either case, most of the newer ones will have 4-6 usb ports.
Highly recommended.
I installed debian (lenny) and then updated to squeeze because (and this is to be expected) the squeeze installer is currently borked. Attached to an external drive caddy this solution chopuld come in well under your 30W and will do all you need.
I have mine serving media to the PS3, downloading stuff, serving my music collection to wherever I happen to be, doing Samba, NFS, TFTP, SSH, SMTP and IMAP.... it's a great.
I've been running a Dell Studio Hybrid for 6 months. They're assembled from laptop parts so they're very low power. It's completely silent. It has a fan but I've never heard it. It's about the size of a mac mini and starts about $100 less. Looks very inconspicuous in the living room - more like stereo equipment than a computer.
I couldn't compare speed between it and the mac mini, but mine is running windows 7 (because I couldn't get Ubuntu to send sound through the HDMI to the TV) and 2 instances of Ubuntu simultaneously under Sun's Virtualbox and I've never had a speed problem except some sketchiness when running the blu-ray dvd player (regular dvd is fine, Hulu is fine).
It comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse that has a pretty good range - I use it from across the living room.
Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
I'm planning on getting one of these:
http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/BAREBONE_SERVERS.html
5 drive-bays, Dual-core Atom, 2GB RAM, nice and silent etc.
Also the NSLU2 can be upgraded to debian through purely software upgrades. The power supply tops out at 10W. I use one with a 1GB flash drive for web, ssh and file serving (though I use sftp rather than nfs).
Intel just released the D945GSEJT Atom board. This is not the same boards that used to older 945 chipsets. The older boards needed a fan on the chipset for it sucked up almost 20 watts!! The new board is mini-itx so it should fit in just about any case and runs on a single 12 volt coaxial plug so no need for a buly ATX PSU.
A nice review here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/Intel_D945GSEJT_with_Morex_T1610
I also use, and am a big fan of the PC Engines Alix boards: http://www.pcengines.ch/ You have several board styles to choose from. You can install Voyage Linux (Debian based and keep APT!!) on a compact flash with a simple installation (specifically for ALIX) script: http://linux.voyage.hk/
My alix, which I use as a USB music server, draws a measly 3 watts (Kill-A-Watt meter) when playing FLAC files. You can attach a low power USB hard disk for added storage if you want to run NFS.
Consider one of there:
atom barebones
I'm currently running an MSI Fuzzy GM965 board with an intel core 2 mobile (T8300) in a Sugo SG05 chassis. 4 gigs or RAM and 1 x TB 3.5 WD Green drive gives a total Wattage of 35 idle. A little over what you wanted but it idles at 1200MHz and scales to 2400 when required. This is in the process of replacing my old server that pulls 230Watts constantly (Opteron 246 with 2GB RAM) so likewise I'm hoping to save a decent ammount on my electricity bill. My only gripe with the system is that the bios in the MSI is shocking, try and run an external graphics card in the system and the bios does not let you turn off the internal one. You then get to play the "which graphics source gets detected first" game as that then becomes the default. I've ended up just sticking to the internal which is fine for a server purpose but rules this out as a desktop replacement anytime soon.
Visit TheHavenNet [ http://thehavennet.org.uk ]
I've been looking for the same thing for a long time, except I want to have ECC RAM on a machine that runs 24/7 and shuttles files back and forth. Apparently, there is no such product (Not mini-pc, not Atom-anything, not notebooks, etc). I've ended up using one of those cheap Dell T100 series machines (ECC RAM, but only two drives supported) that you can pick up during a dell promotion. It draws 50W at idle.
Does anyone know of _any_ low power solution that uses ECC RAM?
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
I know a fellow who has had a little netbook running as a server for about a year. I told him he was crazy, since those things weren't designed for 24/7 use, but so far he's proving me wrong. Will it survive for the 4 years you're looking for? Ask me in three more years. I find it amazing that it has done as well as it has so far.
Loose lips lose spit.
Not great for surfing, or HD video but a home server is generally just passing data around and leaves the compute intensive stuff to the users' PCs.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/
New device: ~$110
New 320 GB 2.5" HardDrive: ~$90
New 2.5" HD Carrier: ~$25
Total: ~$225, AND good binary support
$200 on amazon shipped. Upgrade the RAM if you want but 120GB HD is probably enough. Very low power consumption and virtually silent.
I use an Asus WL500-W router with an attached 1TB USB drive. The router costs under $100 and uses 10 watts. You can install Linux on it by uploading new firmware (I use DD-WRT). It runs torrents at all times, with QoS during the day, as well as an nzb client. Apache and Samba are installed and my XP laptop has no issues talking to either of them.
A MiniITX Via 1GHz processor will run at about 15 watts, but if you want less, look for 500MHz AMD Geode boards (ALIX). 4 watts. The savings comes from not having an graphics hardware - it's rs232. They're fantastic little boards.
The Mac Mini's power supply maxes out at 85W but it uses much, much less than that. I just used my Kill-A-Watt to verify that my 1.25 GHz G4 uses less than 20W when logged in and looking at localhost in Safari. The Intels are comparable.
I have an original Mini that has been serving apache (with php and mysql), ssh, afp, and other things 24/7/365 since a month after it was released--coming up on 4 years now--with OS X. AFAIK they take Linux just fine and that shouldn't make much (if any) difference in the power usage. Original G4s can be had for ~$200 used, used Intels are around $400, and of course new ones start at $600.
More info:
http://www.dssw.co.uk/sleepcentre/threads/mac_mini_power_consumption.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/apple-mac-mini,978-7.html
http://www.macintouch.com/macmini05.html#jan25
and these guys: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3468
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I've got one of these:
http://koolu.com/Koolu-WE-Appliance/Works-Everywhere-Appliance.html
Geode is a bit underpowered but for a file server and torrent daemon, it's plenty enough. Comes with an internal 80gb hdd but can also boot from usb, btw 4 usb ports is really great. Fanless and uses less than 10 watts! It also comes with ubuntu pre installed.
-- Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world; it's the only thing that ever has.
I've had a Virgin WebPlayer running as web/mail/file/etc server since 2002. It is still running. It uses about 15 W when the display and backlight has been turned off. I've had it with me on a canoe expedition over the Yukon (from Whitehorse to the Bering strait) running on 2 x 10W solar panels plus a 7Ah 12V battery. Fully charged that battery was enough to keep it running for about 5-6 hours. That was including the 2 20GB notebook drives it contained.
Of course we're not talking speed-demon here, the Geode GX1@200 MHz is comparable to a Pentium 166. With 128MB (instead of the standard 64 MB) it does most things I want it to.
--frank[at]unternet.org
I bought a Western Digital MyBook network drive which is basically a little ARM board with 32MB memory. It is intended just to serve up some windows shares over a network. But you can run a simple program to enable ssh access, install a package manager and start installing other software on it - mine runs a few cron jobs to download files, as well as being a print server through its spare USB port. I'm not sure how far it could be pushed given how little memory it has, but I'm sure a bit of email & NFS wouldn't be beyond it if you're not fussy about speed.
Power and cost were only a bit more than the drive itself.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
I get $345 ($405 if I use a 750GB hdd). I think a good low-power system with the right combination of features is hard to get for under $300 new.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Netbooks currently go for $300 and are low power. As a bonus they have a builtin screen and keyboard (obviating the need for a KVM) and also have a builtin UPS (aka battery). Use small bus powered external USB drives for extra storage. You can even make them a router/firewall/access point since they have wired and wireless interfaces.
Wolfdale E7500, G31 mobo (Gigabyte), 1TB green WD HDD, single 1 GB stick, 80+ PSU.
I have used this article as a guideline.
The Wolfdale is very low-power in idle state but delivers oomph when you need it (e.g. HD streaming to HTPC or video-recoding or re-sizing thumbnails in my Gallery).
SUSE/Apache for few years, then when auto-updates broke the system few times in a row, WHS/IIS6.
Here are some of the machines I run:
Cobalt Raq2 with 250 MHz MIPS processor, 256 megs of memory, and 500 gig hard drive - about 30 watts.
Mac mini, 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 gigs, 500 gig hard drive - about 20 watts when doing stuff (it maxes out at about 35 watts when the CPUs are pegged).
Quadra 605 (yes, I like classics), 40 MHz m68040, 132 megs of memory, 250 gig hard drive, about 22 watts.
If you want REALLY low power, pick up a Jornada 728 or the likes. It takes THREE watts (the meter shows four watts momentarily now and then), with a 206 MHz StrongARM, 64 megs of memory, and a 16 gig CF card. However, this doesn't help if you want to do lots of file hosting, but I figured it was worth a mention because it takes so little power. I run several Jornadas (including the 690, which uses SH3 processor) as DNS servers running BIND.
The one that might match your requirements best, though, is a Plextor PX-EH25L and the like. You can put in whatever size hard drive you like, and if you want, you can even get the new low power 5900 RPM drives which take half the power of a typical hard drive. It has 64 megs of memory, a 266 MHz SH4 processor, and two USB 2 ports which can be used with a CD or DVD drive, a second ethernet, more storage, or whatever you want to connect. With an inefficient 7200 RPM drive, it takes less than 20 watts (15 to 18), plus it is incredibly small and so far it's been completely stable.
Note that on all of these machines I run NetBSD because I prefer having one consistent OS across all of my architectures, but if you don't mind maintaining a different version of GNU/Linux for whichever you get, you'll be happy with any of the lower power devices.
You might want to consider a Linksys NSLU2. It's a tiny NAS with two USB ports for storage but you can flash Linux to it and make it do whatever you want.
This will probably come in a little higher cost than you'd like, but consider getting a Synology NAS box (http://www.synology.com/us/index.php), and a pair of notebook drives. I've had a home server of one sort or another for years. Back in the day I had top of the line multiprocessor Compaq server with a full RAID array. These days I live completely off-grid. The power draw of that beast would crush me.
Seeking a better solution I picked up a 207+, and then modified the brackets to take a pair of notebook drives. I measured it at 12 watts. It doesn't have much processing power, but I run fetchmail, dovecot, slimserver, and of course file sharing services on it. It would easily run a web server, though I host my website externally. I have mine configured with cron to shut down in the at night. Newer versions have automatic support for starting up and shutting down based on the time. If you're not hosting a web site, you can save more energy and money.
For me, running a server without RAID or mirroring isn't an option. That's one of the reasons I chose this solution. I use a USB harddisk for occassional backups. I've never hooked a USB CD-ROM to it, though I don't see any reason you couldn't. It's running Linux under the covers, and it's relatively easy to cross-compile software for it, or simply use optware (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Optware/Packages?from=Unslung.Packages) to get what you need.
I've been using my mybook world as a home server for almost a year now. It's pretty much what you need for a home server since you can install ipkg to add software from repositories. It's cheap, simple and more or less what you want. The package system ipkg is easy and works like debian/ubuntu repositories. There are quite a lot of packages available just a single command away ;)
More info at http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/ and http://martin.hinner.info/mybook/
http://qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=112
Its not as cheap as a SheevaPlug, but it has 512MB DDR-RAM and 1200GHz ARM9
Get a Bubba http://www.excito.com/ - I've had the original Bubba server for 2 years and it's still ticking along beautifully.
I wanted to semi-retire my quadcore and only power it up for MythTV and other heavy lifting.
I picked up an MSI Wind? Dual-core atom for $120 (on sale), $30 for 2GB RAM and another $50 for 250GB HDD....it consumes 30W max.
You may want to consider a Shiva plug, however there is no video out nor sound card. The lack of a sound card was the deal-breaker for me.
I've been into low-power conventional computers for a while. You can buy an old Compaq iPaq (the computer, not the PDA) for almost nothing ($10-$50 in speeds from 500 MHz Celeron to 1 GHz PIII) and they'll use 30W at idle and under light use. They come in "legacy" (serial, parallel) versions and "legacy-free" (USB only) versions. They have a bay that can hold a CD, floppy, or no drive. (Compatible with Armada laptops from the same era.) So beware that if you buy a used one it might come with no optical drive so shop carefully.
A slimline HP will also use about 30W and is a little newer and faster--the one I had was a 1.6 GHz Celeron with a DVD burner (could be a 2nd HDD instead) and SATA hard drive.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
You can get an Intel Johnstown board (Atom N270 - 1.6ghz) for around $110. RAM will set you back another $20 or so. The Johnstown board is nice in that it has a built-in PSU and just requires an external 12v brick. If you don't have one, that's another $20. For the chassis, it depends on what sort of storage you want to put in it. Anything that'll hold an ITX board will do, though I like the mini-box cases (an M350 will set you back $40 though it requires the use of laptop drives). An M300 is more expensive at $60 but allows the use of a single 3.5" drive so you can recycle a hard drive you already own.
Anyway, I think the best bang for the buck is one of the Intel Mini-ITX boards. They're inexpensive, capable and familiar. Be aware that the older Intel boards (Little Falls, Little Falls 2) have no integrated PSUs so that drives their prices up relative to the Johnstown.
James
you are not going to find anything that uses 30W, since if the metric is the mini uses 85W then 30W by that metric is about -10W in reality.
I just put a FreeNAS together with the Artigo A2000 barebones PC. It ended up being a little more than $400 using 2X 1.5TB drives (mirrored), but fairly simple to get going, small and quiet. With a GigE switch and old WRT54gs in use as an access point, it pulls 35W at idle and about 50W or so under load. It runs the Via C7-D at 1.5GHz, and has an internal CF slot that you can load an OS on easily. File transfers are nothing to write home about, but acceptable (and much better than the Linksys NAS200 I should have checked reviews on before buying!). The only problem I've had is that the power connector looses contact easily if you move the box around.
