Today is blog action day, an initiative to bring more exposure to the enviromental problems.
Today i’d like to talk about the use of home servers. My old homeserver (you know, to download all those fancy Linux distro’s) was running 24/7 to serve all kinds of files to the network. It was an old AMD XP 1800 cpu, an Asus mainboard and some harddisks. Recently i found out that it was using more then 125 Watts to run, even with the harddisks spinned down. That made me wonder if i could build or buy a homeserver that has a low power consumption.
I spend about a week to do some research on energy saving components and i found out that there are huge differences between cpu brands and types. The new AMD cpu’s use about 35 Watt, while the older ones use up to 80 Watts of power. I was looking at a NAS system wich i would hack to run both torrent and usenet clients. This would use about 45 Watts of power and it had all i needed to run the same services as i did on my old home server.
But then i got an idea, why not use a mac mini? I used my power consumption meter to measure the usage on a mac mini and it uses no more then 20 Watts idle! That’s perfect. I can run anything on it and it has a very low power usage! So now there is a fancy mac mini G4 that has replaced my old home server, saving me a minimum of 80 Watts of power and that is a few hundred euro’s a year!
Because i bought the mac mini from Marktplaats (kinda the dutch ebay). It takes me less then two years to earn the costs back in power savings.
So i helped both myself and the enviroment and, i now have a fancy mac mini on my desk!
