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  Seriously — laptop disks in a server?

  It might sound strange, but laptop disks actually have a lot of 
  advantages for an always-on home server: they use less energy, run 
  very quiet, and take up little space. Although you pay roughly 
  double the price per gigabyte compared to 3.5" disks, you pay less 
  for electricity, and thus save money in the long run.

I seriously doubt the power savings over the lifespan of a hard drive (5-6 years) are greater than paying twice as much per gigabyte. After all, if they were, Backblaze themselves would be using 2.5" disks.

In any event, the disks in a home storage server are going to be spending most of their time spun down, and drawing very little power.

The other advantages he mentioned (reduced heat, vibration, and as a consequence noise) would outweigh the price difference for a "living room" storage server.

I certainly wouldn't want multiple 3.5" HDDs in my living room...

The disks are quiet, but the cooling fans they often require are not (at least that's what I've learnt from having a Drobo with four 3.5" disks in my living room).

thats why i use an ultra-silent 140mm fan ... running it at 5V (instead of 12V) makes it practically unhearable.

Why do hard-drives, in a small home server, need cooling fans?

They probably don't.

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

yes, that is true, the disks will run fine without. airflow is mostly for any heat generated by the sheeva and port-multiplier boards .... just to be on the safe side.

well, it partly depends on the local electricity rate you are paying .... which is probably a little higher here in europe than in the states, i guess. haven't really calculated the amortization time yet, though.

10 watts per year is 87.6 kW h... how much are you paying for your electricity?

88kwh cost about 22$ here in Vienna, AT.

So for a 200$ drive versus a 100$ drive using 4x as much power with both having an expected life time of 4 years, the 100$ drive is still cheaper.

You are correct. Innumeracy raises its ugly head again.

Powering a 3.5" disk drive costs about $4/year.

Remember the rule of thumb: Each watt that you run all year long costs you $1/year in electricity.

(Also, Backblaze drives probably spend most of their time spun down and thus use nearly no electricity.)

EOM

Some data:

  Model      WD20EARS[1] WD10TPVT
  Size          3.5"         2.5"
  Cap            2TB          1TB
  R/W             5W         2.5W
  Idle          3.4W        0.85W
  Standby       0.7W        0.25W
  Cost           $83         $118

So, figure the drives are mostly idle, but spinning, you would be $4/year for the 3.5" and $1/year for the 2.5", but you might need twice as many of the 2.5" drives to get the storage if you really need 2TB, but if you don't, then it will be 10 years to recover the savings on electric, but that is your own fault for not figuring out how to spin down your drives, and not understanding opportunity cost, you can invest that $30 you saved and make $1.5/year forever, even after your drives detect the end of their warranty and fail in 3 years.

[1] Don't buy this drive. Something went horribly wrong in WD QC land. 1/3 of these that I bought failed their S.M.A.R.T. conveyance tests right out of the box and more failed in the first few months. The reviews at NewEgg suggest this is not an isolated experience. But, they are the ones I'm saddled with and know their data. Mine live out their lives happily spun down but for a few minutes a day and are closely monitored and mirrored, so their admittedly high risk of failure is acceptable.

For what it's worth, your figures for the power draw of the WD20EARs seem to be too low -- Storage Review% measures R/W 6.5W-7.1W, idle 6.3W (odd) -- while the 2.5in drive figures are about right, but maybe a bit on the high side.

And your rule of thumb for energy prices doesn't work in Germany (and possibly other countries), where 1W of electricity for one year will go for about USD 2.50, if not more.

% http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_green_2t...

The numbers I used are from WD's spec sheet. The Storage Review discrepancy is too large to easily explain. Either something is wrong with that test, or WD has posted fictitious numbers.

The $1/year/watt rule is for the United States with a $0.12/kwHr cost. Even in the US the cost varies wildly, but just getting people within one order a magnitude on their electricity reasoning is worthwhile.

I had no idea German electric rates were so high, but it does help explain why large solar power projects are feasible there despite the less than exciting insolation.

I agree that the discrepancy is unusually high. The idle power consumption for other drives reviewed by them is lower and more in line with expectations.