If you already have drives, I think it would be a good way to go.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I recommend the QNAP TS-109 PRO, I have it here and it works perfectly, it uses 14W of power, has an 500MHz ARM possessor and its fan-less, falls under the price-tag to.
Installing debian on it was very easy following a guide on Internet.
How about a BeagleBoard?
You can connect an external drive over USB2.0. I couldn't find its wattage on the page, but it should be pretty low. Its's $149 and can be powered over USB. I've seen it run the ARM version of Ubuntu.
How about a used Pentium III motherboard/CPU from eBay or wherever? That is what I did when I wanted to reduce my watts at home. My old server was a 1GHz Athlon (underclocked 1.4GHz). It did most everything that I needed but was using about 85 watts. It was an improvement over the 200 watt Sun Ultra 60 that it replaced but not good enough.
Since I don't need much CPU for my home server, I looked up old CPUs to see what had a decent performance per watt. I decided on a Pentium III at about 1GHz which is what I got off eBay. I stuck 1GB of RAM, a PCI to SATA card and two 500GB WD green drives in it. It uses about 45-50 watts idle. The motherboard and CPU cost about $25...
Most likely, the only way you'll be able to get lower watts than that in a full size system is to spend some $$$ on modern low power hardware.
Cobalt Qube Software-wise, it has easily one of the best management interfaces.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856119011&cm_re=RS-233-_-56-119-011-_-Product
Basically a netbook in a box, for about $170US (each) i built a pair of small linux servers to handle all my chores...1.6Ghz Atom Procs, 2GB of RAM, 500GB 5400RPM drives.
The only downside i've found thus far is no gigabit, but they have a single PCI slot if you really need it, gig-e cards are cheap.
I have 0 complaints thus far, one box has been running since July, another i just brought up last week. The temperature in my office dropped 5 by turning off the box I replaced, and I went from about 120-130W constant draw to about 60W.
Its not as good as a Mini as power consumption, but I have two machines, and still have less than even the low-end mini in them in up-front costs.
I have been working on lowering my power consumption for just over a year now, with a lot of success (reduced my power bill by 20-30%). I did a couple of somewhat lame writeups on my website about my server upgrades and the power consumption changes:
http://www.peelman.us/wordpress/2009/08/01/new-server-pollux/
http://www.peelman.us/wordpress/2008/10/29/file-server-upgrades/
Netgear's Readynas Duo would probably work for you. It probably has everything you are looking for baked in, including root access. I've added a subversion repository to mine but don't find a need to modify it further. You can usually use Debian's sparc packages on it directly without any trouble. Goes for $250 without any drives on amazon. Power supply is 60W, but is typically uses about 35W. Also has a power saving mode which should lower that further. Check it out:
http://netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASDuo/RND2000.aspx
The Asrock ION 330 seems like a good choice. DVD burner, 320gb harddisk, intel atom + nvidia ion. Uses about 30 - 35W, even under load. Installing Ubuntu or Debian on it is very easy. You can even play full HD content on it if you so desire. All in one package for around $300 - $350. And it looks good in your living room too!
While the loaded power is 85W on a Mac Mini, the idle power might be a lot less. The Apple quoted idle usage power is about 13W for the newest model and up to 32W for the first model.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Try out a Bubba, it comes preinstalled with Debian.
http://www.excito.com/
Now that the N900 is about to be released, your old N770, N800, and N810 become just about as useless as a kick stand on a bass boat. They are extremely low power, have USB, and just about any Debian Linux software is available.
You could plug these into a solar panel, or better yet, take the 48VAC from the phone line that is long been shut off (but is always powered) and convert that to the DC needed to keep the battery charged.
There is always something satisfying in screwing Verizon et al.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I recently bought one of these (Meerkat Ion dual core NetTop) and overall I'm fairly pleased with it. I have not measured how much power it draws, but in terms of low profile and sound level, it's hugely better than its predecessor (a big hulking gazillion-fan Xeon based full size desktop).
You could save some extra cash by going with the lower end model (Atom based).
In addition to saving money, you get Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, and you support a company that only supplies Linux on its products.
ObDisclaimer: I have no connection with System76 other than being a satisfied customer.
-- This
The newest Mac Mini uses 14 watts when idle. Isn't a home server mostly going to sit around idle?
This sig kills fascists.
The Apple Insider has an inside look and comparison of the new Apple Mini Server -- http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/24/inside_apples_new_mac_mini_server.html -- compares to PC (windows) based server solutions noting initial costs compared to added server costs but does not really compare to Linux. Not exactly in the price range of that but might be easier for a home administrator.
No, a mini doesn't draw about 85 watts. A mini COULD in THEORY under FULL LOAD draw about 85 watts. You're very unlikely to keep it fully loaded, so it'll draw a lot less. It is more expensive, true, but: If it does stuff an order of magnitude faster than the super-cheap low-end system, that reduces your costs. Think about "time it takes to rebuild the kernel", and how much that costs, for instance. Basically, on modern CPUs, speed is often also power efficiency.
You can spend a ton of time and effort trying to beat this one, or you can get something aimed at solving your problem out of the box. (BTW, the other candidate I'd recommend, which is nigh-identical, is "a cheap laptop".)
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How about the Intel Desktop Board D945GCLF2? It's cheap, 64bit, dual-core, supports HT etc... Need I say more? It replaced my old Dual P3 setup... :)
http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/atoms/
I'd suggest you re-visit your assumption on the amount of $ you'd save (and for that matter, the *real* power usage of the existing machine, as opposed to just the 'rated capacity' of its PS) before going on a quest for a replacement machine.
Eats about 10 watts on idle.
I'm a big fan of the Soekris Engineering embedded devices: http://www.soekris.com/
They feature AMD Geode CPU's, and are extremely flexible. You have to install linux via netboot on the lower end models - but that's childsplay compared to some of the other suggestions on here.
The net5501-70 runs $300, and features 500 Mhz CPU, 512 Mbyte SDRAM, 4 Ethernet, 2 serial, USB connector, CF socket, IDE&SATA connector, 1 Mini-PCI socket, 3.3V PCI connector.
Runs silent, cheap, and powerful enough for what you want.
I'm running one of these with Lenny installed. It's officially supported by Debian so it's a piece of cake to install Lenny on it, although the default software would probably be able to do everything you want. This has a 500MHz arm processor which is a bit weak but there's a newer 1.2GHz version.
Sleeping mode: 6.6W
In operation: 14.4W
http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=91
Was looking for something like this about a year ago to use as a router. Wound up finding one of these on Ebay for about $75:
http://us.msi.com/index.php?func=proddesc&maincat_no=1&prod_no=225
Socket M, mobile chipset. The whole thing wound up at around $250 with a CF card instead of a hard drive. It's fanless, completely silent, and my Kill-A-Watt says it's using about 24 watts. Way more stable than the typical junk router to boot - I've only rebooted it once in the last year and that was for an upgrade.
The first unwritten rule of miscegenation is you don't talk about miscegenation. Now we have to kill you.
The Sheeva Plug mentioned elsewhere is one option.
Another we've had a good experience with are the ALIX boards from PC Engines. The ALIX 3D3 board we run is at 3 watts at idle, up to 5W (not including whatever you attach via USB). It runs from CompactFlash and has no fan so keeps the energy down nicely. CPU is AMD Geode. You get serial, WiFi, Ethernet, USB connectivity and VGA port if you need it for a screen.
We've used it with the Voyage Linux distribution (Debian-based) and it's running great. Building from parts the whole box costs you around $200 or less and you get a full-fledged system with which to tinker with. We've got a bill of materials online and some build instructions as well.
OpenRemote -- Open Source Home Automation
I've been trying linux debian in my Wii for a while and I can't be more happy. ssh, web server, torrent client, nfs, video player, ...
It's a very cheap computer (200€)
I don't know exactly how much power it needs but its power supply unit is of 52W.
I have a Mybook World with Debian Lenny. Installing it was not a problem.
The processor and memory are really low, but you can have a torrent client or podcatcher.
I currently have a problem with oom-killer and 15G+ torrents but otherwise it's a great little system.
Virtualize. If you're anything like me, you have a public web server, a NAS, and a development Linux box. Now obviously you don't want your public web server having any access to your NAS, and you don't want your dev box to be able to screw up either. At the same time, you don't want to have three separate boxes, either. So what do you do? You get a fairly low-end dual core AMD box with lots of RAM (do yourself a favor - get ECC ram, on AMD it doesn't cost that much extra), download and install VMWare ESXi, and run all three machines on one set of hardware. Your idle power draw will be at around 40 watts or so, more than that if you stuff half a dozen hard drives in it (for the thick, juicy, FreeBSD based ZFS NAS), but still WAY less than the power draw of three separate machines. And you don't have to recompile and install everything by hand. And if you need another box, spontaneously, you can just provision yet another VM.
85W for a Mac mini? Nothing like that. I tested an old one a few weeks back and it pulled less than 20W. The latest ones claim rather less (can't remember the figures, but look at Apple's web site if you want to know).
ASUS Eee Box PC B202 runs Ubuntu Server like a dream. Have configured it as a PDC for my Windows Boxes, and trying to get Free Radius working for my Wifi network. Have got BIND, Squid running to provide the caching I need. Have not got started with the filtering, but thats the next stop after Free Radius. And VPN so that I can get back into home when I am travelling. Syslogd will also be nice to log my Internet Traffic. But that would be all I require. (My backups are on a DNS 323, so I dont plan messing with it. Anyway, this Eee box has only 160GB, hardly enough for the task at hand) It sits as a headless box in a corner and I just SSH in when I need it. Pretty, and pretty impressive for the small box it is. Atom N270, 1GB RAM is enough for what I do - CPU hardly ever spikes beyond 10-15%, and RAM is more like 25% peak that I have seen when I am logged in and swap does not really get touched. I have only one wish - a distro where all this is preconfigured or works out of the box...
Buy a mac mini and hook a bicycle + generator up to it. Runs your server and burns off yesterday's donuts.
I use a Cobalt RaQ 2 (Sun), rocksteady. I runs standard Debian. Uses almost no power, certainly less than 35 Watt, because that is the limit of it's power supply (PS). Supports PATA, scsi, boasts two NIC's, a serial port, 256 MB of ram and some more....
Drawbacks: slow networking, a second HD will probably overstress the PS, little calculating power, although that is relative looking at it's age...
Have you considered using Xen, using dom0 for your desktop and then running your server in a domU?
Or do you turn your desktop off when not in use to save power?
I've read about "green" data centers, but has anyone tried solar panels for a SOHO? The costs are half from 2 years ago, and still falling.
The Apple TV draws 25-35 watts and Ubuntu can run on it.
To be honest, I've looked at a lot of these low power systems, but almost all of them run only a single hard disk. As the main point of these servers is for file serving, it seems remiss to not have some kind of mirroring of disks. Anyone got a good solution which supports two (or more) hard drives?
I have a couple of these: http://www.excito.com/ and they are excellent. However, after reading these posts, i'm also going to buy some of those plug servers. Never have too many servers!
Bifferboard - 1W power consumption, USB and ethernet - only 29 GBP. Runs standard x86 distributions.
Remember, virtually all the electricity you use is being dissipated as heat, and so heating your house. If you live in a cold place, you aren't wasting that much energy. If you live in a hot place, you are using quite a bit more, since your air conditioner has to work that much harder to expell all that extra heat.
Currently I have a P3-933 with a passively-cooled Radeon 9200 and a 2.5" HDD running 24/7. It eats ~28W at idle, 45W running folding@home, and ~57W running a 3D game. Using onboard Intel graphics instead of a video card saves 5-10W. The 2.5" HDD saves a few W compared to a 3.5" drive, SSD might also be a good option.
Of course, one can do better than an old 180nm Pentium 3. Now we have the Atom, which is frugal but not too quick, the Pentium M which is quicker and hungrier (22W at normal voltage, similar to the above-mentioned P3), low voltage versions of the Core/Core 2, AMD's Turion or 45W Athlon X2 and Athlon II X2. These CPUs can all switch multipliers and voltages on the fly to reduce power (although I'm not sure how well the ability is supported under Linux).
Not sure what form-factor you're looking for but grabbing a cheap Pentium M motherboard off of $AUCTION_SITE with integrated graphics might be the most cost-effective route.
I picked up this: Intel BOXD945GCLF2 Atom 330 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard
$80 + $10(1GBddr2 ) + hard drive + a case and psu you have around the house and there you go
Dual-Core atom with SMT, I use it for ssh, svn, ftp, dns cache, torrents, file server. Also, *Gigabit Ethernet!!!* I get 45MB/s on it, so I store all my music, videos, and torrents.
it's about 40 watts i think. Ironically, the chipset puts out most of the heat because it's a shitty old 945, but still worth it IMO.
My father uses a Bubba home server from http://www.excito.com , I've tried it and it has some nice features:
* It is shipped as a turnkey ready system that is built around an ARM processor a Debian distribution.
* It has the standard set of features like fileserver, print server, bit torrent slave, firewall etc. out of the box.
* Excito hasn’t placed any restrictions to what you can do with the software; you can replace the distribution that it is shipped with or customize it through a root shell.
* It is quiet! The HDD is the only source of noise (and it can be shipped with SSD).
* Good looking in my opinion. It is a discreet black box with the same "soft touch" paint as on ThinkPads.
I have been looking for a low power server too but decided to not go with the Bubba since I would like to have a video output. I’m looking at the Intel D945GSEJT Atom board – it does not have a fan and can be powered with a 12 V power supply (e.g. no ATX PSU needed).
If full-HD video is desirable I would have a look at some boards with Nvidia ION chipsets. I know that Asus and Zotac builds Atom + ION boards, but I haven’t looked in to it myself.
