Knowbodies' 5W (at idle) File Server
 

Woohoo, new file server. It's a bit unconventional but it works. I bought an NS-K330 Arm based fileserver off of Ebay. It's intended to be used a bittorrent box. I added a 1TB USB harddrive (to hold my files) and 4GB USB stick for a swapfile. When the harddrive spins up, power usage increases by about 40%.

It's quite an improvement from my old fileserver - a Dlink DNS323. It used 11W at idle and 15 under load.

The ANAS350 I'm working on uses just under 3W (about 240mA at 12V) without a HDD installed. Its main disadvantages are that it's hard to set up a development environment for it and it connects the input 12V directly to the drive so it would need a voltage regulator to run from solar power.

One embedded server platform that has recently became popular is the Seagate Dockstar. I don't have one (yet) so I don't know how much current it pulls.

I'm still stuck with a laptop. My Dell C640 uses 12-13W with the drive spun down and about 22W under full load (1.2GHz Pentium-M.) I've been thinking about going smaller, but this machine does a lot of audio transcoding (WAV to MP3) of programs I record off the radio, so I'm willing to live with the extra few watts.

I have a newer D610 (1.7GHz P-M) that brings a little more speed to the table without appreciably increasing consumption, so I'll be upgrading eventually.

Just looked up the NS-K330 and found it for $41! Now I have to get one just to screw around with. I wonder if SnakeOS supports mplayer and/or lame (or an equivalent.)

What does one use a file server at home for?

It's a centralized file repository for the various computers around my house. It's also used for Time Machine backups on my two Mac minis, a network drive for my AppleTV and as a 24/7 bit torrent box.

$41 seems a bit expensive, I picked up mine off Ebay for $35 shipped. The drive was $150 though. I'm not sure what you mean by mplayer/lame support, there are no audio or video outputs. It should stream without a problem though after adding the correct software. There are a bunch of debian packages available.

That's really neat, and much less expensive than I thought it would be. x86 can't touch that power consumption (but some laptops come close).

If you want to be fair, you'd include the HDD enclosure's idle power consumption as well, which is probably the 1-3W standby draw of its power brick.

I record several shows off of streaming radio stations using mplayer, which dumps them as WAV files. I then use lame to encode them to mp3, which I can then download and put on my mp3 player.

To answer the previous question, I work it IT, so I also use my home server as a machine I can remote into to troubleshoot my work network. If somebody claims they can't get to a website from the office, for instance, I can remote into the home machine and try to get to the site from there. If that doesn't work, I know it's the remote site and not my work network. I also use my home server for backing up my home machines, occasionally as a Bittorrent client when a new version of CentOS or Ubuntu becomes available, as a central music repository, etc.

I used to use a 125ish-watt desktop for this purpose, and then came across a 900 MHz laptop (11 watts) with a broken screen on eBay for a song. I've since upgraded to the more power-hungry 12-13 watter I use now.

I have a 1TB laptop drive that, I learned the hard way, doesn't fit into 99% of laptops out there. There are a few USB-SATA converters that can power laptop drives without a brick, and chances are that a device that small and light isn't going to be able to saturate even a laptop drive's bandwidth, so a desktop drive might be overkill.

I am being fair :D. It's 2.5in hard drive powered through the USB port. It has no power brick. Maximum power draw according to Western Digital is 2.5W.

I think it's too underpowered for that. A sheevaplug is probably a better bet but DO NOT PURCHASE FROM GLOBAL SCALE TECHNOLOGIES. Ahem, sorry for shouting but they hadn't shipped 2 months after I ordered from them. I had to get my credit card company involved before they would respond to my emails. And their phone system went either in circles or to dead air.

On another note, I'm looking at using reducing the reducing the amount of time the harddrive is spun-up by writing torrents to the flash drive and copying them to the main drive only when complete. I'll need to see what kind of scripts are available for Transmission-BT though. Otherwise the hard drive spins almost 24/7.