Everything is more expensive in Germany, energy in particular. A rather high VAT (19%) in addition to taxes specific to energy, including gasoline and eletricity, cause this. Part of this is due to a conscious political decision to encourage energy conservation and investment into renewable energy; in fact, of the 0.2 EUR/kWh, about 0.03 EUR are a flat tax/allocation towards renewable energy. This has spurred photovoltaics, but particularly wind energy, which in 2010 accounted for 6.2% of the total electricity.

UK residents pay at least $2.80 per Watt per year according to my quick Google calculations.

On a different note, my last litre of petrol cost $2.12 (£1.33) - that's $8/gallon.

Given that electricity costs can vary by a factor of 5 or more from one place to another, that rule of thumb doesn't seem very, er, thumby.

I'm sure if one sampled the mass of human thumbs they'd find that it varies by more than 5.

$1/watt/year is based on a typical $0.12/kwHr US electric rate, but even that varies by a factor of three depending on location and usage category.

Yeah. So I looked it up for everybody. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing#Price_compa...

Says 11.2ct/kWh in the US per 2011 (close enough to the $0.12/kWh cited elsewhere in this thread).

                $/kWh     $/W year
  --------------------------------              
  USA           11.20     0.98
  Germany       30.66     2.69
  Belgium       11.43     1.00
  Netherlands   34.70     3.04
  UK            18.59     1.63

You can calculate prices for other countries by looking it up on the table on Wikipedia and using Google Calculator to convert to dollar per Watt year:

https://www.google.com/search?q=($0.1859+per+kilowatt+hour)+...

Additionally, I propose that we redefine the name for the unit of "dollar per Watt year" as one Belgium.

---

Aside: is Wolfram Alpha ever useful for anything? Every once in a while I think of a question that would be perfect for WA to answer, and every time it disappoints me and I have to get the data from Wikipedia or Google, when WA could have also done the cost-per-year conversion for me straight away. This time it failed because as soon as you mention "energy price" WA assumes "US energy price" and tells me it has "no data" for the US energy price in Europe (which is technically correct, of course).

Addition: I forgot to do the price comparison for when it pays back the more energy-efficient harddisk versus the other one. Can someone do that?

How many Belgium do you need for the energy-efficient disk to pay itself back within warranty?

I'd do it even if it's about the same or just slightly more expensive, just for the sake of saving energy.

> Additionally, I propose that we redefine the name for the unit of "dollar per Watt year" as one Belgium.

I approve.

Note that lumping the entire US into a single number misses the fact that prices vary enormously within the US as well.

There's a huge table of prices in the US here: http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/electricity/esr/table6.html

The variation is amazing. While most of the prices are around the average you mention, some are quite low, with a decent number of people paying under 4 cents/kWh. On the other side of things, on place in Alaska pays over 100 cents/kWh, and a lot of others are well above the highest figure on your table. For somebody who buys power from the Middle Kuskokwim Elec Coop Inc, 1W costs $9/year.

Just for fun, here are some power consumption figures (based on data from storagereview.com%):

  Idle power draw (3.5in drives): around 5W
  Load power draw (3.5in drives): around 6.5W
  Spinup power draw (3.5in drives): around 15W

  Idle power draw (Samsung 2.5in): 0.58W
  Load power draw (Samsung 2.5in): 2.53W
  Spinup power draw (Samsung 2.5in): 3.89W

Of course spun-down (as opposed to idling but spinning) HDDs draw far less power. I found a 2008 report# which measured spun down power, and it ranges widely but 10 to 20% of idle seems to be about right. (Not sure if there's a 2.5in drive among those they tested; I only skimmed the report.)

If you disregard the spun-down thing for a moment, you get about 4W savings all the time, ie. 20W for the full array. That's about 175 kWh over a year. Assuming 0.20 EUR/kWh (which seems fairly typical for Germany), that's 35 EUR you save, per year. I guess that number can serve as an upper bound for the savings you can expect, chances are it'll be much lower: not a full array, 50% or more time spent spun-down, your energy prices might be lower.

% http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_spinpoint_m8_review http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_green_2t...

# http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~acr31/pubs/hylick-harddrive2.pdf

>you get about 4W savings all the time, ie. 20W for the full array.

It would either be ~2W or ~7W. Relevant to bear in mind the TB 2.5inch drives have more platters than standard height 2.5" so will use more power.

5x2.5" Drives = 2.9W

1x4TB Drives = 5W 2x3TB Drives = 10W

You think 'i need X TB', not 'i need X drives'.

Perhaps power saving is the point, not money saving?