So, my recommendations are:
* Bubba for a turnkey ready system.
* Intel Atom board for the hacker.
* Atom board with ION chipset for the media centre.
Good luck with your server!
>A Mac Mini draws about 85 Watts
On the contrary, my 2009 Mac Mini C2D draws 15 W idle and 30 W playing HD content as measured by a Kill-A-Watt. The Shuttle X27D I have at work with an Atom 330 draws 30 W doing absolutely nothing. If you remove the optical drive and install a second hard disk, the Mac Mini makes a fantastic low-power server. You can get a refurbished Mac Mini and save some coin.
Bought one for $99 off Newegg. They're great little machines.
Just get a NetTop:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettop
I wanted the same type of box a year ago, and settled on Intel's D945GCLF2 board, which has a dual core Atom, onboard video, one memory slot, and two SATA plugs. Adding a 2Gb stick, a 500Gb Seagate drive, a generic CD-RW, and a case to put it all in ran just over $300. Runs Ubuntu 8.10 like a champ, and draws 35 watts when spinning the disk. To quiet it down, I replaced the stock northbridge fan with a Zalman passive cooler (instructions here).
To save power about 4 years ago used an Asus Terminator C3 as a server to replace some aging HP netservers. The Via C3 chip is interesting to get set up due to the lack of floating point math, but it did the job and with little power. I selected components which drew less power. You don't need a 7200 rpm HD. After installation, remove the CD drive. It adds to the current draw, especially at boot.
Take the 5 and 12V lines from the PC power supply and bring them out the back of the computer and use them to run stuff that normally runs on a wall wart. The PC has a switch mode power supply which is much more efficient that the simple linear supply in the wall warts. Better still is the fact that switch mode supplies are at their most efficient at 70-90% of their rated capacity. The transformers the wall warts use draw a little power any time they're plugged in, not just when the thing they power is on.
I fabricated a mount for the Yoggie Soho firewall and Linksys SD-2008 switch and put them in a drive bay. My cablemodem won't fit, so it sits to the side, also powered by 12V from the power supply. Also set the BIOS to come on when you need it to, and put it to bed at night. You will save a lot more with the thing off. If you remember to shut it down, great, if not, oh well.
I will eventually switch over to a Intel Atom or ARM architecture, but for right now this works. My entire system, firewall, switch, cablemodem, and server pulls about 60 watts under use. It is doubtful I will be able to increase efficiency beyond this sufficiently to merit an upgrade. It will wait until I have a failure, and something tells me that could be a long wait, but I am thinking of using a netbook like my Samsung NC-10 when I finally do.
I just put together a SuperMicro 5014A-H 1U server (dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor) with two 320GB 2.5" hard drives (in a RAID-1 configuration) and an 8-port Digium card (AEX800) for Asterisk use. Aside from the Digium card (which was inherited from another server), the total cost of parts including tax and delivery was under $500. The system runs Asterisk, Samba, Apache, PostFix, and Dovecot and does so consuming (according to Kill-A-Watt) roughly 40 watts of power. It's also reasonably quiet and compact. The only downside is that the chassis was designed to hold one 3.5" HDD, and the adapter they sell for it makes it impossible to use anything larger than a half-height PCIe card, so mounting the two 2.5" drives required some drilling new mounting holes - no big deal, but something that should have been foreseen by SuperMicro.
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You can run an alix1d from pcengines (http://www.pcengines.ch/alix1d.htm), 500MHZ AMD geode CPU (fan less) with 256mb RAM. Only 5w with a 2.5 HDD....
see http://www.own3d.ch/this_server.html
TermTek makes a nice line of 'Thin clients' (read full fledged computers sans hdd, coaster-drives and fans). I've found that the TK-3350 I had worked great. Nice quiet little boxes. (plug)I got mine from http://www.disklessworkstations.com/ .(/plug)
I picked up one of these:
http://www.fit-pc.com/fit-pc1/whats-new.html
for $200. It's running Ubuntu 8.04 with LXDE pretty reasonably and being an excellent Squeezebox Server. Peaks at 5W and is fanless, so it's virtually silent.
Previously I used an old laptop, but the fan whine drove me nuts and it was sucking 15-20W even at idle.
The 330Gb Hard drive cost me an extra $150 and it only works with parallel ATA, but worth a look.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
I have an AMD Geode LX 800-based system (DT168) which I got from eBay. It's got a 1GB flash and IIRC 3xUSB2. I get real-world 7MBps over 100baseTx using Samba, XFS, MyBook 1TB. It's got 512MB RAM which is enough for "most" tasks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Check out Intel D945GSEJT Johnstown Mainboard Dual core Atom, low power fanless, doesn't need power supply (jack in back goes right to power brick) and gig ethernet for about $118. Very low profile Mini-ITX board, works well in $39 mini-case. I've been using this combination for all sorts of things esp storage servers ( Try OpenFiler Linux-based or FreeNAS BSD-based FOSS NAS solutions )
I've been running 3 desktops as servers 24/7 for over a year. Each physical machine runs 6 VMs.
My entire home (4BR) power bill last month was $54 and in July with A/C running it was $145. It will dip around $38 in December and I really don't conserve any power beyond turning off things when I'm not in the room. Of that $38, most goes to the fridge, then to the toaster oven, microwave, air drier, coffee maker, HDTVs and ... then the computers. Oven, hot water and house heater are gas here.
I've placed a Kill-a-Watt on each of the PCs. At boot, they use around 80-180W of power for 30-60 seconds, but then each drops to 40W, 50W and 80W (the older E6600 chip with a RAID card and external disk array) steady state. Yawn. Not worth the trouble for $5/month of cost ($60/yr).
BTW, BensBargains had an Atom processor + MB (with lots of crappy built-in peripherals) for $89 today. You'll have to add a case, OS, cables, and other stuff, so plan another $100 min.
I use a QNAP 219 P. It runs Linux,, has support out of the box for many servers including apache, mysql, imap, pop. Additional support for qpkg packages basically means that the world is your oyster.
You can get a decent P3 or Celeron laptop for under $100 (for free if you are lucky). Depending on the CPU, it can draw 15-40W under load. The upside is that usually no hardware tweaking is required at all.
I recently replaced my file server for two reasons. 1) Age. 2) It was a different architecture (PowerPC) than my workstations, which means I needed two different update procedures. I switched to an Atom based system (MSI Wind Nettop). Now, if I update one workstation or the server, the updates get cached and used to update the remaining systems. Further, it's the same command to update any system: yum update. It's slightly out of the power and price envelopes, but it saves significant time on administration. Getting something low-power is nice, but make sure you aren't significantly increasing your admin time or bandwidth requirements.
The O!Play is going for ~$100US right now (cheaper if you shop around. It has linux on it with full root access (telnet deamon, root w/no password). It has a MIPS CPU and there's already a large number of ipkgs that will install on it. Attach a hard drive of your choice and you can install packages share files/stream content all you want. Not sure you'd be able to install a full X on it. And I'm not sure about the optical drive although being linux I assume ISOs can be mounted anyway. And it has convenient HDMI output you could hook it to a TV if you needed to (for non-video stream I'm not sure why you would need to).
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
The Linksys NSLU2 is a home file server which uses USB disks and can be easily flashed with a couple different linux versions. I ran mine with 4 disks in RAID5 and SAMBA, but I'm pretty sure Apache was available as well. It's not very fast and I think the ethernet is 10 base, but it was really easy to set up and I found it reliable.
http://www.amazon.com/Linksys-Storage-Link-Drives-NSLU2/dp/B0001FSCZO/
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/
Fit-PC will do everything you want at about 5W. /. before and of course you can google for more info.
The old version has been on
I run 5 small sites on a single Fit-PC (http://www.fit-pc.com/) running Tunrkey Linux (http://www.turnkeylinux.org/). Instead of a HD, I've installed a CF card using a CF to IDE adapter, so the setup is completely solid state. The server has no fan, is not much bigger than a deck of cards and has been quietly working away at 3W for the past year.
I think it's what you after, cheap, low power but otherwise a modern computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettop
Okay, so lets look at this plan of yours to save money.
You are going to spend $300 on a low power webserver in order to save you seventy dollars per year on your electricity bill. You will still be spending approximately $30 per year on your new low powered webserver.
So, 300 + 30/yr after 7 years is 510 dollars
The savings of 70/yr after 7 years is 490 dollars.
After seven years of having a lower powered webserver, you will still be spending more money on your solution than on your problem. If you that concerned about saving money, you might just turn off your webserver.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Considering that my desktop was built to be Quiet and Low Power, I'd say it's easily done. Specs I'm using are a C2D e6300 (65 watt), 3GB ddr2-800, Fanless Geforce 7300GT (could use onboard for less power), onboard audio, 2x Sata Drives and a Sata burner. According to my APC, total draw from it, the monitor, Phone charger and Linksys WRT54G router is Simply look at Micro ATX boards and something like a Celeron or Sempron CPU that's 65 watts (shouldn't be to hard) and you've got the basis for a decent server for less then 300
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I went from an old 300W system down to a 7W Bubba II from Excito. Runs debian and all that entails. Also has a nice WebUI interface for most services (which I've never used). Comes in a few HD configurations. Other than the HD it is completely silent. It's also nice looking, if that matters.
Probably the only thing I wish it had was a sound-card.
I've been using this for a year and have loved it. Perfect for my needs.
My wife has a mac mini intel 1.83GHz Core2 Duo with the gma950, 4 gigs ram, using wifi, 320 gig 5400 rpm drive and it takes 20 watts, the 20" viewsonic monitor takes 57 watts. Total power for the PC and monitor is 77 watts.
Buy a Cobalt Qube2, add a second hard drive, install NetBSD or Debian and you are ready to go and they look awesome
Consider using a netbook of some kind. Netbooks have low power consumption and will run Linux fine.
I would recommend you OpenSolaris as ZFS can do compression on the fly what could save you some more bucks
(in terms of hw or electricity if you avoid buying bigger hdds)
it does all you require and with one or two line commands to enable it.
for me it was definitely way to go...
How much power does the existing server draw when it's idling? Try measuring the power draw if you haven't done so already, it might not be as bad as you think.
The savings of 70/yr after 7 years is 490 dollars
Look, I'm no bleeding heart... but, you've got two things wrong:
a) First off, I think your figures might well be understated, particularly if energy costs rise in real terms. If anything, any power that your computer uses during the summer time costs you more because, first you pay to buy the energy, then, you pay to get rid of its heat.
b) Secondly, you falsely assume that the sole reason for the upgrade is solely due to power efficiency. This is a technical web site, and one can expect that people here tend to be in a mode of continual upgrades and investments. We can then assume, more likely, that the person is going to upgrade anyway, and is simply using energy as a selection of what to upgrade to, rather than just upgrade.
For example, I upgraded my prized Opteron to a new Nehalem Xeon box. Was energy efficiency the sole reason that I did it? No. I did it because I wanted a new computer. But it was certainly worth knowing what some of the different energy options are, and yeah, I probably will wind up saving, under Delaware rates, enough money to at least buy myself a decent bottle of whiskey (knob creek, or, laphroig), simply because the new box uses a lot less power than my old dual Opt 270 did.
But, yeah, I'll give you one thing... if you really want to save power on your computer, turn it off.
This is my sig.
I setup a home server (print, file, ftp, smtp, on-demand packet sniffing, etc) on a 2GB MSI Wind Nettop. This is a barebones PC and uses only 35Watts peak. With HDD, RAM, etc total cost was $350.00
The coolest part is the "server" spends most of its time asleep (S3). When someone in the house needs to print, access files, etc they have an icon that sends a magic packet to wake the server. The server will then stay on as long as needed (based on CPU Util + 10 minutes) and then go back to sleep. Be doing this for 2+ years (old higher watt computer previously) and this solution works great for us.
-Joe
I am in a similar situation... but over the years, I find I am doing less "server" things at home and much prefer to outsource basic functionality like email.
I used to run my own in house email, web sites, etc... but now use google apps for my domain for most of that.
I have found a simple QNAP NAS device serves my file sharing (NFS, etc...) needs quite well, and it draws much less power than a full fledged server.
VMWare or some other virtual machine environment and a lightweight linux distro like Crux serves my needs very well when I need to do some shell scripting or other activities for which a linux environment is necessary.
In short, over the years as I have used my home environment as a learning and testing environment, I have found the need to run a true server environment has lessened, allowing me more time to focus on other things.
I used to be a sysadmin at work... and found that I didn't want to be one at home as well!
I have 2 low power servers running. One is a Mac mini with regular MacOS X with a few extra apps running as a file server, web server, and a few other fucntions. The other is an EeeBox running CentOS 4.7 as a DHCP, DNS, & NIS server. The Mac uses very little power (~15w idle, ~60w average) unless heavily taxed. The Eee uses much less running the Atom processor, and the itty bitty power supply.
Either way, or even instead of these boxen you could run a standard PC... Just buy a single high power solar panel and have no power bill at all. (The panel will pay for itself over time.)
I can recommend the Alix boards. They are very well designed and draw 3 Watt on average, 5 Watt peak at 100% CPU. I've used them with Voyage, which works very well, and I'm in the process of releasing an alix-customised Debian distribution which will provide a richer environment than Voyage, yet still provides facilities as fall-back flash and network boot.
I'm interested in how you are running a home server if it is serving to the Internet (presumably via apache). My ISP Verizon (!#%&X!) [1] seems to have a policy of filtering incoming requests to "home" machines on port 80 (for normal HTTP). Have you switched to serving on an alternate port or is your ISP less restrictive?
