Saving Leccy by running a NAS rather than a server

michaels

Noticed my 24/7 file server burns 120 watts = £90+ pa in electric.

So I am thinking a high efficiency PSU or even purchasing a NAS might be cost effective but would welcome on advice on relative power usage.

Currently server is running 300 isa and 250, 750 and 1tb sata hdd so I could put the two big sata drives in the NAS which would cover most of my media files. Any suggestions / advice?

unrich

What does your server do?

If you have a look at the functions it performs you may be able to work out whether there are other options that don't need power.

http://www.synology.com/enu/index.php have always looked intersting to me.

eijit

NASs tend to be pretty expensive though. A 120 watt PSU seems pretty good going considering all those disks you've got in too. Certainly when you think that a new PC usually has at least a 300 watt PSU. You could turn it off when you're not using is (sorry, that's stating the obvious isn't it).

Are you disks set to spin down when they're not in use? Maybe even get the whole system to go into low power mode (although if the mobo is old, that might not be supported).

Or I suppose you could get an external disk and just lug that around (although one wouldn't be big enough to hold 2+ tb of data)

weegie.geek

I'd look into reducing the power usage of the server. I'm pretty sure my server doesn't use that much, and it's similarly specced to yours in terms of drives at least.

a decent NAS is really expensive for all it is. For £110 I got a dual core Xeon server, 1GB of ram and a 250GB hard drive. I fired in three 500GB drives, and there's room for one more drive in a 5.25" bay, two more if I ditch the unused DVD writer.

The noisiest thing about it is the hard drive whirr too, so there's no real advantage to a NAS in that respect either.

Ignoring the system disk there's room for 5 hard drives in the box. A 5 bay NAS with raid and good gbit networking for £110?

I use the box for more than just serving up my music, but I'd really grudge paying 4 times the price for maybe 50% less power usage. And that 50% is being generous, I reckon. Going by your £90 a year, the NAS would pay for itself in what, 7 or 8 years?

Seems like a bit of a false economy to me, and there's far more you can do with a proper server than you can with a thecus or something similar.

It'd be nice to have something that uses barely more power than the hard drives it's got, but it's a lot of outlay for not much of a saving. Perhaps with things like the Atom and other general purpose low-power CPUs, companies will be able to make sensibly-priced NAS systems.

In fact, it'd be nice if someone just made an Atom motherboard with a sensible amount of PCI/PCI-E/SATA slots.

unrich

The ds108j NAS from Synology uses 10W operating normally and 27W accessing the disks. Its about £100.

It will run your website, shre your photos, provide NAS and ftp site, printer share, allow shares of external USB drives, serve itunes, and run your downloads including bittorrent. Oh and run samba shares.

I don't think any server can match that for the price or the power consumed.

Find me a server PSU that consumes less then 30W just powering the mobo.

weegie.geek

the ds108j is one-bay, unpopulated, and costs slightly more than my server did, from what I can see.

One hard drive with no possibility of having more than that, so no sort of redundancy that I can see of, unless it lets you RAID USB drives.

If you only need one drive, with no redundancy, it looks like one of the better featured products (a quick google didn't find much in the way of reviews though, only a few people rating it pretty well in online shops), but it's still stupidly expensive for what it is.

I'm interested in the quoted figures though. 10W "operating normally" and 27W accessing the disks. Does reading from a hard drive really use 17W? Of course, the data that's being read must be processed in some way, even if it's just being spat down the ethernet cable, so that will use some power, but 17W purely to read data off a hard drive?

I could imagine maybe 10W with the drive spun down in power saving mode, and 27W accessing the disk I guess.

The NAS server you mentioned will use less power, yes, but it's already more expensive than my server was before you even put a hard drive in the NAS server.

I love the idea of running some NAS here, but it's just not cost effective when you're running multiple hard drives, especially with redundancy. Cheapo NAS hardware sucks. Terrible reliability and performance, even if you're lucky enough to find a cheap one with gbit. A decent one with gbit that actually performs like gbit is hard to find for less than £100.

Hopefully in the near future everyone will want a NAS for streaming stuff around the house and to their consoles, and the prices will come down.

weegie.geek

the ds108j is one-bay, unpopulated, and costs slightly more than my server did, from what I can see.

One hard drive with no possibility of having more than that, so no sort of redundancy that I can see of, unless it lets you RAID USB drives.

If you only need one drive, with no redundancy, it looks like one of the better featured products (a quick google didn't find much in the way of reviews though, only a few people rating it pretty well in online shops), but it's still stupidly expensive for what it is.

I'm interested in the quoted figures though. 10W "operating normally" and 27W accessing the disks. Does reading from a hard drive really use 17W? Of course, the data that's being read must be processed in some way, even if it's just being spat down the ethernet cable, so that will use some power, but 17W purely to read data off a hard drive?

I could imagine maybe 10W with the drive spun down in power saving mode, and 27W accessing the disk I guess.

The NAS server you mentioned will use less power, yes, but it's already more expensive than my server was before you even put a hard drive in the NAS server.

I love the idea of running some NAS here, but it's just not cost effective when you're running multiple hard drives, especially with redundancy. Cheapo NAS hardware sucks. Terrible reliability and performance, even if you're lucky enough to find a cheap one with gbit. A decent one with gbit that actually performs like gbit is hard to find for less than £100.

Hopefully in the near future everyone will want a NAS for streaming stuff around the house and to their consoles, and the prices will come down.

Linbox

weegie.geek wrote: »

For £110 I got a dual core Xeon server, 1GB of ram and a 250GB hard drive. I fired in three 500GB drives, and there's room for one more drive in a 5.25" bay, two more if I ditch the unused DVD writer.

Could you give more details on this please.
How do you access the system?

ta

Linbox

michaels

Thanks for the replies so far.

My set up is the cheap HP deal from earlier this year - amd 5000 x2, 2gb ram, I have added the 4 hard drives - 2x Samsung satas, a Maxtor ide and a 1tb Seagate GP, have also added a 2600 pro. Will also add a twin dvb-t pci tuner card as I also intend to stream tv round the house when I get round to it. I believe the standard power supply is 250w. Used to serve music and movies, several hours web/msn per day and will also drive the lcd/plasma tv when I can afford one....
Energy meter is showing 111 watt average for the past 3 days = approx £100 pa.
I am thinking I do need a PC not a NAS for this but that possibly a high efficiency power supply is the way to go - these do about 85% for £40 quid so would pay for themselves in 2 years if current psu was about 65% efficient - any one any idea what sort of efficiency you get from stock psus?

eijit

Do you have the various power saving options enabled in the bios? As I say, you should also be able to get the disks to spin down after a certain amount of idleness. They tend to use a fair amount of power, and I don't suppose you have all 4 active constantly

weegie.geek

Linbox wrote: »

Could you give more details on this please.
How do you access the system?

ta

Linbox

The drives are shared across the wired gigabit and wireless network using standard windows shares, and if I need to do any work on the box I remote in from the laptop or my desktop or my phone if I'm out and about.

Server and desktop, wired into a gigabit switch, which is then wired into my wireless router. Damn hard to find a wireless router with gigabit for sensible money.

Laptop and other PCs in the house connect wirelessly.