Just wondering whats everyones thought on the ideal power consumption on a 24/7 home server would be?

Just wanted see what the range would be, also any idea's of what the power consumption price in southern california is?

A bit too general to answer easily. What types of things will it be doing? eg. media (audio, video or both) streaming, simple file serving/storage, web server, database server, e-mail server, etc. And how many workstation processes will be accessing it simultaneously? How many hard drives? RAID? Will it be on a UPS? Power consumption could range from 50 watts for a simple single drive file server to a couple of hundred watts for a busy streaming media, database or web server.

ahh sorry...

was thinking along the lines of a simple media/streaming server, less than 4 drives, no ups.

I have one built with 3 drives running windows server 2008 and power consumption is around 59w load
SPECS

Commell LE-565 VIA C7 1.5Ghz
768 DDR
20gb 2.5" Toshiba
2x640 WD AAKS
Sparkle 180w MATX PSU

Would this be ideal consumption for 24/7 media server or can I go lower i.e. amd 780g + low power am2 cpu?

59W is pretty good, and about 10W less than my 780g/ Athlon LE-1640.
I don't have the most efficient PSU though - but it was lying around and I can buy quite a few watts for the cost of a new one.

Fit-PC Slim, uses 5-6 Watts. I have it as torrent box, some filesharing, pluse a few other things. Running Ubuntu 8.10 at present.

The ideal power consumption would be 0 watts.

(Negative infinity would be good too, except for the size of the power conduits to connect it to the grid. )

Approaching the ideal - something that will hibernate when not in use and wake up from hibernation reliably (e.g. on timer, wake on LAN, etc.)

my 24/7 server use 29W in idle and 39W in full cpu, of course measured with wattmeter.

I have a

sempron mobile sms series 25W tdp 2800+ at 1.1V
asrock K8NF4G-SATA2
512Mb ddr 400@266
250GB 2.5" samsung sataII.
picopsu 120W WI + 60W 19V brick

I use vnc to controll it, no usb used and all disabled by bios.

before I had a via that use more power than now with less computational power.

may be with a WD GP 1TB you have to add 4W more.


another configuration I can suggest you is

intel e5200@def 1.1V
giga g31m-s2l
1GB ddr2 800@400
2.5" samsung sata II

I had a similar config, but with g33m instead of g31m, that use 38W in idle

Definite, no, on the E5200 system.

Sempron LE-1250 @1.6GHz + 740G -- 22W full load.

Might be able to save more with a Abit AN-M2 which allows more undervolting.


Ideal: XScale based <1W

Nice: Atom Z540 + US15W -- 4.7W TDP.

Atom is better than Geode in the Fit-PC Slim, but not really worth it when paired with any of the power hungry 945G variants.

You will need a special power supply to get efficiency at these low loads.

No UPS on a file server? Are you mad?

Might as well mount the drives with rare earth magnets.


...


Lowest wattage would be a server running off solar with enough back up to last the length of long periods of cloud cover for you micro climate.

My server is 59W idle.

X2 4000+ @ 1Ghz/0.800V
1GB DDR2
Asus M2A-VM (690G)
3 x 1TB 7200 RPM hard drives (Seagate & Samsung)
Seasonic SS-400ET

I guess it depends what you want. For just a low power server for NAS and downloading the Sempron is hard to beat. It's both cheap and low power. Suitable mobos are a bit more expensive but that is offset by the cheap CPU and power savings.

You will get good performance from that kind of set up too. The only time it might lag a bit is with heavy processing, say using encryption.

How much power does a UPS take though?

With NTFS or EXT3 power cuts are not really a problem anyway.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/vi ... 1efe577b2a

Well worth it imo, especially if you've ever lost mobo,cpu,hdd's to a 30 second brown out.

My friend runs a readynas and says it takes hours to reboot after a power failure. He gets short power outages a few times a month (lives in a suburb of San Diego.) The $40 bux spent and a few watts juice is well worth it to him.

But roll the dice if you want.

If I fix someones PC I only guarantee my work if they are running a UPS.

The new Tripp Lite Smart 1000 LCD connected to my iMac takes 10W with nothing plugged in, and a fully charged battey. I tested an old APC BackUPS on another system which took 7W. We have direction from management to turn our systems off at night, but it is really the UPSs that are using more power, and no one shuts those off.

It's worse than just the power needed to run the UPS though, as most are not that efficient at the low end. See this post for example:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/vi ... 155#275155

77% efficient...

Here in the UK we don't seem to have the kinds of problems you guys in the US do. Power cuts are very rare and brown-outs are unheard of, at least down here in Hampshire.

Thinking of upgrading my server to a low powered amd...kind of sluggish with the via chipset/cpu and windows server 2008..i did test mine with a kill-a-watt and max on load is 59w..i also have a amd be-2400 and a gigabyte 780g mobo with a 80gb hd, 2gb ddr2 and a dvdrw and it sees around 100w+ load when testing with the kill-a-watt, so im not so sure about that anymore...

i dont really need a ups since its just media, nothing majorly important..they can be re-ripped, although i do have an apc surge protector..

in that case then, no ups is obviuolsy fine.

When i read "home server", i thought the data was important.

On the Isle of Wight, a brown-out is when it's been raining in the night prior to the farmer moving his cows to an opposing field.

The amount at load isn't really important, since the server will be idle 99% of the time. Even if you run BitTorrent the CPU will barely be loaded. With that combo and a good PSU you could expect around 30W idle without any effort.

In fact, even if you rip and re-encode media with it you will still probably save money, because although you use more power when doing it the encoding is much faster than on the very slow Via CPU. You use more watts but for less time, so the overall kilowatt hours will probably be lower.

I live just over the water in Portsmouth! We get regular brown outs in the fine establishments on Albert Road every Friday and Saturday night, but that has nothing to do with the electricity supply.