My second suggestion (before you go the alternate hardware route) would be to switch your Linux installation to use the "ondemand" CPU scheduler. For the Pentium IV machine I am running this reduced the wall outlet CPU consumption was ~25 W (to around 105W). Still not the reduction you are seeking but a place to start.
1. Verizon seems to consider "home servers" to require a higher priced "business" class DSL service. On alternate HTTP ports the search bots will find your server fine though you will not rise high in the search results rankings unless you find ways to get the URLs with the alternate port #'s into circulation. I wonder how much power Verizon consumes/wastes on port filtering?
You're talking about dropping from 100W down to 30, but what if you're really only consuming 45 regularly right now? Is it worth it for a 15W drop in consumption?
There are a huge number of posts in here talking about the Mac Mini and peak vs normal draw, but they're missing the point that *YOUR* normal draw may be much lower than you think, and there may be power saving features that you're not using that could lower it further. For example, if you're running DD-WRT or another aftermarket firmware on your router, you may be able to set things up to power your system down and use Wake On LAN to wake the system up remotely when you need it.
Of course, if you're using one of those routers with USB support you may be able to attach your external storage to it, though you may actually lose some power management features depending on how you do it and expect to have a much more limited range of capabilities.
A Kill-A-Watt or a good UPS should both be able to give you some idea of your current draw.
fencepost
just a little off
I had an old P3 laptop I used for just this, and it pulled 25 Watts. It was getting flakey, and I replaced it with a Wyse 9455XL thin client -- actually a pretty standard fanless MiniITX Via system. I added a 4GB CF card for a disk, and it pulls 12 Watts.
I'm running a Linux-loaded MSNTV2, and with an IDE hard drive. At 100% CPU, it peaks at 15W.
It takes a bit of hardware hacking, but if you're into that kind of thing, see MSNTV2 Linux Port and MSNTV2 Boot Tutorial
Try the Revo, eso. The new dual core Atom 330; it has an HDMI output as well. Around UK£150.
5000 KWH @ 10 cents per kwh = $500. I know the 10 cents per kwh doesnt apply to industrial use or in the countries where computers are made. Even so it makes me skeptical of the 5000 KWH to produce a computer. We can buy a complete computer for less than $500. When you consider the additional costs of making a computer (labor, engineering labor, materials, shipping, sales costs, money paid to various governments etc.) it is hard to believe 5000 KWH estimate.
According to my Kill-A-Watt meter, the thing consistently uses 4 watts. I set up um SVN MySQL LightHTTP Samba and I forget what else. SSH/SFTP were enabled out of the box. I transferred the filesystem from the crappy 512 MB NAND to a compact flash card and moved some var directories to an external HDD.
Ironically it was much more difficult to plug in the Kill-A-Watt. It has a three prong plug sticking out of the middle of a chassis that is carefully designed to cover every other outlet in the room. The SheevaPlug went in right on top with no problem.
I'd be tempted to register a temporary dyndns for 5 minutes and post it here to see what the Kill-A-Watt does if I weren't feeling so lazy. I don't feel like reaching down there and power cycling it.
I like it because it is powerful enough to do most of my daily computing. It runs an apache, a mailserver and serves as my desktop machine. I use a 1680x1050 Gnome desktop, fullscreen video, browser and email client. It has, in practise, completely replaced my normal (1300 euro) desktop. After I replaced the crappy fan that came with the motherboard it is now perfectly silent.
The whole system, under load, uses 28Watt.
I replaced my NSLU2 with a fit-pc as a home server: v. low wattage (8W) and Ubuntu pre-installed was a big plus for me, after hacking around with the NSLU2. The Fit-PC just works and has a little more processing headroom.
I use an AppleTV running linux. The biggest downsides are 1 usb port and only 100 mbps ethernet. The fact that the hard drive is only PATA gets annoying too. But it's absolutely silent and really easy on the electricity bill.
Soekris Engineering makes some great low-power hardware in your price range. They use AMD Geode processors. I have a net4526 as a home router, and according to my Kill-A-Watt, it uses about 1W on average, in a "diskless" setup (boots from CF card, and runs most things from RAMdisk). They're designed to operate primarily over the serial port. The net5501, which we have at few of at work, are basically the speed of a Pentium II. Not bad for such a low-power device. I run OpenBSD on mine, and we have FreeBSD on a couple at work (FreeBSD has drivers for the Sangoma E1/T1 card), but according to their website you can run Linux on it as well. The newer ones even have temperature and voltage sensors.
This is a pretty simple question to answer. Any cheapo PC will do.
I run a wall mounted Asus Eee PC (forgot the exact model name, 901?)
Ubuntu Server 8.10, Uptime:
22:06:20 up 253 days, 10:45, 4 users, load average: 1.44, 1.32, 1.19
Running:
Apache
Rtorrent
Lighttpd
Samba
Ntpd
Mumble
Connected to this is an 1TB external USB2 HDD
Try Texas Instruments' BeagleBoard - it's an OMAP3 (ARM Cortex A8) at 600MHz, has an OpenGL ES capable graphics card (10M polys/sec, HD video) and can run off USB power or DC5V. DVI-D + S-Video for the display and they can boot off either the internal flash or an SD card (cheap storage!)
They are $150 and run Linux in various flavours or even the free home use version of QNX if you need hard realtime capabilities.
The design is quite open - check out the System Reference Manual
Running off either 5VDC or USB power, it typically uses 350mA, so it's using just 1.75W of power.
Now, it doesn't have Ethernet built in, but there is an expansion board available that adds this, or there's a USB hub you can get for it with an Ethernet port and you're up and running. Cutting your home server's power usage by a factor of 50 will have a pretty positive ROI.
Installation is pretty easy, you can download a pre-built image, copy it to the SD card, plug the SD card into the beagleboard and up you boot.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
I know netbooks are overkill (screen and all), but they use surprisingly little power. My Dell Mini 9 pulls ~7W when idle, and ~11W when 100% CPU and network I/O is running. Use a large SSD and a 32GB SD card, and you have a respectable server. Has a built-in UPS with your battery, too.
I didn't see this mentioned in the other comments, but scratch the Mybook World Edition. It's the slowest thing ever.
On the surface, things look good: Enough RAM and CPU to be useful, a lot of space, nearly meaningless power consumption, gigabit network, easily hackable, convection cooled, nearly silent...
There's just one problem: The network interface is so poorly implemented that it can, at best, push 3-4 megabytes per second before the CPU pegs at 100%. Accordingly, since the throughput is CPU-bound, running anything else on the box has an immediate and noticeable impact on speeds.
After a few months of tinkering with it trying to make it suck less, I found that the best use for my 1TB Mybook World Edition NAS was to strip the drive out of the enclosure, put it into a real PC, and throw the rest away.
Kid-proof tablet..
Take 1 shoebox, 3-500GB mini-USB drives, Open Mesh Wireless, 2 SheevaPlug ARM computers. All of that consumes approx. 30 Watts.
If you want low power, look at any of the Netbook and low power 'portable' market devices.
They run on a few Watts compared to something even like a Mini-ATX or Mac Mini desktop solution.
Pick an OS that knows how to handle the device's power management - some distributions suck at this, and some are smooth as butter. (Use something like Windows7 -trial copy- to baseline the power usage to help pick a distribution that gets close to what Windows7 does with power usage or beats it, as it is a good all around consumer baseline OS that does try to manage every power management trick in the book.)
You can even stick to a bland x86 architecture, making things a lot easier for you.
If you pick a netbook or low end laptop, use USB 'selective suspend' devices for storage, DVD/CDROM, etc. Also some of the low end power efficient laptops have eSATA, ExpressCard, etc.
Low power is what these devices were designed to do. (One caveat, make sure they have a 'smart' AC adapter, if not, the AC adapter will not cycle down, and so all the laptop side power saving won't have as dramatic gain.)
PS for a Server, a low end laptop is rather smart, as it can be folded away on your bookshelf next to your hub out of the way, and they also have built in battery backup for power outages and smart shutdown/restart - perfect for servers.
Good Luck...
I'm running FreeBSD on one of these.
https://www.soekris.com/shop/product_info.php?products_id=85
These things are bullet-proof. You'll want the HDD mounting kit ($10) to install a 2.5" laptop drive. That will be the only moving part.
If Linux supports the IP passing protocol Apple added in Snow Leopard, and you are willing to get an Apple router, that could save quite a bit of power.
Basically, the way it works is that when a machine goes to sleep, it can pass its IP address to the router. If anyone tries to connect to that IP address, the router wakes the sleeping server, passes back the IP address, and the server can process the request.
This should be great for a home server, allowing the server to spend most of its time asleep.
really? And you think the recession did not touch you yet? I bet you could find a million ways to earn $70 within a year instead. I guess that would be too easy?
I have an Athlon 64 with 7 drives installed and it all consumes only 90 Wt according to the UPS meter. With one drive this would probably go down to 60 Wt or lower. I am not sure it is worth it cutting this down to 30 Wt and loosing all the flexibility that there is with a standard Ubuntu install. An experiment with Linksys NSL demonstrated that it is too much overhead configuring it and making sure everything works. I have lost just too much time, to make out for that energy save.
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
Newer (not newest) 2.0ghz, 120gb hard drive, 4gb RAM, plus an attached FW800 drive. This is running Snow Leopard Server providing a couple of relatively low-demand websites (about 1 request/sec) and it's also doing some active firewall for my local network. (I have another Mini that's acting as the file/LDAP server).
According to my Kill-o-Watt meter, booting up it drew about 25-33 w, and right now it's drawing about 17-25 watts steady-state with a load average of about .5 and running about 10%-15% CPU utilization.
What that shows is a Mini that isn't doing much isn't consuming much power. I'll report back more results tomorrow once the machine has run with the Kill-o-Watt for a day. Then I'll put the Kil-o-Watt on the other server.
It's not under 300$, it is 349$
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856158007
26W at idle, 38W with processors at 100% and GPU 100%
Read reviews over the net, especially this one: http://www.missingremote.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3727&Itemid=1
Fully decode at 1080p through hardware (CPU around 5-10%).
Disclaimer: I have one! It's great
Marvell plug PC! $99.00
http://www.marvell.com/featured/plugcomputing.jsp
This gets you close. It's the same setup I have:
* MSI Wind PC Intel 945GC Barebone ($135)
* Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB ($85)
* Kingston 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 ($45)
* SanDisk Extreme III 8GB Compact Flash ($55)
Looks like amazon is out of the 500 gHz ($200) but the 1.1 is now at $250 I've seen gentoo/ubuntu/windows running one... only 5 or 6W!
Amahi!
get a nice ITX board, a green HD, and install amahi! :)
its one click software removes the need of a discdrive, or USB for that matter!
once installed, you can simply put it headless in the basement, quietly zooming, while everything gets done through its nice an feature rich webinterface!
its easy to configure, and easy to maintain! it helped me on my power bill, while still having my whole family enjoying all the best of a home server
I would say that any of via small form factor pc are great, i have used several models and very low power on each.
I like to run mine on the best hAmahi (http://www.amahi.org), on an Atom system with all the power management optimizations on: cpuspeed, no X (headless), disk power management tuned nicely. And also I run it well ventilated.
Interesting device called the Lantronix XPort Pro. Claims to be the world's smallest linux network server. Don't know if it's functional enough to fit your needs. I love the Sheeva(mentioned numerous times earlier) and would be hard pressed to trade it in.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Watt per watt, a computer isn't any less efficient putting out heat than any other (electrical) system, so you'd be making up for the "saved" energy otherwise. Of course, if you're in a warm climate (i.e. have to use AC) then your savings will be even greater.
I was given a Sparcstation 5 a few years ago that I have running faithfully as a home server and it draws less than 70 watts. It runs DNS, squid, OpenVPN and a few other things quite well (its running OpenBSD, but you could just as easily put Linux on there). You could pick up a similarly aged system that would have a low power requirement from ebay for well under $300. It's also better for the environment to re-use something that someone else would have otherwise thrown away than to buy something new.
Buy a cheap netbook and a USB hub. Problem solved.
Recycle an old xbox. Not to be confused with the newer xbox360.
with a "kill-a-watt" meter or similar. If the server you have is Pentium 2 or newer it should have good power management already built into it. When idle I've had P2's (rated at 100 or 200W on the case, that's max output not continuous consumption!) sipping along at 15-20w. These were stock desktop machines running headless with no extra PCI cards sitting in there.
I have one for operations like print services, occasional recoding, and backup chores. I have another that is the recording end of my digital audio studio. I think I got mine for $60-70 on ebay 2 years ago. Kill-a-watt says ~34W on idle, peaks to 60-65W under full load. It's a regular old P4-2.4, 512MB RAM, and an IDE laptop drive, and has built in 100bT networking. Nice and small too, though the power brick is hefty.
If you're looking to save money, consider what is costs to pay for an extra 10W-20W of power over a mini vs. the upfront costs. I figure 131 kWh per year at a 15W average difference. That's right about $10/yr for me.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
NSLU2 Arm based, linux powered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2
You can definitely have a full-fledged linux environment on one of the DNS-323 or DNS-321 NAS units from D-Link. Basically you just drop 1 file into your root directory, reboot, and you have telnet access. From there you can pretty much install anything in the repository of pre-compiled binaries. I switched from a 4-bay server tower to this little NAS about a year ago, and I haven't had any issues. I eventually want to get another, though right now I don't have the need. See http://wiki.dns323.info/ for info.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
It's 175 euro, a 100 euros more than the sheeva. And I really want to know if they have a good SATA implementation and if it really works good enough to be worth that much money.
http://beagleboard.org/ Definitely consider the BeagleBoard for $150, especially if you are into building a custom low-power Linux box. Open-Source hardware, draws 2 watts. A little overkill with DVI-D / S-VID output ports, and currently only USB, but the price is right.
