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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

So do your machines just idle or do you have a way to put them to sleep and only wake/poweron if someone actually wants to watch a movie?

I had a Plex server running on a spare machine, but I found I only used it once a week or so (Friday/Saturday nights) and the rest of the time it was just wasting energy.

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If you only use Plex infrequently it can be a bit of a power waster for a standalone server. But one of the really cool things about Plex is photo backups from your mobile devices. If you'd rather not have them up in a third party, then it's a really great solution. Also Plex has streaming audio options, though it could be better with audiobooks. My storage array for Plex is in the same place as my home back up so it's never really wasted for me since I store all my files in one location and just open them at whatever computer I'm at.

The ODroids peak at ~20W of power each, and idle at a lot less. All six together, at peak will be ~120W, which isn't so bad, and it seems to idle at around ~40W, which is a number I'm ok with, especially since these things live deep in my basement, far away from the AC, meaning that the heat they generate at least isn't being re-cooled.

That said, I also use these things for a whole ton of things; I watch a lot of movies on there, but since I use docker swarm liberally, pretty much any pet project I have gets deployed there. For example, and I forgot to mention this in the previous post, I built my own basic home-security system by using ffmpeg with a bunch of webcams and Raspberry Pi Zero W's, which communicates to a docker container that streams HLS to hard disk.

Of course I could probably get away with turning these servers on at an as-needed level, but I like being able to just spin up a container whenever I want.

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