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Tree Huggers - watch out - what's your footprint ?

Question
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WHS - brilliant - sheer genious !
Just watch out how much your extra you may pay on your utility bill, not to mention your carbon footprint.
Check out here - http://green-pcs.co.uk/2007/11/17/power-to-be-or-not-to-be/ - for some useful reference material.Maybe there should be a 'what's under your hood' and what power have you managed to get down to ? (small power meters are cheap these days less than £20.00 for a good German one http://www.machinemart.co.uk/shop/product/details/socket-cw-wattage-current-meter )
- so come on - who can report what their home server is consuming (watts) ?
Saturday, November 17, 2007 5:45 PM
All replies
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I am interested in checking this, as i have just set up a HP Proliant server with AMD Opteron Dual Core 1210 CPU and 4 HDD's. Although to be honest their is not much i can do about it if it high due to funds and the fact the HP is new with warrenty.
I will monitor this thread and soon post feed back for my system.
Saturday, November 17, 2007 5:48 PM -
Just bear in mind that real footprint includes the energy used in the manufacturing process of a typical home PC is 83% of the total energy used during a 3 year life cycle. That means if you buy a new PC for WHS it could be extremely false economy as far as the carbon footprint. Most of my WHS was rescued from the land fill.Saturday, November 17, 2007 10:25 PM
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This has been discussed in, among others, "Want to build a "green" WHS", and, by some builders, in "What's in your server?".
My machine is running at 70 Watts +/- with the GA-MA69GM-S2H board running a BE-2350, 2GB of PC2-6400, a LiteOn SATA DVD burner and 3x WD Caviar GP 1TB drives. The power factor is just over 0.5 so it's pulling just shy of 140 VA using the stock p/s in a ASUS TM-210 case. (That would be a 300 W Delta Electronics p/n GPS-350AB.) I have since replaced the standard 80mm case fan with an Antec SmartCool 92mm fan for noise reasons, but have not revisited power consumption. I suspect the fan has made no signficant difference.
I could have used a different motherboard, different CPU, slower/less memory, and unplugged the optical drive to save maybe as much as 10 Watts. A PFC supply would have been nice for carbon footprint. If that supply was of lower capacity--closer to the requirement--and higher efficiency, that would have been good for power consumption as well. But power consumption/carbon footprint was not the only variable I was solving for.
Likewise, Microsoft could have done more to design WHS to minimize power consumption like spinning down drives and running CPUs at quasi-sleep power levels. I want my server seamlessly available 24x7. I don't need it at full instantaneous capability 24x7. Of course, they've already spent 15 years trying to get power managemetn at the OS level to work. From what I see on my Vista machines, they still aren't there. For one reason or another--probably application software and drivers that don't work and play well with power management--they only sleep correctly and automatically about half the time.Monday, November 19, 2007 8:01 PM