Ah, but my machine does NOT spend all sorts of time at 100% usage. In fact I am using it to watch 1080P content now, CPU usage is 10%. The ONLY time it hits 100% is during a compile process when I use -j4 to load all 4 cores. I play MKV files with H.264 compression ripped from BD that I compress myself - I use some pretty serious settings too. Obviously I rip\compress on another box - an I7. This box pushes out 5.1 audio via HDMI too.
The reason why my CPU usage is so far below yours is because it's an ION. No shitty Intel graphics here, this is an NVIDIA 9400m (as in mobile). It supports VC-1, H.264, and MPEG acceleration via VDPAU in XBMC under Linux. I've never run Windows on this one but other ATOM I've used were pretty snappy with XP.
You can learn more about all of this here -> http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=54705
Frankly, this box works WAY better than the C2D I had that also had a 9400m on it. Quieter, WAY less power usage, smaller, and looks great. You sure you're using one of these? I wouldn't expect a CNC machine to require tons of CPU, mostly I/O. For a nettop or small server these boxes are pretty ideal save for their lack of space for many disks.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Why don't you get a fonera2n? Or any other wifi AP which runs linux and has a USB port?
True enough. What would be most interesting is to see a study comparing the total energy efficiency of different model cars - comparing that VW for example (which typically have very long lives) vs most any american "fleet" car... town cars, and those horrid late model GMs like the Impotent... er, Impala. Those things are so cheaply made in ten years they're at that final tier, next stop the wrecking yard.
Old PIII machines are the way to go. Get an old Vectra - those things were built like tanks and have 120W power supplies in them. You'll need a SATA card to do internal drives (2-3W) but their energy outlay was paid back years ago and they'll probably outlast cockroaches.
I've not tried this myself, but we use these Yawarra boxes (http://www.yawarra.com.au/hw-alix.php), which are slightly more expensive than you may be looking for, but could be worth looking at. We've used them at work a couple of times, and if I remember correctly we had success installing Debian Lenny on them, but Ubuntu I think had a kernel issue.
I have done two different ones, so far. The first is (over-) documented here: http://dgack.selfip.com/server/Server2008.php . It works O.K., if a bit slow. The second one is an Intel Atom 330 (with Intel mobo), 2 gigs of ram, etc. It's a 60% faster clock rate, and dual core (with hyperthreading, it looks like 4 cores in Fedora system monitor.) it's a lot healthier. Either one works fine, and can be done for near your target cost. Look at directron.com, and mwave.com for bits and pieces. The Via is rated at about 4 watts, the Intel at about 7, so the power savings are definitely there. Doug
i got an eee pc HA900 from newegg for around $290 after shipping and california tax. i use it as a 24x7 server. i have been turning it on for 3 months. so far, i have not run into any problems. it's energy efficient, very quiet, stable, poweful enough. i got windows XP home pre-installed, and a vm running linux as lamp server. i guess you can install linux directly on to the box. i choose windows as base because it comes pre-installed and easier for me to connect to other devices such as printer, wifi router, usb stick, etc. it even has build-in "UPS" (the battery), "Console Terminal" (the keyboard and LCD), and "Surveillance Camara" (webcam). everything works out beautifully so far, and i have no complaints.
There are also cheap alternatives based on 680MHz MIPS CPU (all overclockable to 800MHz):
RouterStation Pro - 128MB RAM,16MB flash,4xGb ethernet,USB 2.0
Mikrotik RoutBoard RB450G - 256MB RAM,512MB Flash,microSD card slot,5x Gb ethernet (for hdd you can use some cheap Gb AoE box like Welland)
Mikrotik RoutBoard RB433AH - 128RAM,64MB Flash,microSD card slot,3x 10/100 ethernet, 3x microPCI
All can run OpenWRT or Debian.
I've been running Slackware on a Jetway with an Atom 330 and a 4-port SATA daughterboard as my fileserver for a few months :
http://www.jetway.com.tw/jw/ipcboard_view.asp?productid=573&proname=NC92-330-LF
Haven't measured the power usage (I'm currently spinning 4 SATA and 2 PATA drives in it) but my monthly power bill seemed to come down about $10 after I replaced the AthonXP I was using. I only wish I could have used more RAM. I've seen some new ION-based boards with two RAM slots.
If you can fit all your needs into a single 2.5" (or 1.8" with adapter) drive managed by a 586-compatible CPU, there's the Norhtech Microclient Jr DX and/or DMP ebox-3300 (same machine, AFAIK). My Microclient Jr DX with two NICs and a CF card draws 5 watts, with occasional spikes to 6 watts.
http://www.norhtec.com/products/index.html
http://www.compactpc.com.tw/ebox-3300.htm
I needed to replace my main server, so I got the System76 dual-core meerkat nettop (http://system76.com/product_info.php?cPath=27&products_id=91). It almost certainly uses less power than the old desktop that it replaces, although I don't have any numbers (the powersupply is 84W, according the the above link). It is easy to get into to fix/upgrade things, and it takes an ordinary desktop drive, so you can get up to 2TB in there atm. It's also a pretty good size, and stands vertically or horizontally. I'm very very very happy with it, and their customer service (not needed any support beyond the purchase, so that's all I have to go off of) was better than anywhere else I've been.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Im running a mini ITX system comprising of a Mini ITX board and two 1TB WD Green Power drives. The system is easily fast enough as a web and file server and runs for hours from my old UPS when the power goes down!
Advantges: Quiet, Cool and uses alot less power!
I'm running a fanless pc with an intel atom and a case that doubles as a heat sink. Actually most intel atom based mini boxes would suffice - I chose this one simply because I wanted it to be a router as well and its got the dual ethernet ports on the back. You don't need a netbook - they're basically the same thing with a monitor and the monitor is completely redundant for this sort of thing - just means you'll be installing far more than is necessary.
On mine I've got gentoo running with only a minimal set of packages:
ssh, apache, mysql, php, svn server, dokuwiki, samba, nfs, iptables and redmine.
- Fanless box with low wattage -> low power
- Intel atom -> compatibility problems a little easier than with some other cpus.
- Minimal -> easy to maintain.
- Gentoo -> can continually update, dont have to worry about re-installing when the next big release comes along.
It's brilliant, stacks in my bookshelf like just another book.
I guess I am probably too late to be noticed, but for what it's worth I did exactly this. My notes are here - http://www.acooke.org/cute/SystemRefa0.html
In short: it works just fine, and sits (moderately quietly) in the corner, doing its thing. However, the processor is not really fast enough for desktop, so installing and getting everything working was a little frustrating. Also, that chip doesn't have automatic throttling support in Linux so I have a bit of a hack (see link). And the original fan was small and noisy, so I replaced it with a 120mm one.
My electricity bill dropped by about 1/3 since my main machine, which I use during the day for development work, is off for over half the time.
http://www.acooke.org
http://www.synology.com/us/products/DS109+/spec.php Check out the specs on this product. It takes up to a 2 tb sata hd, has mail, web, and runs php. It uses only 21w during use. I purchased the 409+ for its raid5 capability.
Has anyone tried the QNAP NAS servers? - like this one http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=112 . I have heard that the SheevaPlug cannot do simultaneous connections from multiple machines? Is that correct or have I heard wrong? Or isn't it a problem?
I had the same power concern and similar application/performance expectations. At the same time, I had a Windows desktop machine that was powered up 24x7 for other reasons. So I added some extra RAM to the Windows box, put VMWare Server (free as in beer) on it, and then installed my favorite Linux distro on the VM. My virtual Linux server works like a charm, and in a manner of speaking, consumes no electrical power. Highly recommended.
1. Intel Atom 330 (dual-core, 64-bit) CPU + motherboard: $80
2. 1TB low-power disk: $80
3. 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 667: $30
4. Crappy mini-tower case: $30
5. Ubuntu Server: free!
Total price is in the neighbourhood of $220. Best bang for your buck, period. If I ever feel like putting Arch, Gentoo, or FreeBSD on it, the dual-core CPU will make building packages a breeze. The machine I built runs around 35W whilst doing nothing and a lot of that can be knocked off by spinning down the disk when idle.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/24/1918217
Runs linux, 5 watts, $100
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I think "EPIA SN 10000" or "18000" is the best in kind of performance and energy. I was thinking about some MIPS or ARM based boards, like rt433uah, but there are problems with performance and sata ports. EPIA SN 10000 is standard PC, in really small form factor, and have fanless CPU 1.0GHz, up to 4 GB of ram, 4 sata ports, 2 ethernet ports (one of them is gigabite), audio, ide, compact flash, minipci, and lots of usbs. ANd of course vga. I'm currenlty creating system from it, and mirrored set of 4 caviar green series hard drives + system on compact flash. Eventually i will add one SSD as a kind of cache. All powered prefrebly by ZFS :)
All i need now i good and efficient Power Supply for it.
For one server? Are you kidding me?
Skip a premium coffee each week and help your health, don't waste your time worrying about $70 a year on electricity.
Now if you had 300-5,000 servers? Yeah, going from 100w to 30w would make a big difference.
I use a few of these in different place. It won't get you to the 10 watt range of the reflashed routers, but you save much time in wrestling fringe distributions in to working the way you want them to. (I have wrtsl54gs boxes running OpenWRT too, Atoms are more convenient.)
Do replace the motherboard fan if you get the intel motherboard. It will probably fail soon and cause your CPU to start thermal throttling. I just took it off and placed a full sized fan on the case vents over the motherboard blowing down. It runs cooler, quieter, and longer.
Ok - so we have had people proposing
- buffalo link station
- alix boards
- sheevaplug
- EPIA 5000
- WRT54G
- Mac Mini
among others. The thing these *all* have in common is
completely horrible LAN/IO performance. None (except for a mac mini
and perhaps the EPIA 5000) can come close to saturating a 100Mb LAN.
Certainly only the MacMini has half a chance at making use of a Gb LAN.
Remember this guy wants NFS, so one presumes he actually wants
to move reasonable files around at a reasonable rate.
I've got a low cost LAN drive, and get, at best, 2-3MB/s out of
it over a 100Mb LAN - about 1/6th what I expected. I turned it into
a remote backup drive where the ugly performance is ok.
So lets rephrase the question: can someone suggest a cheap system
( 20MB/sec (which of course requires Gbit LAN).
DARN: Slashcode stole the end of my post...
Can someone propose a cheap system (LESS THAN $300),
that uses low power (LESS THAN 40W full power) and actually move
GREATER THAN 20MB/sec (which of course requires Gbit LAN).
I have a QNAP T-209 Pro II -- its just a NAS device (I have 2x 1T drives in it). It does a bunch of things I needed, and a bunch more that I didn't. I love it -- it replaced 2 servers in my closet.
The new 110 draws 36W and allows you to throw in a single drive (200-series houses 2 drives, etc):
http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=136
With the standard free QPKG add-ons it can do everything you listed and more...
"There *IS* no patch for stupidity" -www.sqlsecurity.com
Use this for my home server which runs SME server 7.4. e\Webmail, 7 sites, FTP, everything off this little box with a 1TB green drive and 1GB RAM. About 250 dollars total, 35W full load.
EFIKA-MX Dev is currently out at $249 http://www.genesi-usa.com/products/efika
got a coupla logic supply pico itx boards from via.
WAAY under 30W and run full linux off a SATA drive with 1GB ram and 1 GHz CPUs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You might consider putting together a system based on the Intel D945GCLF2D board that has an integrated Atom CPU. Alternatively some companies (Acer and Asus for example) do sell desktops based on that board. It's the same basic configuration in most netbooks. I've run Ubuntu on it with no problems so I presume Debian will do fine as well.
See http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/motherboards/D945GCLF2-D945GCLF2D/D945GCLF2-D945GCLF2D-overview.htm
A softmod isn't that hard to do (assuming you can find the right copy of Mech Assault, Splinter Cell, or 007: Agent Under Fire).
The Gospel according to lolcat
I have turned my eeepc 900ha into my "always on" everyday computer at home. Runs Arch Linux, all the laptop-mode type power tweaks and I turn the LVDS off and I believe it pulls ~9 watts.
I think the idea is to have a nice, flashy PC that can be left on the whole time. A plug-based CPU with 640k of RAM doesn't cut it. But this does:
http://www.asrock.com/nettop/overview.asp?Model=ion%20330
Dual-core Atom, 2-4Gb RAM, lots of IO options, a DVD and no Windows tax. What more could you want?
You can build a cheap x86_64 system that uses about 25 Watts idle with an AMD X2 4850e CPU (2x 2.5 GHz) and an nForce 630a chipset. Unfortunately that CPU isn't easily available anymore but as far as I know, AMD has only recently released a successor.
My 4850e system uses about 40 Watts idle but that includes:
- 2 spinning 3,5" hard drives
- Onboard gigabit ethernet
- 100 MBit/s PCI ethernet card
- WiFi PCI card
The power supply is a relatively cheap one from BeQuiet with 80%+ efficiency.
Phone System PBX Project
I had to build such a full-fledged system but one that had to be dependable, reliable, small, quiet, unobtrusive, long lasting, cool running, low-power, well performing, be built of standard parts, and be able to accept one PCI or PCIe expansion card for the telephone TDM interface for incoming FXO lines.
I'm in the process of setting up a phone system PBX with up to 4-incoming telephone lines and a phone menu system to provide basic business information (e.g. hours, address, directions, information, etc.) for a friend's business and also offer the standard features such as voice mail, faxing, internal analog extensions, VoIP capability for future expansion, customization, etc. built on Linux using Elastix that is based on Asterisk PBX.
