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?"

Comments

Linkstation Pro Duo

[ceswiedler]

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.

Re:Linkstation Pro Duo

[karnal]

All I do from my home Linux server is read/write files - mostly from Windows clients, but I have a few Linux clients as well. Also some very basic MRTG which I usually don't even look at anyways. One thing I've consistently read about NAS devices is that they won't necessarily have the horsepower to push the network connection on file read/writes to the max.

What's your experience with the speed of files in and out of the Buffalo device?

Re:Linkstation Pro Duo

[thadmiller]

I'd like to second the Buffalo Linkstation solution. The LS-XHL model has a 1.2 GHz ARM CPU, 256MB RAM, and the 1 TB model is available from NewEgg for around $220 (they also make a 1.5 TB and 2 TB). I did have to take the drive out and hook it up to a desktop running Ubuntu for part of the install, but I didn't need to solder anything. I have Debian Lenny running on the NAS with AMP, Samba, OpenSSH, Webmin, and TorrentFlux for normal operation. I also have LXDE accessed via TightVNC with various desktop apps (aMule, gtk-gnutella, etc).

End result is a $220 box, with a 1 TB drive, using approximately 15-watts that sits quietly on a shelf, and does everything I want.

Re:Linkstation Pro Duo

[Akdor 1154]

I dealt with the HDD issue by buying an 8GB compactflash card and $10 cf-ide adaptor from ebay. Data's stored on a mirrored terabyte (which can now be turned off for 90% of the time), and Debian is running quite nicely on the Atom board I've got in there. The loud chipset fan was shitting me but I fixed it with a less-cheap aftermarket 40mm fan (which incidentally is held to the board with a bent paperclip). My favourite bit is the 3.5" ext. HDD docking bay that automatically selectively syncs my portable drive to my storage array.

Re:Linkstation Pro Duo

[cbreaker]

But.. bigger capacity drives are heavier and require more electricity! Two 1TB disks will draw 2x more than two 500GB disks!

Kidding aside, I think the big myth these days is that hard drives use a lot of power. They use a few watts when they spin up, but when they're just sitting there doing nothing they consume very little electricity, and when they're working hard they can use DOUBLE - and double of very little is still very little.

I have a file server machine with 13 drives in it - all but one is is a 750GB Seagate 7200RPM disk. I have a kill-a-watt and I plugged it in to see the power draw. I don't recall the numbers off the top of my head but basically all the drives spinning only added about 40% to the total power requirement, and when they were all busy (doing a RAID resync or something) they use about 60%. Considering the machine is a dual-core Opteron clone machine with 4GB RAM and nothing more special than that, I was very surprised. (The machine does have a hardware RAID card in it, which uses its fair share of power.. but still.)

These huge honkin' 2TB disks and such are even lower powered because they tend to spin a bit slower and many of them have special considerations for power management, further reducing the power needs. A 5900RPM 2TB disk can have similar performance to a 500GB 7200RPM disk because of the data density, and when put into a multi-disk array can perform very well for applications not requiring bleeding-edge performance (which is actually most everything..)

Re:Linkstation Pro Duo

[ls671]

Nope, both system are the same you are not taking into account the following factors:

1) additional hard drives will cause your power supply to generate more heat and to consume more energy.

2) additional hard drives will cause your controller to generate more heat and to consume more energy.

3) additional hard drives will cause all fans on your sytem to rev faster and to consume more energy.

4) Additional hard drives will cause your cpu to work harder generate more heat and to consume more energy especially if you are using software raid. If using hardware raid, your raid card will consume more energy.

etc. etc.

All these components don't have a 100% efficiency and transforming power from the 110 AC outlet produce energy lost trough heat.

Do the test yourself by measuring the power drawn from the AC outlet, not the power drawn at the hard disk connector.

The utility company bills you according to this.

Underclocking

[XPeter]

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

Re:Underclocking

[Tjp($)pjT]

At idle I get about 12 watts to 14 watts (PPC vs Intel) for mac mini's on our APC monitored power controller. We watch closely as we only have a 2KW budget for the rack with all the equipment considered. Peak I have seen about 40 from a PPC and 65 or so from an Intel

Laptop

[talcite]

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.

Re:Laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the LCD draw significant power if it is shut off while the lid is closed?

Re:Laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

This is similar to what I did. I used a HP mini with an atom N270 with the 16gig ssd and a 4 gig sd card. The biggest consumer of the power is the lcd screen. I set the screen to be off when I close the lid instead of taking it out. Then I remote in for everything else. It is a 'server'. It also totally blows away the server it replaced and uses 1/10th the power. There is also a intel board that has the 330 on it. About the same power draw and dual proc and 64 bit. But that would require a bit of assembly. Total cost for this is in the range of 250-350. Just depends on where he gets the parts.

There is also a couple of ion boards out there but they would probably draw a bit more power.

Now the downside to the intel chipset is the Ethernet is 100 instead of 1000. So if you are looking for a 'home movie' server situation the ion would be a better choice. Using the MB's instead of laptops also opens you up to the possibility of esata.

Really it depends on what he is doing.

Via Epia 5000

[robertkeizer]

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.

