5 ms·

And the word 'watt' is no where in the article. I'd be curious to the yearly power costs. I've been the eying the Lenovo Thinkserver TS-140: http://amzn.com/B0

by esaym 11y ago

And the word 'watt' is no where in the article. I'd be curious to the yearly power costs. I've been the eying the Lenovo Thinkserver TS-140: http://amzn.com/B00FE2G79C http://amzn.com/B00FE2G79C with a Xeon E3-1225v3. Some comments state that it has an idle draw of less then 40 watts. Which is hard to believe. My Dual core intel atom box idles at about 50 watts (of course there is no difference between idle and full load draw with the atom, just super slow either way...)

sosuke 11y ago
I must assume I'm wrong in this calculation but 40 watts seems pretty cheap in cost. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+watts+in+kwh+per+month http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+watts+in+kwh+per+mon... at a 3.3 cents per kWh rate is just under a $1 per month right? On the top tier of my local utility it would still be under $4 per month. http://www.austinenergy.com/wps/portal/ae/rates/residential-rates/residential-electric-rates-and-line-items http://www.austinenergy.com/wps/portal/ae/rates/residential-...
- brandmeyer 11y ago
  1 W draws about 9 kW-hr/year, so for residential pricing of about 10 c/kW-hr, you get about 1 $/W-yr.
- esaym 11y ago
  I think most Americans pay between $0.20 and $0.40 per kWh. I am lucky though that here it is only $0.06. But in summer months it goes to $0.14 for every kWh over 600. Staying under 1000 kwh's a month is hard to do.
  - fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
    $.106 and free weekends.
  - slavik81 11y ago
    Speaking of summer, if you're trying to cool the house with an air conditioner, you can multiply the effective wattage of the computer by 3.
    - esaym 11y ago
      True, that is a good point.
  - barney54 11y ago
    The average price of electricity in the US is $0.13. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf... And you would have to be somewhere really remote to pay $0.40.
- oso2k 11y ago
  In the U.S. $0.20 per kWhr is a more common rate.
  - VLM 11y ago
    Those prices are an Alaska/Hawaii and New England thing. Everywhere else its pretty cheap. http://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/ http://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
- ryan-c 11y ago
  In California, PG&E has tiered pricing such that even a moderate user in the bay area will probably be paying a marginal rate of ~$0.35/kWh.
wandererer 11y ago
Probably not 100% accurate, but the APC UPS on my nas build of similar design (xeon e3, 8x3tb red main array + 3tb scratch/hot spare + 2tb scratch + 500gb ssd for jails) reports 30w when idle, 42w when reading from the array, 75w when transcoding in plex My energy bills aren't crazy, and I leave it on 24/7
- puzzlingcaptcha 11y ago
  Ten drives in idle alone is 30W (WD Reds are 2.7 each).
js2 11y ago
I have a TS-140 with four disks in it running FreeNAS. I'll hook it up to a killawatt tomorrow and let you know what it draws.
- esaym 11y ago
  Yes, please do so! Is it the one with the Xeon? Also what/how much ram...
existencebox 11y ago
Similar to what sister posts say; I have a reasonably large home fileserver (one of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP3K29345 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP3K293... with dual xeon 5606's and 12 non-green 7500 RPM disks) and don't find it makes me surprised in terms of consumption. Power bill for the apartment typically runs me ~80-100$ a month, (I'm mildly embarrassed that this is the metric I gauge my server by as opposed to true avg. wattage) not insane, higher than I might like though. I'll likely shrink to whatever the latest gen of that neat Intel mini-itx server board they recently released is, when the big build starts to go, but I'm not sure how much that will end up helping.
- aroch 11y ago
  Your $/kWh is important though, $80 in your area could be $200-300 in others
sciurus 11y ago
It sounds like something is wrong with how your hardware or OS is doing power management if you don't see a difference between idle and full load. Also, what else is in your system? 50 ways seems pretty high. For just the CPU, the most power-hungry Atom I can find has a TDP of 10 watts. http://ark.intel.com/m/products/59683/Intel-Atom-Processor-D2700-1M-Cache-2_13-GHz#@product/specifications http://ark.intel.com/m/products/59683/Intel-Atom-Processor-D...
- driverdan 11y ago
  Agreed. Something isn't right here. An Atom system should be drawing much less power at idle. I have an older low end AMD system I built with the intention of having it be low power. It draws around 40W at idle.
  - devonkim 11y ago
    Depends upon the generation of Atom honestly. Older Atoms had extremely inefficient chipsets paired with them despite the processors having some varying power draw, but the CPU on those only took somewhere between some mW up to several watts which were eclipsed by the rest of the system typically (the chipsets drew at least 11 w idle or load last I remember). I had one of the older Ion 2 Atom 330 boxes that were popular for media center PCs and it didn't really matter if it was made by nVidia either - power draw was pretty much the same no matter what.
  - esaym 11y ago
    The dual core atom from the 2010 era is a strange beast. True it idles at less than 4 watts, but the chipset they were paired with draw 15 watts or so. My estimates for my power usage are: Chipset/motherboard: 15 watts CPU: 6 watts 2 hard drives: 10 watts really old crap PSU from 2002: 20 watts Although I didn't measure each component by it self, all the power requirements and specs are posted online mostly. Except my really old PSU, I can only assume that is where the power is going. I probably should have bought a new PSU for the build, instead I bought $20 in adapters just to make the PSU work with the board :) But my killawatt meter clearly shows the box drawing 50-55 watts around the clock. And if you are nosy, this is what the dual core atom box runs: http://shorewall.net/XenMyWay.html http://shorewall.net/XenMyWay.html I got tired of having a separate web dev box and firewall box in my house. So I stood up Xen on a debian OS on the atom hardware, and now my firewall and web dev box are Xen guest. Make for fun Dom0 host upgrades when the internet is being provided by a guest that it is itself hosting...
toast0 11y ago
Is your dual core atom the first generation atom, that shipped with a 945 chipset? IIRC, the cpu was about 10w, but the chipset was 25w :(
- esaym 11y ago
  Yep: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121383 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121...
jlgaddis 11y ago
If you're trying interested in the power usage (and not just trying to make a point or comparison), I just recently built a very similar box (same motherboard and CPU, different RAM, and 4 TB instead of 6 TB HDDs + a pair of SSDs for the OS and ZFS ZIL and L2ARC). I can plug it into my Kill A Watt and measure the power consumption if you'd like.
- jonathankoren 11y ago
  Yeah that would be cool. I tend to leave my NAS in sleep mode, since I don't keep daily use stuff on it.

