Home Server - Minimal power

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My Home Server - Minimal power solution

Approximate power consumption...
HP hdx18t-1100 cto laptop, 30w, 14.4v, 5069mAH.
External HD's, 7w, 12v, 2A (x2) = 14w, 24v, 4A
Total approximate power consumption, 37w, 38v, 4.5mAH

lowpowerserver.jpg
 
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Man those Sempron cpu's are cheap as chips (excuse the pun:rolleyes:)

WHS is the os i had in mind it. Was going to try it but says you cant activate the trial and have to start over:confused:
 
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Yeah they work really well as low energy server chips, I have a 140 in mine and it works great. Got it with a motherboard for £40 2nd Hand, but at current new prices you might as well go that way for the warranty.
 
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I've got WHS running on an AMD 4850e quite happily here if that helps.
IIRC, if you install the trial version then you have to do a 'server reinstall' as the trial period ends which isn't too painful (essentially redefining users and share permissions plus installing add-ins).
Oh, and if you're thinking about the current version of WHS (i.e. not the WHS2 Vail trial) then watch out for Advanced Format drives like the WD green EARS models - they need a bit of special treatment.
 
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You should see this guy for an extreme power saving NAS!

He transformed his 1st Gen eeePC into a NAS FTP. Using Dynamic DNS for sharing remote access and Ultr@VNC to remote desktop the netbook. To get a little more performance from the netbook, he used eeeCtl to overclock the atom CPU@900 MHz (he shows a 720p movie running on this thing).

I don't think I've seen a lower power NAS than this one.

 
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The model he used doesn't have an Atom CPU, it is a Intel Celeron M 900MHz underclocked to 630MHz. But yes would be pretty low energy, main issue would be connecting multiple hard drives to it.
 
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The first gen eeepc was an absolute con. Advertised everywhere as a 900MHz celeron, then turned out Asus dropped the ball on the cooling system and set them all to 630MHz. I was livid when I found out (shortly after buying one).

I'm finding the most difficult part to specifying a home server to be working out how much processing capacity I need. Maybe a dual core atom would be enough, but maybe not. The custom pc crowd says it wont be, yet oem's are using them for raid 5 NAS systems. Really hard to tell if the atom is enough, or whether an amd/intel dual core is a better plan.
 
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Depends what you are using it for, I ran a home download and storage server on a Atom 330 board (D945GCLF2) with 2GB of DDR2 and it ran fine. I had no problems at all using Windows Vista / Windows 7 64Bit.

The only reason I moved over to a full ATX board and Sempron 140 was the need for more SATA ports and room for future expansion. It was also cheaper than going for one of the ION based boards.
 
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Ah, but therein lies the problem. The longer one thinks about useful things for a 24/7 machine to run, the more tasks one comes up with. Balancing hardware performance against what you want it to run is tricky. For example,

Raid 5
Disk encryption
Ipsec
Firewalling
Snort
Rtorrent
Tor
Squid
Local aptitude repo (can't remember the name)
Media serving (hd?)
Rsync
User-mode linux
Email server
FTP server

Can't think of any more at present, but I'm sure the list is longer than this. Each one comes with an overhead, and working out which ones you're willing to pay more for vs cost of hardware is tricky.
 
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Lots of nice idea's :)

I'm not one to "label" a computer with a specific tag such as HTPC or WHS etc but think the labels work ok to describe the required function . . .

Any reason one cannot combine all these functions into a single low powered build?

  • Home-Server
  • Download Box
  • HTPC (PVR etc)
  • NAS
  • Virtual Server
I'm sure there are some good reasons but they didn't become apparent to me yet! :o
 
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Finding a power supply is the main issue I think Wayne, Pico psu's start to look like a bad plan when there's little to no airflow and you want to run multiple hard drives. Virtual server has the potential to require phenomenal computing power too depending on how you define it.

Or at least, choosing a power supply is proving difficult for me without going for a full size atx one. Pico's are only good for 65% their rated wattage when operating 24/7, and further derate if they get warm.

I'm trying hard to combine such things in one (small) box, but not managed to work out how yet :)
 
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a lot of server tasks really dont need much power for just home use really

quite often, its the os itself that needs the bulk of the processing power.

im currently running a few servers for different things. One of them is a web/ftp and mail server.

it hosts a few websites, and several email domains, web mail, various spam filters and virus checkers, etc and a few other things. And it runs perfectly fine using a Via EN1200, which is a passive 1200mhz cpu. And 100w PSU in a 1u rackmount, althou it usually only runs at about 20w, althou not tested it in awhile

very rarely do i see the cpu above about 30% usage.

althou its running FreeBSD without a gui, and is mainly accessed via SSH
 
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I'd like to know what PSU people would recommend. If this machine was to be on most of the time and serving files, what PSU would you be using?

Im guessing that storage space would also be a issue. does a machine with more than 3/4 hard drives be about right? Would a pico psu still be alright for that? (assuming the mobo is one of those low power atom/via boards)
 
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i ran the asus ion/atom board with intergrated Nvidia graphics and the dual core 330 chip for a while in a Silverstone SG06 case (comes with a good 300w psu).... was a good little computer and very low on power usage but eventually decided that i wanted something a bit snappier and changed it for an I3. A 330 Ion/Atom build should be ok for home server. Dual core processor that clocks up to 2ghz withouy issue although is very slow on a clock for clock basis with more conventinal chips/ +1 for Samsung F3 drives btw
 
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