In a message written on Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 01:13:47PM -0800, Jeroen van Aart wrote:
After reading a number of threads where people list their huge and wasteful, but undoubtedly fun (and sometimes necessary?), home setups complete with dedicated rooms and aircos I felt inclined to ask who has attempted to make a really energy efficient setup?
I've spent a fair amount of time working on energy effiency at home. While I've had a rack at my house in the distant past, the cooling and power bill have always made me work at down sizing. Also, as time went by I became more obsessed with quite fans, or in particular fanless designs. I hate working in a room with fan noise. As others have pointed out, there are options these days. Finding a competent home router isn't hard, there are plenty of consumer, fanless devices that can be flashed with OpenWRT or DDWRT. I've also used a fanless ALIX PC running a unix OS, works great. Apple products like the Mini and Time Capsule are great off the shelf options for low power and fanless. Plenty of folks make low power home theater or car PC's as well. The area where I think work needs to be done is home file servers. Most of the low power computer options assume you also want a super-small case and a disk or two. Many Atom motherboards only have a pair of SATA ports, a rare couple have four ports. There seems to be this crazy assumption that if you need 5 disks you need mondo processor, and it's just not true. I need 5 disks for space, but if the box can pump it out at 100Mbps I'm more than happy for home use. It idles 99.99% of the time. I'd love a low powered motherboard with 6-8 SATA, and a case with perhaps 6 hot swap bays but designed for a low powered, fanless motherboard. IX Systems's FreeNAS Mini is the closest I've seen, but it tops out at 4 drives. But what's really missing is storage management. RAID5 (and similar) require all drives to be online all the time. I'd love an intelligent file system that could spin down drives when not in use, and even for many workloads spin up only a portion of the drives. It's easy to imagine a system with a small SSD and a pair of disks. Reads spin one disk. Writes go to that disk and the SSD until there are enough, which spins up the second drive and writes them out as a proper mirror. In a home file server drive motors, time you have 4-6 drives, eat most of the power. CPU's speed step down nicely, drives don't. The cloud is great for many things, but only if you have a local copy. I don't mind serving a web site I push from home out of the cloud, if my cloud provider dies I get another and push the same data. It seems like keeping that local copy safe, secure, and fed with electricty and cooling takes way more energy (people and electricty) than it should. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/