Wishlist - PBX PC - Intel Atom 330, 1GB DDR2 667, OCZ Agility 30GB SSD, 120mm Fan, Apex Mini-ITX - $316.94 USD
Form Factor - Mini-ITX
I checked out my favorite hardware review site AnandTech and read a number of articles about the new Mini-ITX form factor motherboards that came out to get an introduction to the form factor and expectations.
AnandTech.com - Two New Ions: ASUS AT3N7A-I and ASRock Ion 330
TomsHardware.com - Does Intel's Dual-Core Atom Improve Efficiency?
I read the articles with a lot of interest but when I looked at the prices of these Ion based motherboard with well performing graphics chips I found that I wasn't interested in paying so much for a feature that would not be used very much in a server type PBX system. Also some of these systems didn't have any PCI expansion slots so they were no good for my PBX type project.
Processor - Intel Atom 330
So I turned to look at other Mini-ITX based offerings and came across the good 'ol Intel Atom motherboards. I found the Intel Atom 230, 270 based boards to be a little low performing in many of the benchmark results that I saw but that the dual core Intel Atom 330 chip was doing quite well for only a few dollars more and very little increase in power. I looked at the offerings at my favorite retailer, Newegg and saw a nice list of choices.
Motherboards, Motherboard / CPU / VGA Combo - Mini ITX
I started my process of filtering so I ignored low powered systems that came with VIA C7 chips and the Intel Atom 230 chips. I came up with these three choices.
Foxconn 45CSX Intel Atom 330 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Retail - $69.99 USD
Intel BOXD945GCLF2D Intel Atom processor 330 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Retail - $79.99 USD
ASUS AT3GC-I Intel Atom 330 479 Intel 945GC Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Retail - $89.99
Motherboard - Intel D945GCLF2
Out of these choices, I wasn't too thrilled with a Foxconn built motherboard because I had no experience with this company for any hardware. I wasn't so sure that the extra money spent on the Asus motherboard is really going to offer anything at all, so the choice went down to Intel because I wanted reliability for a system that was being built for someone else. I read a few good review of the Intel motherboard below.
Go industrial - get something like the Moxa UC-7400 (18W, all solid state, small, no temperature issues)
No fan noise, either
See http://www.moxa.com/Product/UC-7400.htm
(Yes, I've got one sitting on my desk. I could sell you one but the postage would be prohibitive :-).)
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
Get a Dell Mini, or some other netbook.
500 MHz AMD Geode, 512 MB RAM, 4 100 MB ethernet, 1 SATA port, 2 USB 2.0
5 watts
Runs linux like a champ.
I don't know what kind of power you're looking for, but I run debian with apache, imap, ssh, nfs, and cups on a Linksys NSLU2 with an external USB drive. It ain't lightning quick, but it does a great job, is REALLY inexpensive and only draws ~8 watts of power. (note: this system requires a simple hardware and software hack) ... cheers.
He has a page showing realtime load, and so far it's handled the load easily, despite handling several other background tasks. Very impressive!
Do as you would be done to.
The New Mac Mini draws 14W at idle, why not get that? :) It even has a new version with dual hard drives.
Life is a window... It just depends on what side you choose to be on...
I've had the following running since March with zero issues or disappointments. It's my LAMP server running wordpress and ssh access. I just performed an upgrade to CentOS 5.4 with no issues. Also, installed webmin without external access. However, I still can connect to the webmin interface from the internet when I use ssh to tunnel my web traffic.
The prices are reflective of when I purchased the system in March 2009.
MSI Wind PC Intel 945GC Black Barebone - Retail
Model #:Wind PC
Item #:N82E16856167032
Return Policy:Limited Replacement Only Return Policy
In Stock
$134.99
Western Digital Caviar Green WD5000AADS 500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive - OEM
Model #:WD5000AADS
Item #:N82E16822136358
In Stock
$54.99
Kingston 2GB 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) Laptop Memory Model KVR533D2S4/2G - Retail
Model #:KVR533D2S4/2G
Item #:N82E16820134317
Return Policy:Memory Standard Return Policy
In Stock
$25.49
Subtotal: $215.47
Mine is a custom construct case, but any atx-based case will do for the old Gateway flexATX or similar ITX boards.
I had a 900Mhz PIII on a reclaimed Gateway flexatx with 512sdRAM and a sata controller with 5400rpm 500GB drive, with an old dell sff power supply, 50 watts.
I have not metered the rebuild(1u server PSU, itx board, 1.2Ghz) but I imagine it's around the same power.
IOW: Don't forget the old low-power hardware can still max out 100Mb networks.
I know you asked for Linux. But Android was specifically designed by Google to fork Linux into an OS low power enough to run on little mobile smartphones for hours or days. From what I can see already, Android phones consume much lower power for a given computing load than any PC running Linux.
Why don't you see if there are already Android apps that do what those old Linux standbys do. If so, maybe Android is for you, depending on which "phone" (some netbooks already run it). And if not, maybe you should port some.
--
make install -not war
I built the following, I measured 11 watts during idle, 18 on full load. -- Case: Antec IS 300-65 Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel Mini-ITX Desktop Computer Case -- Motherboard: JetWay JNF94-270-LF Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz Intel 945GSE Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo -- RAM: G.SKILL 2GB 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) Laptop Memory Model F2-4200CL4S-2GBSQ -- $267.97 on New Egg. Used an existing PCI Ethernet board and hard drive.
I just picked up a FitPC 2 ( http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc2/specifications/ ). It's around $350 from Amazon with a hard drive and Ubuntu pre-loaded. So far I'm loving it. I will end up using this as my HTPC with an external hard drive. I may get another (or one of the SheevaPlugs) for a general file server and network router.
I see a bunch of recommendations for low-end hardware that would totally suck for what you typically use a home server for.
I use my server as the main hub for everything. It handles VOIP, multiple VM's, media playback to the TV and audio systems, Tor proxy, various VPN proxies, database server, file server, and the list continues. I couldn't use some underpowered router running Linux or some other BS little machine.
I would like to save power on that beast though. Currently I'm running an Opteron 250, 6 hard drives, media encoder card, plus nvidia graphics in it. Sucks a lot of juice.
Basically a 600Mhz ARM NAS with linux (2.6.16 kernel iirc) preinstalled. By default the Linux is locked down so that it can only be accessed through Buffalo's WEB UI (driven by the onboard apache server)
There are straightforward instructions for unlocking the onboard Linux at buffalo.nas-central.org. I've done this and it works like a charm, everything accessed through ssh. Great for running torrents, apache, rsync etc.. on a nice low power box (11W iirc).
Best advice is pick up a cheap one on ebay (250G model) then upgrade the drive to a 1+TB unit. I've done this with 2 units.
Without a doubt this is one of the cheapest, simplest and most low power way to get a linux server going. If you want a more feature rich linux distro there are options to install on the buffalos but I've found unlocking the inbuilt linux to be more than sufficient.
fz :)
I have the B202 Linux version running Ubuntu as my media PC. Newegg has this for $299 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883220012&cm_re=eee_box-_-83-220-012-_-Product). I am pretty happy with it as a media device. Super quite and under 20W average power usage (http://event.asus.com/eeepc/microsites/eeebox/en/features-green.html). It doesn't do 1080p but (there's a new EB1006 that does). It's not useful as a home server (only 160GB of built-in hard disk). It does have 4 USB ports, so external USB disks is an option (but that will add to the power usage).
You could give the Lenovo IdeaCentre Q100 a look. Its said to use less than 14 watts electricity when idle. And I'm sure Lenovo's hardware is good with Linux..
Measure the power with a Kill-a-Watt
The published power specs are usually some absurdly borderline absolute maximum power supply capability and are not even close to the actual power consumption.
For example, the Mac Mini I had (Core Duo with Intel video, not the very latest one with Nvidia 9400M) was nowhere near 85 watts - it idled at just about 20 watts. With the Nvidia, I would estimate no more than 25, 30 at the utmost; almost sure it will be closer to 25. And it will be idling 99.9% of the time with this kind of use. An Aopen Mini will do just as well, and is dead easy to install linux on, and at least as well designed. I measured mine (Core Duo with Intel video) at 20 watts idle. They now make fanless industrial Minis that consume even less power. I've been running a Pentium M mini-ITX 24x7 since 2004 for this type of service; again, it draws 20 watts. All of these systems are ridiculously quiet, make very low waste heat, and take up very little space if the keyboard/mouse/monitor are not connected (you control them over ssh from your notebook or desktop, you turn them on and off with the power button, which invokes a graceful shutdown via ACPI).
If you can find a well used 13-14" Pentium M or Core Duo notebook (preferably Intel video which is low power) with a busted display, and are able to install linux using the DB-15 video connector or serial port, you can have a nice system for low bucks. Once again, I have measured these systems idling with the backlight off, and they are right around 20 watts. The half decent ones will run a long time 24x7 if they are not stressed, because the fan is barely ticking over.
I'm looking into some of the ARM stuff now. It will be substantially less power and still capable of all these kinds of tasks. I should have this one Mini-2440 in a couple of days. It will probably idle below 1 watt with the LCD backlight off.
Have you checked the Synology NAS boxes? http://www.synology.com/us/index.php
One of them may be suitable, if you're just planning on having a Linux file server with some extras, and don't need to install your own *nix or arcane packages. We have a DS-209 with two 500GB disks in RAID1. On our 100Mbit LAN at home, it typically gets read/write speeds of 6-8MBps, which is about 40-50% of the theoretical bandwidth. It has an UPS interface for safe shutdown when our UPS is nearly drained.
You can install some add-on packages, and enable several services in addition to just file serving on most Synology NAS units, such as web server, photo server, download/torrent redirection, scheduled backup to external drive, and media server functions. You can also enable ssh (and telnet & ftp) and log in to do additional configuration, although the web-based administration interface is quite OK. Of course, it's advisable to limit outside access to services via your firewall. We also prevent the NAS from calling home...
Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Synology, except as a mostly satisfied customer.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
this was the smallest, back of the unit says it draws 22W, it has an older but quite credible celeron processor, just open it up, stick a 2 gig ram, run a server distribution of linux eg ubuntu 9.4, just install the packages you want, three USB ports can be loaded up with external drives, its a good low wattage server.
..runs at 10W and is fairly popular with home automation people. 400Mhz AMD Geode + 80gb HD + 1/2Gb RAM and a number of USB ports.
We did a similar upgrade and went for an Atom based mini itx based solution. We used a dual core 330, but I'm sure that a single core will do just fine for your application. For our system, we retained our old HD but had to get new RAM, case and a low profile network card, all for comfortably under $300. We are running OpenBSD and using it as an email server, firewall and print server with no issues at all.
I bought my wife a new laptop, upgraded the hard drive in her old one and used that. Works well!
Swedish manfacturer Excito offers a ready made server called Bubba and Bubba 2.
They offer it with Debian pre-installed.
Here: http://www.excito.com/
They still have the first Bubba model on sale (with ARM) for under a hundred euros, and the newer models start at around 200 euros. Fanless design, low noise and temp. They sell them also with no hard drive if you like to install yourself.
"Bubba Two with 1 TB disk uses about 8-10W of power. This can be compared to a bedside lamp, using something like 25W, or a personal computer, using about 80W with the monitor turned off. Hence; changing your PC server to a Bubba Two actually saves you in the range of 100 EUR every year on the electricity bill alone. Translated to CO2 emmissions, this is more than 300 kg CO2 saved every year. "
https://www.excito.com/bubba/products/technical-specifications.html
Processor
Old Bubba Server - 200 MHz ARM9
Bubba 2 models - 333 MHz Power PC
Like a lot of people, I've hacked an Apple TV to give me SSH/SFTP. You can upgrade the HD, install quite a bit. I run Boxee on it and it is a very flexible media server. Check out http://www.appletvhacks.net/ for info on what you can do with it. Max power draw is 48 watts.
I've been using Freelink: http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php?title=Category:FreeLink on my LS Pro for a couple of years now with no hassle. I replaced the 500GB SATA with a 750GB, I get about 12MB/s throughput and unless it loses power, no issues. Then I just have to like, push the power button. I also have Webmin installed so it's easy to add services. The modification requires some technical skills, but there are step by step instructions for the process.
http://www.fit-pc.com/
I have the first model, 5W max and it's an x86 architecture. Not as cheap as the Sheevaplug, though.
The last one seems *very* attractive, even as a media center.
Ciao,
D.
My LDAP/Mail/SMB server is an 800MHz Compaq Presario minus keyboard and screen - so the entire heatsink is open to the air. It's also sans floppy, battery and cd drive giving plenty of airflow. Unless it's very busy the only sound it makes is the HDD spindle and you can only hear that when your head is under the desk - it sits on a shelf about 6" under the desk and is connected up to the KVM for when i really need to be at the system and webmin or ssh wont do, but 99% of the time they do. Does the job very nicely
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I would like to recommend the MicroClient SrDX (not the JrDX)
As a charity in Uganda (http://heart4children.org), where power is really expensive($0.25/KWh) we need to mind the shillings. Besides, power supply is extremely un-reliable and many times we need to run the computers from battery powered inverters.
As if this is not enough, we also have the dust problem. Any fan cooling will give up within one year due to the intrusive African red dust. It is un-avoidable, whatever you undertake, dust will kill your computers.
I tried looking for some fanless design for this purpose and ended up buying 3 different models of the northec company (in HongKong I believe) These are the Micro-Clients: the Jr, JrDX and the SrDX. I tried playing around with the systems, looking what it could handle. The smaller units are supplied with some extremely micro linux distro, the medium was powered by DamnSmallLinux, but the biggest one, the SrDX was able to really do some 'normal' work.