by esaym 11y ago

sosuke 11y ago

I must assume I'm wrong in this calculation but 40 watts seems pretty cheap in cost. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+watts+in+kwh+per+month http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+watts+in+kwh+per+mon... at a 3.3 cents per kWh rate is just under a $1 per month right? On the top tier of my local utility it would still be under $4 per month. http://www.austinenergy.com/wps/portal/ae/rates/residential-rates/residential-electric-rates-and-line-items http://www.austinenergy.com/wps/portal/ae/rates/residential-...

brandmeyer 11y ago
1 W draws about 9 kW-hr/year, so for residential pricing of about 10 c/kW-hr, you get about 1 $/W-yr.
esaym 11y ago
I think most Americans pay between $0.20 and $0.40 per kWh. I am lucky though that here it is only $0.06. But in summer months it goes to $0.14 for every kWh over 600. Staying under 1000 kwh's a month is hard to do.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
  $.106 and free weekends.
- slavik81 11y ago
  Speaking of summer, if you're trying to cool the house with an air conditioner, you can multiply the effective wattage of the computer by 3.
  - esaym 11y ago
    True, that is a good point.
- barney54 11y ago
  The average price of electricity in the US is $0.13. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf... And you would have to be somewhere really remote to pay $0.40.
oso2k 11y ago
In the U.S. $0.20 per kWhr is a more common rate.
- VLM 11y ago
  Those prices are an Alaska/Hawaii and New England thing. Everywhere else its pretty cheap. http://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/ http://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
ryan-c 11y ago
In California, PG&E has tiered pricing such that even a moderate user in the bay area will probably be paying a marginal rate of ~$0.35/kWh.

