Making a 'green' server

I currently have an old-ish (HP dc7100) server running Debian as my home server.
It has a 40GB system drive plus 3x 500GB drives running as a 1TB raid 5 array.
It's generally used for file storage, dowloading the odd torrent, DNS, DHCP, etc.

All is generally good.

However, I'm quite aware that it's over powered for what it does, and that it's sucking up quite a lot of electricity (just seen our latest bill!).
Question is, how can I reduce the amount of power it uses, or build a lower power server?

A NAS enclosure would be nice, but the ones that do what I want are £200+ (i.e. 2 drive bays, torrent support, etc)
I'd also be interested in an Atom based server, but I've not seen any bare bones systems with them on. And it'd have to be cheap!

Any thoughts?

How about one of these. Stick one or two Western Digital Caviar Green disks in and memory to taste and you should have a very efficient, reasonably powerful server. I'd use one of the BSDs, but I'm sure Debian would do the job as you're already familiar with it.

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Groucho Marx

Well its not dirt cheap but the Shuttle X27D barebones system has a dual core Atom and weighs in for around £180-200... you'd still need some RAM tho thats pretty cheap <£20 should get that sorted, tho I'd imagine HDD space would be quite limited...

Alternatively you could look at building something around one of these:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid...

You'd prolly need an addin RAID controller card tho :| (same with the post above).

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Edited by Rroff (Thu 07-May-09 20:02:18)

Ooh, both of those look particularly interesting.
Not sure if it would be the *best* way to go, but I could always add in a couple of USB drives...

However, a friend may be selling a ReadyNAS box which might be just what I want

Thanks for your help!

If you want to use the case you have already you can pick up:

Atom boards for £60
Plus a PCI-4-port SATA Raid card for £40
Mini-ITX cast for £70
2x1Gb memory for £15
If you already have SATA drives then off you go!
or pick up a PCI 2 port IDE card for £30

Laters

Sol

True - good shout there!

I have largely the same setup as the OP; except... I started with a Pentium 2 @ 350Mhz.
Sadly, the software RAID and the network card both live on the PCI bus, which gets somewhat saturated Bottom line: 20MB/sec reads from /dev/md0

However, that's enough to saturate a 100mbit ethernet link, and it's also enough for x264 HD rips, which means it's fine for me. The entire setup uses around 60 watts; 1x300gig system, 3x750gig in SW raid-5.

I'd be tempted to move to Atom too, but the cost to move wouldn't really pay off, as this machine performs fine for the job. Plus it'd save wasting a perfectly good computer.

Cheers,
Blueacid
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Xilo LLU - Resold C&W on MRCEN. Bliss!

Yep, the power consumption can certainly add up.
My system uses 2 gigabit switches, router, separate wireless access point, and fileserver.

At one time I left it running 24/7 but now have fitted timers to turn things off during the small hours.

I have found that most home systems don’t need high powered servers. You may find that a Pen3 based system will be adequate for your needs, some of the pen3 1 gig CPU only draw 25 watts when idle, so you would be looking at about 50watts or so input for the server.
Wake up on LAN maybe also worth considering.

I recently bought an “electricity monitor” on E-Bay a useful device just plug it in to a socket and the load into the monitor. It will show you by how much you are able to improve things.

In reply to a post by gromit69:

A NAS enclosure would be nice, but the ones that do what I want are £200+ (i.e. 2 drive bays, torrent support, etc)

This has two bays, has an installed BitTorrent client (as well as Firefly, SqueezeCenter and other useful stuff) and is being sold with a free 500GB drive, usually a Seagate 7200.12 (I think). Check it out here. Might be worth a second look if your mate's NAS deal falls through.

Since you're enquiring in the Linux forum I presume you don't care whether it's a Windows box or not.

In which case, have you had a wander round the world of ARM and (say) miniITX?

Can't give you any immediate pointers, but the motherboard for an ARM with PC-class IO might run off a few watts. OK you need to add hard drives and stuff, and it's not exactly mainstream, but there's been some interesting stuff out there in the past and hopefully still is. If only I could remember where I saw these things or how I found them...

Not directly relevant to your quest but readers may be mildly amused by:
http://www.picotux.com/

Small, but there are smaller.

Intel unveils 48-core cloud computing silicon chip

...Intel said it had already demonstrated Linux running on each core. It has also found a way to slash the management overhead required to keep the processors crunching data in synch...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8392392.stm