I had the SrDX fitted with a hard disk and tried loading Fedora on it, it failed. I tried playing arround with DSL but this was too limited in freedom to install. Then I installed it with UBUNTU 8.04. It went really easy. Then I connected my Intracom ISDN mosem with a USB connecter (of which you get 3 with the MicroClient SrDX) and with a little tweaking I got it working like a charm.
The little thing only uses 15 watts!! I continued by installing SAMBA and got it going just perfectly for our work here in the office. Next I installed MySQL and APACHE and the little thing just keeps going like one of the big guys!
The original author said he saved $70, I can now say that so far I have saved $187/year plus, I have not had to touch the ting again ever since I installed it... it just works like it should.
I wish we could say the same of the electricity company in Uganda (UMEME)
Cor Koelewijn,
Missionary for Heart For Children in Uganda
http://heart4children.org
I got me one of these http://unixwars.com/2009/02/19/fattening-up-a-thin-client/ for under 75$. I just added an internal HDD for downloads. It has plenty of power and uses standard x86 code, so no problem with the upgrades. It draws from 18 to 27W. Not as little as the ARM alternative, though. It is also fanless, and has a printer and 3 USB HDDs attached through USB, Gigabit Ethernet and has a PCI slot in case you need eSata or whatever. I've been very happy with it so far.
I'm using old Thinkpad X31 as general purpose server. Fits nicely to the bookself and with 1.6GHz Pentium-M is more than powerful enough for everything I need. Don't know about exact power consumption, but I doubt it's anywhere near 30watts even under full load. Added bonus is that server keeps running even if there is a blackout.
Try looking for an old slimline desktop PC from eBay. Some have very low specs. I personally bought 12 of these when I found them at a real bargain price. The model I have is IBM Netvista A40p, I bought them for around $35 each (including shipping from Germany) and they have 1GHz and 256MB RAM. I guess when saving is what you want, buying new hardware kind of defies the point. These do the trick, and their usage is low (when I did some tests I saw around 25W usage).
I've been running a mini server on a VIA mainboard (C3 533) for years now (started I think in 2003). Last year I upgraded to a VIA C7 because I happened to have one laying around and I wanted to start using a SATA hard drive. A few things to take into account:
- the hard drive is usually the real power drain. 2.5 inch models are much more power efficient
- spent money on an efficient powersupply!
As for the power usage, I suspect you get the best results if you run it from a USB stick and add a harddrive for storage that you keep spinned down for most of the time. I.e. keep the active torrents and such on the USB drive and move the files to the large disk to store them when they are no longer active. Laptopmodetools will power the drive down for you.
On the C3 I used gentoo but I switched to Ubuntu server along with the switch to the C7.
Via offers quite a few fanless mainboards. That seems nice and quiet. Unfortenately most cases use small and therefor noisy fans. I ended up cutting a big hole in my case and put a 12cm fan on there (with an added anti dust filter). Now you can hardly hear it. I still aim to test if I can safely work without a fan when I separate the harddrive fully from the case. Both the mainboard and the drive should be able to work without a fan, but if you put them both in a case, the temperature gets to hot for the CPU.
---
To quote myself in a discussion I had on Ubuntuforums....
I use/sold a lot of linux home servers
The hardware is a shuttle k45 barebone with 1 Gb ram and a low power intel cpu and 2 identical disks ( from 500Gb to 2Tb each).
I run hardy 8.04 on them. I set up software raid 1 (/ and swap part). /mai syncing
-ssh shell and webmin for administration
-samba for file sharing
-mediatomb/ampache for music streaming to pc/console
-imap mail server with postfix/dovecot to make mail accesible evrywhere
-with cronjobs I handle automatic backups & auto shutdown from 23:55 to 7:30 (powersave)
-I'm in the middle of trying to get funambol running for phone/calendar
There's a steep learning curve if you're only used to windows systems, but these systems out perform windows by price (licensing costs), flexibility (wat can't be achieved?) and stability (viruses? crashes?)
I access the severs features from the outside via my dd-wrt enabled router that runs dns and a vpn server.
If you want to know more I'd be glad to go more into specifics.
This servers uses at minimum 35 watt (according to shuttle). But a average server with 2x 1Tb and celeron processor uses 55 watts in my experience.
This setup did the trick multiple times for me... Yearly usage of 330kWh, due to auto shutdown/restart at night and "green" components.... and no hard hacking exotic HW
Freedom of choice, knowledge & life...
Check out the VIA C-7 chips. It sips power at ~25W under load, and still manages to serve files to 4 other systems. The 6 Hard-drives I have spinning in the case for my RAID array more then make up for the power savings from the chip and board.
Personally for my home server I use a Linutop (http://www.linutop.com/).
Makers claim it draws just 8W, but I've added an external disk (haven't mesured how much that uses in total).
I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on it and run apache, nfsd, ldap, backup-pc (perl program) plus a number of other small programs.
Its a bit slow on the disk access (can't run a home account from the nfs share), but for everything else it works great.
Hell, I spend less than that almost every Friday night of the year, you poor bastard you. That's fucking less than 20 cents a day...are you an English teacher or something?
Seriously, take a look at the developers' blog of the fonera. Besides, it's a 802.11n router.
http://www.marvell.com/featured/plugcomputing.jsp
The 85W figure you are posting is very false. You probably saw the max power rating of the AC adapter supplied with the earlier G4 (PowerPC) Mac Mini. The Intel models have a 110W power adapter, but that isn't what they draw most of the time. I have a couple of early 2009 Mac Mini's, and also have a Kill-a-watt watt meter. At idle (which a server is going to be run at 90-99% of the time) the 2009 Mini draws only 12W, and that is with a 500GB (laptop-type 2.5") hard drive, and 4GB (2x2gb) of DDR3 RAM. The earlier Intel-based models (2006-2008) had an idle power consumption of about 22W. Even encoding video with handbrake at 100% CPU load, the highest I could get the 2009 Mini to draw was 32W. These figures are for Mac OS X 10.5.x (Leopard). I don't know what the figures would be for Linux, but probably similar. All that said, if you want low power consumption in a mainstream (X86 based PC, not specialty ARM or MIPS based NAS hardware), then stick to mobile components. Look for a motherboard that supports Mobile Core2 Duo, or even older Pentium M mothhboards (cheaper$). Use mobile hard drives (idle power of 2-3W vs. 9-13W for a desktop drive), and the minimum number of RAM DIMMs (eg, use a single 2GB instead of 2 1GB modules). I have a file-backup server running an Aopen mobile-core2 duo motherboard with a 2GHz T7200 Core2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 3ware 9500S hardware RAID controller, and four 1TB hitachi desktar harddrives. This server consumes 56W at idle. Not bad, considering the four hard drives. It only consumes about 8W more than the Buffalo (Linkstation?) ARM-based RAID NAS that I had with the same hard drives. Unlike the Buffalo, this wasis "normal" PC hardware that is easy to put any modern Linux distro on, and it has a "real" hardware RAID card. Also, the performance is MUCH better than any ARM-based dedicated NAS system that I've tried. And, as hardware impoves, I can upgrade any part of this system easily. Total build price was about $200 plus drives (less than the dedicated RAID NAS systems).
I'm using an AsRock ion330 as homeserver/HTPC. It's small, quiet and has the capability to play HD videos. Uses about 30 watts thanks to Atom 330 and nVidia Ion
I use a Fit-PC for my home Linux server. It came with Ubuntu and Gentoo installed. It uses 6W and easily handles my e-mail, DNS, ssh, apache, and file-serving needs.
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
If you can get one... Small, durable, lowpower...
Take a look at the nvidia ION platform. On newegg you can find a variety of motherboards with built in atom CPUs that require no heatsink fan and HDMI/VGA/DVI output to output to whatever your heart desires. If you can manage to find some of the components laying around your house (perhaps the hard drive) and pick up the case and PSU you could easily accomplish this for under $300. I'm putting together a NAS box using the ikea emu tin as a case and 3x1TB drives for about $360. It'll use about 30-40W, depending on the efficiency of the PSU. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=ionitx&x=0&y=0
:(){
sure, it lacks the sexiness of the shivaplug/microclient/terrastation/etc, but you would get much more value for a similar cost by re-using slightly older technology. more than likely you'll have a faster CPU capable of heavy lifting, the choice of boot media (cdrom, floppy, CF, usb, HDD), the ablity to install you favorite distro, and hardware expansion won't be as difficult as it will with these compact systems.
TCO includes service and repair, not just initial purchase and operating expenses. how easy is it to purchase a replacement PS of a shivaplug? how quickly can you get that replacement component shipped to you?
build an ulgy box, and hide it in your closet/basement/attic.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
This looks perfect for you: http://www.silentpcreview.com/Intel_D945GSEJT_with_Morex_T1610
Around 12W idle, 16W peak - small, cheap, efficient and simple.
An old linksys NSLU2 that's been reflashed to run either Debian or OpeNSLUg would probably meet your needs. They are very hackable and can be had for like $20 on ebay easily. It's about the size of a paperback book, has ethernet and a couple USB ports.
Your assumed power consumption of the mini sounds a bit like a maximum to me... it's more around 30W.
As for the price... I'm willing to sell my old single core for around $300 one day when I get the server model. :)
I've used an Acer Revo Intel Atom based nettop. It sucks about 20-30W... I use it as my main desktop which also runs samba, bind, dhcpd, ssh, dovecot and postfix. Works a treat with Fedora11. I had exactly the same motivations and now am saving around $150 per year. The system cost me around $270 including extra 2GB DRAM.
Does the world really need more Tron fanzine websites?
You could look at the Fit-pc. According to http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc2/specifications/ it only use 6W to 8W
This company seems to be pretty dedicated to making what you want.
http://www.norhtec.com/products/index.html
I'm impressed that they can supply low-power consumption home video and audio rigs that are completely fanless. They can support wireless connectivity, too, although personally I like nice fast private hard-wiring and have installed it throughout my home.
So have any of you Einsteins done the calculations on how much its going to cost you for your hardware expenditures vs the energy savings? The ones of you that have and think your saving money did you include the billing of your time in the equation? I wonder how many of you will end up blowing money down the drain so that you can have the perception of cost savings when you could have reasonable cost with a normal system without all the tinkering and extra cost outlay. This whole question is great for the stupid cheap people out there. What are you guys going to do next? Buy a 20K car so you can save 2mpg and save all that money on gas?
http://www.cappuccinopc.com/light-c7.asp
I have run the older version of this with Debian and a 2GB flash drive for the last 4 years. No moving parts and it has run without issue the entire time. Highly recommend.
As low power Linux Gateways/Websever I'm using the ASUS EeeBox (cf. ;-)
http://usa.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=QUObl5lSRQQ3lSqJ -
Atom 1.6GHz, 2GB RAM, 160G Disk, LAN, WLAN, USB)
It uses about 20-30W and with an external DVD drive attached you can install any current Linux x86 distribution on it.
Plus: you can get it without windows
I'm surprised that nobody's suggested a netbook yet. I bought a refurb Asus Eee 900a for about $150 (woot has them pretty frequently, although I got mine from mwave) and then maxed out the RAM and SSD for about $50 more, taking it to 2GB RAM and 16GB SSD. It has a 9" display that I have set to turn off when I close the lid, but even with the LCD on max brightness it only draws around 12 watts.
There's a SD card reader built-in that you can install linux from, or use one of the USB ports. You could hook up an external drive or use the SD card slot for additional storage, but since all I'm doing is network services (ssh, http, tinyproxy, etc) the storage isn't much of a concern. Going wired instead of wireless would save some power as well.
Best of all, it has it's own built-in UPS :)
I evaluated taking a consumer NAS device and repurposing it, but the hardware specs you can find in a comparable price range aren't nearly as good (except for the drive, obviously). The SheevaPlug is interesting, but it is nice to have a display and keyboard integrated. It makes for easier setup and debug when something is going wrong. Plus, at the time, they were in short supply.
What about this one with a RAM disk (I used a USB-connected 80 GB HDD)?
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/02/marvell-offers/
At 8Watts max. this is what you need. http://www.fit-pc.com/web/
Too cool!
I'm running the FitPC v1, which is advertised as operating in 5 watts. Mine has FreeBSD on it, but you can get them with Ubuntu preinstalled if you prefer. I've had OpenBSD on mine before, too, so I can verify that that also works.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
I've just bought an Acer Aspire Revo (2 GB RAM, 160 GB disk, Atom 230 based, 240 euro) that could do this pretty well. It's small and low-power, and runs Ubuntu well. I'm using it as an X terminal (it has decent graphics performance), but it could also be used as a server (won't break any speed records though).
I just pieced together a dual-core atom 1.6 GHz system with 2 GB Ram, 160GB 2.5" drive and an ASUS case with external power supply. The PS unit will only draw 60 watts at max, and so at idle, would much less than this. It doesn't have an optical drive or wireless, but as an asterisk server and NAS box (with 7 USB ports, I can add as much temp space as necessary), it rocks and I have put Fedora 11 on it. All for $300 CDN.
Another worthy option is an ASUS WL-520gU flashed with Teddy_Bear's wonderful Tomato ND USB Mod. Plug a USB drive in and Bob's your Uncle!
With built-in SAMBA/FTP/Print services, rock solid QoS support and many more features this combo is solid.
Here's what I'm doing. Zotac IONITX-A motherboard - Wifi - comes with 90W Power Brick - Dual Core Atom 330 - HDMI/VGA/DVI/Optic/SPdif - 3xSata + 1xESata Mini-Box M350 Case - Super small - Well ventilated Can definitely do a whole system under $300, even cheaper if you go with the IONITX-C. Then just get a couple sticks of ram, and a laptop sata hard drive and you have a box able to play 1080p videos with NVidia VDPAU and uses under 30W of power. I own the IONITX-A and the IONITX-C, so many things you can do with it if you decide to scrap it as a server. I'm really waiting to see what gets released for the ION based netbooks (HP Mini 311 is the only one really available right now), they would be another nice option for a little more money.
