Servers and power

You know, one thing people don't often consider when they're messing around with computers is power consumption.

My power bills aren't horrendous or anything (at least compared to gas... I really have to work on insulation...), but I picked up a Kill-A-Watt meter to see if there was anything around that that could be improved or replaced, and just for general interest. (If I ever get lots of money, I'm gonna put solar panels on the house, just because I think that's cool). To give a bit of perspective, My overall consumption is about 500kWh per month. Probably higher than it needs to be, but I haven't yet found any obvious, glaring problems.

Anyway, my old server, a dual Celeron 300A with three harddrives ran at a pretty consistant 75 Watts. Servers are going to be running 24/7, so this works out to 54kWh for an average 30 day month, which, at current rates, costs me $2.70/month. The server I'm running right now, my sister's old AMD K7 with one harddrive, runs at a rather nice 40W, which comes to about 29kWh or $1.44/month. Unfortunately, it kinda sucks, and likely isn't going to stay up for very long.

My plan at the moment is to buy a new, kick-ass machine for the desktop and relegate my current desktop machine (an Athlon XP 1800+) to server duties. I just plugged it in to Kill-A-Watt and turned it on. 130W. Which would be 94kWh or $4.68/month.

Now, honestly, an extra $2/month isn't going to be breaking any banks, but there is a principle involved here.

My iBook, by the way, runs about 15W (11kWh or 54¢/month if I had it running all the time).

My iBook would make a perfectly competant web server. To do the file server duties it would also have to perform, I'd have to get some external harddrive enclosures, which would up the power consumption a bit. But it does leave me thinking... My current strategy of moving desktops to servers is only going to eat up more and more power. Lord knows what a new Athlon64 X2 3800+ would draw. One of the things I'm keeping in mind as I spec this new machine out is how decent a server machine it'll be in four or five years. I may have to rethink that.

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