wandererer 11y ago

Probably not 100% accurate, but the APC UPS on my nas build of similar design (xeon e3, 8x3tb red main array + 3tb scratch/hot spare + 2tb scratch + 500gb ssd for jails) reports 30w when idle, 42w when reading from the array, 75w when transcoding in plex My energy bills aren't crazy, and I leave it on 24/7

puzzlingcaptcha 11y ago
Ten drives in idle alone is 30W (WD Reds are 2.7 each).

js2 11y ago

I have a TS-140 with four disks in it running FreeNAS. I'll hook it up to a killawatt tomorrow and let you know what it draws.

esaym 11y ago
Yes, please do so! Is it the one with the Xeon? Also what/how much ram...

existencebox 11y ago

Similar to what sister posts say; I have a reasonably large home fileserver (one of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP3K29345 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP3K293... with dual xeon 5606's and 12 non-green 7500 RPM disks) and don't find it makes me surprised in terms of consumption. Power bill for the apartment typically runs me ~80-100$ a month, (I'm mildly embarrassed that this is the metric I gauge my server by as opposed to true avg. wattage) not insane, higher than I might like though. I'll likely shrink to whatever the latest gen of that neat Intel mini-itx server board they recently released is, when the big build starts to go, but I'm not sure how much that will end up helping.

aroch 11y ago
Your $/kWh is important though, $80 in your area could be $200-300 in others

sciurus 11y ago

It sounds like something is wrong with how your hardware or OS is doing power management if you don't see a difference between idle and full load. Also, what else is in your system? 50 ways seems pretty high. For just the CPU, the most power-hungry Atom I can find has a TDP of 10 watts. http://ark.intel.com/m/products/59683/Intel-Atom-Processor-D2700-1M-Cache-2_13-GHz#@product/specifications http://ark.intel.com/m/products/59683/Intel-Atom-Processor-D...

driverdan 11y ago
Agreed. Something isn't right here. An Atom system should be drawing much less power at idle. I have an older low end AMD system I built with the intention of having it be low power. It draws around 40W at idle.
- devonkim 11y ago
  Depends upon the generation of Atom honestly. Older Atoms had extremely inefficient chipsets paired with them despite the processors having some varying power draw, but the CPU on those only took somewhere between some mW up to several watts which were eclipsed by the rest of the system typically (the chipsets drew at least 11 w idle or load last I remember). I had one of the older Ion 2 Atom 330 boxes that were popular for media center PCs and it didn't really matter if it was made by nVidia either - power draw was pretty much the same no matter what.
- esaym 11y ago
  The dual core atom from the 2010 era is a strange beast. True it idles at less than 4 watts, but the chipset they were paired with draw 15 watts or so. My estimates for my power usage are: Chipset/motherboard: 15 watts CPU: 6 watts 2 hard drives: 10 watts really old crap PSU from 2002: 20 watts Although I didn't measure each component by it self, all the power requirements and specs are posted online mostly. Except my really old PSU, I can only assume that is where the power is going. I probably should have bought a new PSU for the build, instead I bought $20 in adapters just to make the PSU work with the board :) But my killawatt meter clearly shows the box drawing 50-55 watts around the clock. And if you are nosy, this is what the dual core atom box runs: http://shorewall.net/XenMyWay.html http://shorewall.net/XenMyWay.html I got tired of having a separate web dev box and firewall box in my house. So I stood up Xen on a debian OS on the atom hardware, and now my firewall and web dev box are Xen guest. Make for fun Dom0 host upgrades when the internet is being provided by a guest that it is itself hosting...

toast0 11y ago

Is your dual core atom the first generation atom, that shipped with a 945 chipset? IIRC, the cpu was about 10w, but the chipset was 25w :(

esaym 11y ago
Yep: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121383 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121...

jlgaddis 11y ago

If you're trying interested in the power usage (and not just trying to make a point or comparison), I just recently built a very similar box (same motherboard and CPU, different RAM, and 4 TB instead of 6 TB HDDs + a pair of SSDs for the OS and ZFS ZIL and L2ARC). I can plug it into my Kill A Watt and measure the power consumption if you'd like.

jonathankoren 11y ago
Yeah that would be cool. I tend to leave my NAS in sleep mode, since I don't keep daily use stuff on it.