Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Get a Sheeva plug its 5W and it looks like an adapter.
http://www.marvell.com/products/embedded_processors/developer/kirkwood/sheevaplug.jsp
I have a DNS-323 which looks similar. You can indeed install Debian on it, but it seems that some of the peripherals are not handled properly, in particulare the thermal sensors.
My current mini-server of choice is the Micro-Client Jr DX (~10W)
http://www.norhtec.com/products/mcjrdx/index.html
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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 get a whopping 35 Watts used running SETI@home on my Mini... That is with a bus powered FW external HDD for Time Machine hooked up and not spinning down the disks when idle.
A Mac Mini uses nowhere near the power you claim, unless you've got a case where both cores, the GPU, the HDD, and the DVD Burner all all running full tilt at once; a pretty tough thing to do with the use described by the submitter, I'd say.
OSX pwns.
If he's going to use a linux distro, he can use vbetool to turn off the monitor, or apple laptops will let you turn off the screen completely. Then use ssh, vnc, or ard to control the computer remotely.
One thing to watch out:
...
I tried this with two laptops, and you have to keep the lid open, because processor overheats otherwise.
This is bad for the space it occupies and for the dust that keeps raining on the keyboard
With lid open, it works great.
No, the Mini power adapter puts out a max of 110w. Under load, the Mini actually draws a lot less:
http://www.applesource.com.au/mac/soa/Apple-Mac-Mini-2009-/0,2000070803,339295252,00.htm
Just under 30w under load. Might be a bit higher if you have a DVD in there. It draws a lot less juice than the adapter provides.
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.
Also, the mac mini draws 110 watts
I'd be surprised if it actually uses that much. The figures shown on consumer products for power consumption seem to be peak or maximum, not nominal figures. Using a meter such as the Kill-a-watt will likely show significantly less consumption. (read Watts, not VA)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882715001&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Electronic+Gadgets-_-P3+International-_-82715001
A few years ago I built a desktop using a E6300 Core 2 Duo overclocked to 2.25 Ghz. With added Ethernet and Firewire cards, and typical optical and hard drives, consumption measures only 82 Watts. (tested while doing video compression) Components were selected with energy use in mind. It helped to use basic ICH7/GMA950 graphics.
Clearly the Minis still use much more energy than some alternatives suggested here, but for a true picture of power savings measured consumption is needed. It would be interesting to results at different clock rates.
At aa 13 cents a kwh above baseline rate, I figure it costs roughly $1. per month for every 10 Watts of continuous (24 hr) load.
Absolutely TERRIBLE, no question about it. You'll get much better performance out of the oldest system you can snag off ebay for $20.
Even if you get one for free, I would recomend NOT using it. They made some of the most horrendous design decision ever. First is vastly underpowering the system. Second is giving it anything more than 10BaseT networking, and advertising it as if there's a snowball's chance in hell it'll be able to utilize it... Third, is not providing ANY WAY for the end user to access the underlying system, so when the array gets completely hosed for no reason (and it will! No question.) you can't get in, anywhere, to fix anything, and only a hacked firmware image will save you... Fourth and perhaps most significantly, is cheaping-out on $1 worth of flash, and instead storing the OS image on the HDDs, leaving it vulnerable to data corruption, and a huge pain in the ass to bootstrap with fresh drives (requiring Windows, or at least WINE to run the firmware updater app).
I posted on a forum somewhere about all the typos I found in the firmware of my unit... "ehco" is a good extensive one in the software-raid scripts, ensuring nobody can actually get the reports of a few specific errors, should they occur. And this is in a commercial product.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Energy to build a new computer: 18,100 MJ ~= 5,000 kwh. Source. Fossil fuels assumed to be 45 MJ per kg, the value for gasoline.
Proposed ROI payback period is $300/$70 ~= 4 years, saving $70 per year. Electricity cost in the US for residential customers is $0.104 per kwh. Source. This means he expects energy savings of around 675 kwh per year.
Expected EROI payback period is: 5,000 / 675 ~= 7.4 years.
I have to admit to being pretty surprised by that number. Usually, energy to manufacture is a fairly small portion of the retail price. Not so for computers, I guess.
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).
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 )
It looks like you included the energy for producing the 17" CRT Williams assumes each desktop computer has. I think we could leave that out for a server.
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.
> and has mirrored 500 GB disks, which I think is essential for any home server.
I found that when the computer is ran with with no screen, the hard drives are what require the most power. Not surprising when you touch them and see how warm/hot they get.
I have two monitor-less servers, one has 2 X 500G drives in it while the other has 4. The one with 4 drives takes about 160 watts of power while the other with 2 takes about 80 watts of power.
I would suggest to look at alternative media to store your data (or more energy efficient drives) if you are concerned with saving power. You may also look at stopping the drives from spinning when not in use depending on how busy your server is throughout the average day but I do not know how well it works under Linux.
Also, if you live in a cold area where you need to heat your place, the heat dispersed by the drives will warm your house and make you save on heating bills. This is one of the reason I do not worry about this that much... I just warm my place up with the computers and this makes me save on heating bills ;-))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I have two monitor-less servers, one has 2 X 500G drives in it while the other has 4. The one with 4 drives takes about 160 watts of power while the other with 2 takes about 80 watts of power.
All this means is that your two systems are pretty different. A typical 3.5" hard-drive uses less than 10 watts, not anywhere close to the 40 watts your example would seem to imply.