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> For those who go, "but I need real power" There's also the flip side, which is "well since I already have real power..." I.e., like many HNers, I own a powe
by piaste 4y ago
> For those who go, "but I need real power"
There's also the flip side, which is "well since I already have real power..."
I.e., like many HNers, I own a powerful coding/gaming Linux desktop with plenty of HDD space, which gets regularly backed up to cold storage. It does however use a frankly obscene 90W when idling, due to the GPU, fans, and multiple hard drives and peripherals.
Building a separate, power-efficient home server would take a year or two to break even, even compared to running the workstation 24/7. But it's more like 3-5 years when you consider that it's going to run several hours most days anyway, and that it can be safely put to sleep at night. Plus of course it's more effort to manage two servers rather than one, so everything else being equal the single desktop is preferable.
Now if I can use some of the tricks described in this thread to turn it off when I'm not using it, and only temporarily wake it up when I need to stream or upload something, then using the desktop as a home server becomes kind of a no-brainer.
Of course, if you only use a laptop, then a low-wattage home server is a totally sensible complement.
- Semaphor 4y agoFWIW, everything added together for my homeserver in the parent comment was about €120 ;) With the 0.4€/kWh that I pay here, that’s worth it quite quickly.
- MrFoof 4y agoMy workstation is a Zen 3 Threadripper Pro that mostly serves as a virtualized Spark cluster, an entire virtualized infrastructure stack, and video editing (plus occasional games). Wife lives in CAD tools on similar hardware with a bit less CPU and less memory. We already have real power. - - - - - However, we mostly prefer to have those off when we’re not doing work that requires them (I’m mostly on an iPad), plus there’s stuff that the entire family benefits from with the lab. Considering their performance the workstations are actually very power efficient setups for their capability, but they can noticeably change the temperature of a room in an hour when they’re under load, and both of them combined add about $35-40/mo to our electric bill (we pay ~$0.50/kWh in the Boston area) just for light loads, sometimes quite a bit more. - - - - - I will never suggest building something new JUST to reduce power consumption of existing stuff. ROI never makes sense. But when you DO build something new, I DO suggest looking hard at power consumption. There the savings can be quite material. Plus never having to hear any of the equipment EVER (barring the workstations going flat out) is a great thing. Silence is golden. You’ll also learn a lot more about your hardware.