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Comment by jasonjayr | Hacker News Reader

Running home servers, I'm always worried about power use:

300 Watt(average)/1000 * 24 hr = 7.2 kw/hr per day

7.2 * 30 * $0.14 (roughly tax, generation + distribution in my area) ≈ $30/month to run the machine.

Definitely something to consider, but unless you're running some old big iron hardware, 300 watts would be a very high average for a mostly idle server.

I have a nearly 10 year old HP Microserver with 4 SATA disks and the average usage is less than 50 watts.

One reason why I love my NUC. I have it running everything under the sun and it plus my networking gear draws 18 W. To be fair I haven't checked when it's under heavy load, but the internet says it shouldn't be more than around 35 W.

You don't have to buy actual rackmount server hardware to run home servers, just PCs with a high core count will do and there are some nice low-power options out there like Xeon-D based motherboards and Coffee Lake (i7-8700T) mini-PCs that offer high thread count for less than 35W TDP.

AMD's upcoming Ryzen 9 3950X is also rather exciting if it performs as well as promised. 32 threads for peak 105W TDP is really more than even most home lab builders are likely to ever need.

$30 a month should not be a hardship for most; I think I spend more for fast food every week (I certainly spend way more than that for random ebay and amazon purchases each month - and let's not get into what I spend on my Jeep).

I can understand it being a concern if you are trying to run multiple machines like this (beowulf cluster?) - or if you just don't want to be wasting the power by leaving the machines running an idle...

...but really, at idle without anything happening, I doubt a system even pulls half that. The best way to find out would be to plug the machine into some kind of "kill-o-watt" monitor and check what it uses at idle vs under load.

I would guess that a relatively modern machine, with a basic-level CPU, running headless and using SSDs or laptop hard drives - or just one or two standard desktop drives - likely wouldn't pull more than 150 watts (or could be made to do so).

If you can get VPS for $5 a month, I kind of don't feel like running some old hardware at home is worth $30. Ofc depends on what you use it for. For NAS I would rather buy actual NAS which would have Plex and other stuff and would take a lot less in power than old computer and would be a lot better in terms of storing data.

I've got a 5 year old server with 2x8 core sandy bridge xeons, 32GB ram (I had 128GB total but went down to 32GB since it wasn't being used), an SSD for the OS, and 8 hard drives from 2-8TB each (~30TB total).

I idle at 100W +/- 10W, which is ~$10/month. Sure, I could get a VPS for $5/month (with much lower specs), but the massive amount of local storage plus the ability to easily host multiple VMs really outweighs the extra $5/month cost to have everything local.

I run a handful of VMs and docker containers, such as pfSense, emby (similar to plex), HAProxy, samba shares, snapraid+mergerfs for storage, etc. Worth it to me, might not be for others unless they're interested in server administration.

When this dies I'll probably downgrade to something smaller and shoot for <50 watts, but it's not worth it until it actually fails.

At least for me and I'm sure for some others it's a hobby and just kinda excepted the higher electricity cost as part of my hobby's expenses. And as the others said, at idle you'll be using a lot less power.

That said you can run home servers with WAYYYY less power usage if you prefer. Single board computers are good bets, like the Raspberry pi 4 only use a max of ~15watts. Repurposed laptops have low power usage too.

As others said, 300 watts is a ton of power, if you're actually using that much compute then you're probably getting your money's worth.

My little pizza box R210 II PFSense router uses 30 watts (even though the PSU is 250), once I turned all the BIOS power settings down.

Right now I have a R720 fully loaded with a mix of 16 SSD/HDDs, multiple Fusion-IO cards, 128GB+ ECC RAM, 10Gig Ethernet and when not under load it draws < 200 watts.

If you get something like a R620 from ebay, assuming the US, you can get one that uses less power.

My ancient 5-disk box uses an average of 60W.

Modern hardware should pull even less.

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