Energy costs PER GB can actually be lower/much closer in a 3.5 inch HDD by going with the largest capacity drives.

Very nice. Looks fantastic.

Put a second Ethernet port on it and let me use it as a NAS/Router box. That would be really cool. I'd like a NAS, but I'd also desperately like to ditch my DSL router.

What's the average (idle) power draw like? The PSU is rated for 20W (output, I guess). This seems to be just enough, since current 2.5" drives draw up to 4W when starting (are you doing a staggered spinup?). For a single drive, idle consumption should be below 1W. So I guess idle power should be way below 10W? More like 5W? That sounds good for an always-on appliance.

At those loads, I'm sure the system is virtually silent, particularly given the humongous fan. The fan grill looks like it would block a huge amount of the airflow, but I guess it's not much of an issue. Does the fan pull air in or blow it out? It would be really nice if everything could go no-moving-parts during idle periods, ie. fan turned off and all HDDs spun down.

Sadly, even with a second ethernet port, I probably won't be in the market, it's just too expensive for me. But I'm sure you'll be able to sell a few batches to the MBP toting internet nouveaux riches in Berlin. :) As a bonus, it's small enough to bring along to the Wifi equipped coffee shop. SCNR.

I'd also be very interested in knowing the average power consumption, especially for a device designed to be always on.

average power consumption is between 10 and 20 watts, depending on the number and model of disks.

Sorry, but that isn't saying much. Average power consumption doing what? Or is that range meant to be the minimum and maximum draw, ie. idle power draw 10W, loaded power draw 20W? I don't see why the device should draw 10W with idle disks, much less with spun-down disks.

Regardless of whether this is the "best" solution for everyone, I'm excited to see people trying these ideas, open sourcing their designs and creating space for there to even be a discussion like this.

Pardon the cheesy line, but it's a move from just reviewing hardware to being able to actually revise it if you don't like something the original designer decided to do.

So, I'm guessing from the specs on the page the hardware is:

SheevaPlug - http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-k...

Then some sort of 1 to 5 eSATA / SATA multiplier like this - http://www.amazon.com/5-Port-Port-SATA-II-Multiplier-SiI4726... . I didn't know these even existed until I was trying to figure out how you attached the 5 drives to 1 eSATA port. I'm guessing this is powered by running a connection over from the Sheevaplug

120 MM Fan

Then all of the metalwork and clips. I like the design on that.

This definitely something I am going to build to decommission the ATOM nettop I am currently using to share a stack of external drives.

yeah, that's mostly right. the 5-port SATA backplane is a CFI-B53PM (from taiwan), using the same port multiplier chip (SiI3726). the fan is 140mm.

i'll published a detailed parts list (including suppliers) this evening.

The design is nice, but why buy this thing for €429 excl. disks if you can buy a Synology DS211 with 2x2GB for the same price including the great diskstation software? Ok, the design is nice, but hey, it's a NAS, you can just go ahead and hide it somewhere, there's no real need for it to be on a desk or in a living room.

I'm with you. Infrant ReadyNAS, LaCie 4big Quadra, etc., there are a lot of really reliable and known high performance (needed for high volumes of DSLR images or 1080P video) chassis designs out there in the 430 Euro USD 600 price range.

Yes, and many of those devices come setup with very reliable RAID without any special configuration by the user. Running 5 1TB disks with no redundancy on standard Ubuntu ext4 is like pleading for data loss.

With the Evercube, I pay double for 2.5" storage and have no redundancy? 5TB of storage but only 512MB for the OS? At those prices the OS storage should be at least 1GB so that users have more options. Standard Ubuntu Minimal requires a lot of manual configuration (no room for GUI in 512MB), especially if you want network sharing and RAID. Then, because it's Ubuntu I can guarantee that there will be major changes in the configuration process at the next version upgrade.

Compare this with ZFS on BSD/Solaris which exports NFS shares with a single command. Upgrade process is predictable and requires little intervention.

Or compare with my setup: Arch Linux with ZFS-FUSE in RAIDZ2 configuration: 4x2TB HDD = 7TB of storage that can survive dual drive failure. And just the Evercube shell without drives costs much more than my setup!

Whoever buys the Evercube will be looking for a pretty solution instead of a technically solid one. Ubuntu 9.04 is outdated and no longer supported. To spend this money and go this far on design on hardware, and then fall so flat on software is really disappointing.