Re:Via Epia 5000

[jeroen94704]

Second that. My home server runs FreeNAS on an EPIA 5000. Including a gigabit ethernet card, 4-port SATA card and four 1 TB drives, this system draws about 35 watts. When the drives spin down, power usage drops to
One downside is that the EPIA 5000 is too light-weight to do software RAID (even JBOD), which I found out the hard way (by losing data!), so I am now running the HD's as plain, separate partitions.

Re:Via Epia 5000

[(H)elix1]

I've got one of these running my local subversion repositories and a few other processes. As a bonus, it is fanless. One gotcha is it is a i586 CPU, which means distros like Centos and a few others will not install without a bit of extra work.

ASROCK ION 330 NETTOP

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:ASROCK ION 330 NETTOP

[BLKMGK]

Ding Ding ding!!!

I too am using one for an XBMC machine. 2 real cores, 2 hyperthreaded cores, decent price, good performance. NOT the fastest at compiling XBMC but it gets by :-) Overclocked and 100% usage it hits just 40watts.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=40000003&Description=asrock&name=Barebone%20Systems

I too am pondering the old electric bill. My new I7 machine may only be powered up as needed, I'll move my torrent client to this box instead soon I think. Just need to get a WEB client working for it. My unRAID servers all spin drives down and use 80+ PSU for efficiency.

Re:Sheeva Plug

[Anonymous Coward]

I have one. It is preloaded with Ubuntu. This is a no-brainer.

New Intel D945GSEJT & PC Engine Alix!!!

[niko9]

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.

Re:New Intel D945GSEJT & PC Engine Alix!!!

[ajlitt]

Seconded on the D945GSEJT! For under $200 I was able to get the board, a 1TB Seagate Barracuda LP drive, 2GB SODIMM, and some miscellaneous bits to make a simple plexiglass case. The PSU came from an old external HDD case and didn't require any cable hacking to fit the connector at the back. The board has no onboard fans, and runs so cool I didn't need to add any. It's so quiet that I can't hear it over the hum of the 2 CFL bulbs 10 feet away.

I haven't measured power consumption yet, but considering my PSU is only 12V@2A and it hasn't caught fire yet, it can't draw much more than 24A running full tilt.

Re:New Intel D945GSEJT & PC Engine Alix!!!

[Nicolas Pillot]

I'm using a pcengines' alix 2D3 as a dedicated firewall / router and AP (with a mini-pci athereos card with 2 antennas).

Runs debian, very stable and with an external USB 1TB drive, acts as webserver/fileserver and all.

Draws a merely 3-to-10W depending on the wireless/disk/cpu activity.

Re:Via Epia 5000 another vote

[petes_PoV]

I have one set up too. With no disk (CF card on a CF-IDE adapter) it's as slow as a dog for loading programs, but only uses 13Watts. Plus it's completely silent. So long as you have enough RAM to keep all your apps resident, their response times won't be too bad. Plus writes to cache help speed things up - so long as your electricity supply is reliable.

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.

NSLU2 embedded solution: ~$225 new

[N0NCE]

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

Not what I intended, but works well as a server

[mattbee]

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.

Re:Sheeva Plug

[DamonHD]

The SheevaPlug is great: I've come down from over 600W for a rack of Solaris servers via 18W for a Linux laptop to now under 4W for a SheevaPlug (all quiet/typical consumption) to provide the same services, see:

http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-SheevaPlug-setup.html

(Served off the plug indeed...)

I've reduced the consumption so much that the plug now runs entirely off-grid from a small array of solar PV panels (under 200Wp) with a small (12V, 40Ah) battery to cover nights and very dull days...

Rgds

Damon

Re:netbook

[Neuroelectronic]

The fan in most netbooks is only for your comfort, and will still run fine with the fan disabled or failing. Also, they have a built in UPS with several hours of power!

Four watts

[MillionthMonkey]

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.

Re:Mac Mini idles at 13 watts!

[Wingsy]

Not robust enough? I think the people running this server farm might disagree.

http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/13019/Mac+Mini+Server+Farm.html

Re:Eee PC

[RandomJoe]

Or even a nicer one - I have the 1000HE (Atom processor, 160GB HDD) and it runs 10-12W with the screen on. Performs comparably to the Atom "fanless" desktop machine I also have (which won't run more than 1/2 hour without getting hot as a pistol thanks to the lousy chipset, so it now has a fan on the heatsink!) which pulls 25W at idle with NO screen. Both running Ubuntu 9.04. (Of course, the Eee pulls more when it needs to charge the battery - I don't remember what that tops out at.)

I use the Eee as a laptop, but have considered getting another to replace the desktop. It is a server, running on my off-grid solar system, so more than halving my 24x7 power consumption is a tempting idea...

The wattages above are actually DC measurements off my battery bank - the desktop has a DC PSU, the Eee was running through a small inverter.

When I bought the Eee, I thought it was interesting that the unit with solid-state disk listed a *shorter* battery life than the one with the 160GB HDD... I wanted the space anyway, so went with the HDD.

Re:Sheeva Plug

[Beacon11]

I definitely recommend Sheeva. I'm using mine as a streaming media server. I used to just use a well-built desktop Linux system, but now I'm using the Sheeva Plug with an SDHC card containing all my music and it uses less power than my desktop turned OFF (my desktop pulls about 5 W of phantom power, whereas the Sheeva runs at MAYBE 4-5 W depending on load). Can't beat it, and there are a ton of prebuilt images for it. I even have Hamachi on there.