Howdy all,

I just thought I'd toss this out to the masses. My 250Gb external and 120Gb internal drives on my HTmac are starting to max out and I've been tinkering with getting a dedicated server to leave on 24/7.

However I am concenred with the power consumption of such a device, not because I'm especially green but more because I'm a massive tight-arse.

I've looked at a couple of NAS solutions that are around 30w consumption but the value for money is not there IMHO as they are not terribly flexible and for the price I could easily buy the parts for a server from my local computer market.

Has anyone out there thought about this? If so what power numbers are you coming up with? It where a low-power variety of motherboards out there?

Cheers,

Josh.

You can use an old PC - a 486 will do fine - and run an application call FreeNAS or NASLite+. These older machines draw very little juice compared to newer machines and, once setup, can be maintained over the network. A reasonable sized case to accommodate the drives and you're away. FreeNAS is free but must be run from the drive while NASLite+ can boot from a floppy disc or USB if your machine is able to. I've no idea exactly how much energy it would draw but I think the hard drives would be the major users.

I've looked at a couple of NAS solutions that are around 30w consumption but the value for money is not there IMHO as they are not terribly flexible and for the price I could easily buy the parts for a server from my local computer market.

Has anyone out there thought about this? If so what power numbers are you coming up with? It where a low-power variety of motherboards out there?

why save power when you can go all out? Servers and power consumption goes hand in hand..... Other than that, ajm's comment is spot on for low power (until it does on u )..

why save power when you can go all out? Servers and power consumption goes hand in hand..... Other than that, ajm's comment is spot on for low power (until it does on u )..

What, no comments on the "27/4 server"?? (Just noticed it myself )

Anyway thanks for the advice. I suspected as much - I guess there isn't much demand for such a beastie ATM.

FWIW We are currently making a powerPC based comms board which has more than enough grunt to run as a NAS (except it dosn't have any xATA ports) and it's peak power consumption is 6 watts! So it's certainly possible but I guess not enough demand out there for one...

Edited October 19, 200718 yr by evil_josh

Try a QNAP TS-109 or TS-209, the older series might still be available at a cheaper price, ie. TS-101 and TS-201, the D-Link DNS-323 might be another option, cheaper , but less features of the QNAP range.

http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=79

JDH.

Howdy all,

I just thought I'd toss this out to the masses. My 250Gb external and 120Gb internal drives on my HTmac are starting to max out and I've been tinkering with getting a dedicated server to leave on 24/7.

However I am concenred with the power consumption of such a device, not because I'm especially green but more because I'm a massive tight-arse.

I've looked at a couple of NAS solutions that are around 30w consumption but the value for money is not there IMHO as they are not terribly flexible and for the price I could easily buy the parts for a server from my local computer market.

Has anyone out there thought about this? If so what power numbers are you coming up with? It where a low-power variety of motherboards out there?

Cheers,

Josh.

Edited October 19, 200718 yr by JDH

Hi there

I have a modified buffalo linkstation (see http://www.nas-central.org), which is essentially a network hard drive that has been hacked to run linux. What's great about it is that because it runs linux, you can install almost any sort of software on it. Because its basically just a hard drive with a processor attached, it consumes less than 20 watts.

Currently, it runs a samba and an itunes server and enables all computers and devices on my network to access my audio / video files. The clincher for me is that it also runs a p2p client which manages my bittorrent downloads - certainly beats having my computer turned on overnight consuming 400+ watts of power when i want to download anything. Its pretty easy to set up and run, provided you're mildly tech-savvy. Also, there's a great hacking community for the linkstation - so there's great support forums as well (see the above website).

Bought it for about 100 bucks with a 100GB hard drive in it. I recently upgraded the hard drive to a 400GB one for about an extra 100 bucks. I'm extremely happy with it, I keep it on 24/7, it sucks up less than 20 watts of power and it sits in a cupboard. I haven't rebooted the thing for about 6 months now.

There are other similar servers out there - another one is the linksys NSLU2, which consumes even less power than the linkstation, but is not as fast.

Hope this helps - if you have any further questions, let me know.

Marcus

My 24/7 machine is a P3 1.0 GHz with 250 watt power supply and some cheapy Geforce2 MX graphics. It has no keyboard/monitor/mouse, it's accessed via remote desktop only. Doubt it draws more than 80 watts or so during typical use, which is acceptable to me. Getting a truly low power C3 based system with integrated everything might be cool though.

I'm about to do this myself. I currently have a pc running 24/7 anyway (security surveillance) so I'm just going to gradually add things as I have time. I'm going to set up my printer on it to make it networked and plug in a couple of external 500gb drives ($179 each, I'm I've ordered one already just waiting for it) and just share them. By using two drives I can have one for recording (tv, ill have to add in my tuner cards too...) and p2p etc and unplug the other one to take with me or connect to another machine for video editing (quicker than over the network!). I'll prob also move ftp off another box onto this one too, should be interesting to see how much it can handle.

p.s. I think I'll make some disk images as I go in case I break something along the way.

Edited October 23, 200718 yr by Mcrackn

My HTPC (which sorta doubles as a server for my other machines) just goes into S3 standby after 15 mins (and starts turning off HDD's earlier).. If its asleep and something needs something from it - you can ping it to wake it up (or refresh a persistent network connection)

Its not really a 24/7 but I dont need to touch it - wakes up with the remote mouse or via webscheduler for HT duties (then goes back to sleep)

Cheers,

Bitey

Not sure if it fits the bill but a NSLU2 with two harddrives hanging off it might be the go? $100 and uses little power. It has a major following with 100's of custom approaches.

The old version and the new:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2

Regards

Peter Gillespie