I'm using an xbox (the old ones) that I got for £6. It has a 733mhz Celeron and 64mb ram. I'm not sure about power usage, but it's not more than my laptop.
Pretty decent system for 5 watts; runs on a Geode so you can run most any x86 Linux distro. There's a slightly modified version of Ubuntu for flash filesystem, although if you're talking about NFS you'll probably want to add a disk. Limited support for that, but you can always use Passports or something like that via USB if you need multiple disks.
They make great routers, firewalls etc. in the diskless configuration. About $150 for a board, case and power supply, as I recall. NFS performance ain't gonna be great, but it should do it. And they run on 12 +/- a bunch volts, which make battery backup a real breeze.
For a little more power (in both respects) check out some of the older pizza box workstations or PC rack servers, like the HP 9000/710 or the IBM x300. Depending on processor and number of disks these things can be pretty frugal; getting into the 30 W range should be possible.
I just saw this reviewed on SPCR: Intel finally released a MiniITX motherboard with an Atom processor and and a mobile 945 chipset! Even with a 2.5" hard drive, idle power is less than 10w, and peak power is around 16w.
The board features Gigabit Ethernet, and if you need 2 NICs there is a PCI slot and a MiniPCIe. Performance should be plenty for anything server-related (2 SATA), and if you need more drives you can add them via USB.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
You do realize that in the 4 years it will take to return on your investment, you'll probably either:
1) No longer be concerned about $75 a year because the economy is decent again
OR
2) No longer be concerned about "power" because nobody has electric anymore, and our country is in shambles, with people stabbing each other for food.
Just a thought.
I took power measurements of my son's 800Mhz iMAC PPC, running Tiger, and it drew 39 watts. An Acer 5100 AMD X2 (1.6 Ghz I think) laptop drew 24 watts - not sure if it was running XP or Kubuntu at that moment.
I'm using an Atom 330, 1GB, 2x 1.5 TB 5400RPM drives, 1 PCI Gigabit NIC, Power PC & Cooling 510 (a little overkill ;P).
Actual total power usage is ~65 watts according to a kill-a-watt meter.
I put together a custom NAS using a Chenbro case and Zotac Ion motherboard with Atom 330. It uses about 30 watts, this case has 2 hot swappable 3.5" hdd bays and an internal 2.5" drive bay for your OS drive. I'm running it headless with Ubuntu Server, it just sits in my closet, barely puts off any heat. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811123114&cm_re=chenbro-_-11-123-114-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856167032
This is a little bit of an older link, but all you need to add is Memory and HDD. There might be faster builds now, but you can't beet the price and power consumption.
The Sheeva plug is something I have looked at and I am still tempted to get.
The other solution I have in place is a Mac mini with the Airport Extreme. The interesting thing with this combination is that the computer can sleep when not in use and the Airport Extreme can wake it up when there is traffic for the Mac's IP address. The solution can even be made to work wirelessly. This works with Snow Leopard (MacOS X 10.6), but I would interested to know whether this solution can work with Linux and possibly another router?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Some industrial wireless bridges that are a bit behind the times and therefore dropping in price might be worth looking into, some were rather sophisticated, especially the ones built behind flatpanel antennae. I have one laying around that has a PCMCIA slot in it for the wireless card, when I tested it for functionality, it seemed pretty robust though I don't know all the specs on it. Even if they don't have things like USB or flash storage connectors built onto the boards, sometimes there are headers for a hacker to solder additional functionality on! Oh, and they're generally rather low power consumption, being designed to be powered-over-ethernet.
The power listed on a device such as a computer or a monitor is NOT what the device uses. It is a design rating of the AC circuitry required by UL or NEC. The actual power used by a device can be a little as 10% of the rating. Measure for yourself. Put an Ammeter in the line - you will be surprised. Your power costs are much less than you think.
I'm using the same web server I have since 2000 - a Pentium MMX running at 233 MHz with 128 MB of PC133 SDRAM. The hard drives and RAM have been upgraded over the years of course; now it features 320 GB of SATA space thanks to a SATA PCI card. I took out the video card because the system runs headless.
Power draw with both drives running? 14 watts. 100% CPU usage? 16 W.
It serves quite the web page too!
Yes I know netbooks are intended to surf the net, but they do a pretty good job serving too. I have a Dell Mini9 (readily available for $199 new) running as a home entertainment/web server. It's running a N270 (1.6GHz atom) with 8GB SSD. I got a 16GB SDHC card for about 30 bucks, and occasionally have an external HD plugged in. I don't serve video so usually 16GB is enough.
It draws 12 watts under load (downloading the new ubuntu image at about 800KB/s while decoding xvid video/AC3 sound to a 32" TV while feeding a vnc session and a couple of bash shells performing various maintenance tasks), and about 9-10 without load. I haven't actually tested it with screen turned off, but can only assume it draws even less. This is with the USB bus powering a hub, a bluetooth dongle (voip and internet sharing with my really old pda), a wireless mouse/keyboard combo, and an external laptop pad with fan. The fan is actually not necessary if you want silence, since Mini9 uses fanless design. It doesn't run all that hot, but figured if the fan increases lifespan by even 2 months over 3 years then the extra $3 of electricity I paid will have been worth it.
Check out the HP MediaSmart server. Agreed, it is not linux powered, but hey, 52W is pretty good right ? Here's some statistics (I googled and found this link) available: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PowerConsumptionOfTheHPMediaSmartHPHomeServer.aspx -Venkat
our company did a lot of research into low power pc and ended up with the mac mini, our test shows about 21-25w while being used. That's from the kill-a-watt attached to the machine and using it in a 24 hour setting. Just wondering where you go the 85w number from.
I use the Netgear ReadyNAS DUO (http://netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASDuo/RND2000.aspx), which is discounted to about USD$270 for a single 1TB drive configuration. I added a second 1TB drive in a RAID 10 configuration, bringing the total to about $320. The unit draws about 35W, but can be put into disk spindown mode or powered up at specific times. It is a Sparc-based CPU and includes a slightly modified version of Debian Sarge. There is a supported add-on that gives SSH access to the box. I've fully enabled FTP & HTTPS access. Squeezebox and other standards are supported.
So many replays, but I can't see the right one. Here is my configuration:
Motherboard: Alix1C (ITX board 500MHz AMD Geode processor, 256MB RAM, Alix1D is currently in production). board has two serial ports, parallel port, several USB ports, LAN, PCI, mPCI, 4 audio ports, keyboard/mice port, 44pin ATa port, and CF card slot, and other...
Power supply: 12V, 1.25A, idle consumption 5W plus 2-3W for HDD (Hitachi 30Gb 2.5" ATA HDD), pluged directly into board. See http://www.pcengines.ch/ for more info. I tested board from -10 to +50 degrees Celsius, works like a charm for two years non-stop now.
One PCI SATA controler, with two 1TB HDD, and 12V 2A + 5V 2A power supply, fanless. HDD's take about 30-35W together (haven't measured it).
I placed all that in one old ITX case, and right now I have replaced original power suppply with two fanless "brickl" PSUs. Case is ventilated with one 120mm fan, running on 5V.
Ubuntu LTS is installed, running services: Teamspeak, ftp, www, mysql (for WIKI and other things), DC hub (for local network), DC client, Open2300 meteo station software (see http://www.pljusak.hr/ and http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Open2300/WebHome ), samba, and some others.
I was just reassembling it yesterday... ( http://www.vallisaurea.net/staro/webcam/S5004006.JPG and http://www.vallisaurea.net/staro/webcam/S5004008.JPG )
Doing a good job is like spilling coffee on a dark suit, you feel warm all over, but nobody notices.
I use ClearOS 5.1 on small fanless boxes from Lex or CappuccinoPC. They pull about 15 Watts of power and have multiple NICs so I can run various firewall, file server, content filtration, web server, and database applications. My needs are light and the system works well with a light OS that is easy enough for my mom to administer the sites list UI for the content filter.
do all of you work for Apple? Get paid to put this tripe in hear name dropping a product that you probably are selling?
Neat little device, creates a tunnel so you don't have to fiddle with ports on your router with an account that is included in $99 purchase price. http://www.pogoplug.com/
I have thought about using my eepc.700 It's keyboard, slow response, and smail screen make it less than ideal for desktop applications, but it has more memory a faster processor and almost as much storage space as my celeron medicino that I've been running for years. It also has long battery life which acts as a back up battery. Anyone using an eeepc as a home server?
As others have said, the watt rating it says on the box is a peak figure, that is all. Most devices will consume a fraction of that figure most of the time, especially if they're running as an unloaded server with no GUI up. Personally I'd use a laptop but I guess this depends on the amount of storage space you need. My laptop (Core2Duo at about 2ghz off the top of my head) has a 65W power adapter, so 65W is the max it can supply, but this is what it will consume when the screen is on full brightness, processor running at high load etc. When idling with the screen off it'd be around 25-35W, though I haven't measured it.
Honestly, not that huge of a return on this unless your planning on running the machine for the next 100 years, with zero downtime and the cost of energy stays the same.
You'll only be saving $700 every 10 years. That being said, at $70 a year, 100 years of use would only save $7000
If you want to think realy minimal: I'm using a Micronix PV6270 system which is a PC/104 based system with a 533Mhz processor running SSH and some custom software for data logging in an appartment. Uses 2200mA@5V = 11Watt. A small flash "harddisk" for the logging. In total it's powered by a 15W powersupply. It's also realy small, 90x96mm and "roughly" 40mm high. It has VGA out (not that I ever use it), PS/2, serial ports, ethernet plus USB which i've connected a wlan module to. Oh, and it runs Ubuntu also (but you have to compile a 486 compatible kernel yourself).
The most obvious answer is Marvells SheevaPlug, about $100 US. It uses approximately 5 watts, I have multiple usb hard drives hanging off of a powered 2.0 usb hub, right now I have about 2 Tb hooked up, but it is easy to add or subtract. I run mysql, apache2, with a dyndns account I can access everything from any where. I run a vnc server also which also allow me access to a virtual desktop as the SheevaPlug itself does not have vga output. I never turn it off and it is fanless. I boot debian lenny from a 8 GB SD. I can not believe there is a more energy efficient solution out there at the moment. Very nice. Check out: http://www.openplug.org/ http://www.marvell.com/featured/plugcomputing.jsp http://www.marvell.com/products/embedded_processors/developer/kirkwood/sheevaplug.jsp
I have a C7 VIA processor board, a GB of ram . The peak power usage is 20W, idle power is 5 W. The CPU has built in sha1/sha2 support for encryption. Its 1.5GHz. The cost of the complete "hack job"; board/ram/enclosure/power was $120. I am using an external hdd to boot up linux - works great with my TV too.
Use the Fritzbox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRITZ!Box with this hack http://trac.freetz.org/
70 bucks a YEAR??? So you are going to buy another server which will cost at least a grand to save 70 dollars a year? what am I missing here?
I have an eee box as a tiny server for a year. It's rox with a low power consumption.
My system runs at less than 30 W with a Gigabyte GA-230D board (Atom chipset), WD 500 GB Green, 2 GB RAM, Advance PC ITX 3903B chassis. It finally ended up costing a bit more than $300, probably $350.
Whoops - it's a SuperServer 5015A-H (see http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1U/5015/SYS-5015A-H.cfm?typ=H). Stupid me didn't copy/paste.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
I'm not joking on this one. I have a quad Athlon 3.0ghz performing MythTV duties. It draws a lot of power when it needs to - for example, commercial flagging HD recordings. But I have it set up to conserve power when it's idle, which is most of the time. Two things you'll want to consider:
1) The easiest thing is to set up powernowd (simplest daemon IMO - but there are a couple alternatives). It drops the speed of your CPUs when they are idle - in my case from 3.0ghz down to 800Mhz. This reduces power usage, keeps your machine cooler and has zero impact on service availability.
2) Depending on what you use the machine for, you may want to set it up sleep most of the time. Then use wake on LAN, or ACPI / BIOS wakeup functionality so that it powers up on demand. The BIOS method is useful for things like MythTV that perform a lot of scheduled tasks.
Have I,I am your bright spot Babyphat tracksuit,Adidas Adicolor Shoes
Shuttle X27D is listed at eWiz for about $170
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
and add external usb drives.
I use an old PC with a PIII at 900Mhz. Added a SATA controller and a 500GB SATA Disk. The thing runs OpenSuse 10.3 since 2 years 24/7 and I measure a constant power consumption of 35 Watts. It runs a LAMP stack + Samba. We are very happy with this configuration
Hi,
I have an atom based nettop (eeebox 202 from asus :http://usa.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=QUObl5lSRQQ3lSqJ) it make virtually no noise and use very low power.
the CPU (atom 1.6ghz) could be seen a slow but is perfect for ma use:
i have installed on it a linux distribustion and it provide me this services:
- file server (samba/nfs)
- apache server
- video playback with XBMC, as the box is attached behind my TV on the vesa support. (max 720p)
if you need better video performance there is new version of the box based on ATI or nvidia chipsets.
If you are after a server have you looked at the Excito Bubba? Small 7-12W power consumption, no fan, runs Linux and comes with a bundle of software (mail, web, uPnP, bitTorrent etc). I have been running the original version (with Via 100Mhz and 64Mb Ram) for a couple of years with no problems at all - quiet, very small and configurable ( if a little slow - current versions are faster ).
The latest technical specs are here:
http://www.excito.com/bubba/products/technical-specifications.html