"Arch Linux with ZFS-FUSE in RAIDZ2 configuration: 4x2TB HDD = 7TB of storage that can survive dual drive failure."

Uhh, 4 x 2TB raidz2 will give you 3.6TB of storage...

You probably meant 2x2TB, but yeah, Synology, QNAP, etc come with great software including iTunes sharing, DLNA, Time Machine, etc.

About the only issue with NAS devices is disk encryption, but at that point, you probably require a NetApp box or similar.

I stopped being interested when I came across the price. I'm running two Intel SS4200's with FreeNAS x64. Cost of each was 129.99 last year (closeout price) + ~30ish bucks for 2GB DDR2 mem (they charge more for last-gen mem) + ~20ish for a usb serial adapter + cabling ==> roughly 180 for a DIY server. Only other things needed are a 4gig flash drive for the OS, and hard drives.

The drives can be swapped without any tools. My only regret was the 2GB ram limit due to the outdated chipset -- it scares me a little that i'm running ZFS with less than the 6GB recommended minimum FreeNAS recommends, but I'd rather use ZFS than worry about RAID bitrot/etc.

Some interesting links I found while searching for a low-power server/NAS for myself:

8.5W Core i3-based desktop computer http://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/6112/85w-core-i3-based-...

(from wikipedia: core-i5 mac mini consumes 13W while idle, core2duo model uses 10W)

building a 8x2TB NAS http://www.willudesign.com/BlackDwarfTop.html

the first link is an awesome read, thanks for sharing!

Yeah, there are quite a few — but do they really look good next to your MacBook Pro?

The drobo does. This looks like a machine shop class project.

>This looks like a machine shop class project.

That was my immediate thought upon seeing it. Those vent holes on the front in particular. It's a simple design and seems close to looking good, but it's missing the machining know-how. It would look like a dumpster next to a MacBook Pro.

This is awesome, but totally overpriced. It's a shame, because this is exactly the sort of hardware people need to start using in the home. I suspect the case is slightly overengineered - an extruded aluminium case may have even given a better finish. Also, Ubuntu on a NAS? Overkill?

I may have misunderstood slightly... please ignore the Ubuntu comment.

That's a pretty unique interior setup. I built my own living room server that has comparable power usage (uses ~20 W from the wall in practice) with more traditional computer parts. I'm so used to the x86/x86-64 options of Intel, AMD, and Via that I have never considered building my own system with something other than x86.

With low power/heat/noise as importance factors, one's x86 options are very limited. I went with an Intel Atom for my own build, which resulted in very limited choices for motherboards as far as number of SATA ports, hardware RAID controllers (for redundancy), etc.

I am very interested now to see what options I might have now to build my own ARM server.

I just setup my Tonidoplug yesterday (based on the same basic technology from what I understand). Primarily as a backup server, but the sharing between pc, laptop and mobiles is definitely cool: http://www.tonidoplug.com/tonido_plug.html

not to ruin the spirit of this post/project, but if you're looking into a low power, inexpensive home server why not consider an old laptop with a few USB drives?

With an old laptop you get battery backup (UPS) for free. Bonus points if you find a super cheap one with a broken display.

Disclaimer: I've been doing this for years and it rocks.

Often not as low power as these modern tiny machines.

But yeah; fitting FreeNAS on an old PC is easier than on something like SheevaPlug.

Part of the project is the fact that it looks _good_, something a A broken laptop with hd's hanging off of can never be (unless it is an art piece).

This would be sweet for running CrashPlan on. Are there other SAN solutions that work with CrashPlan? I looked about 2 years ago and didn't find a good option (to me, good = I don't have to leave my computer on all the time).

Very nice, is it possible to boost the RAM to 1 GiB without ruining the whole design?

This box would be perfect with FreeBSD + ZFS (as you say in the text).

i am afraid that would be very hard -- the sheeva board comes with soldered RAM.

I can't find the schematics for it, despite them apparently being CC licensed.

right, i'll upload them this evening -- was in a bit of a rush yesterday :)

Excellent, I was considering making my own with a perspex chassis.

i would love to see the perspex chassis, if you get around to build it ... the design specs (including parts list) are up now:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.evercu.be/evercube.20111102.z...

Cool but way too expensive.

I can't open the site. First I cot a server error, now it loads forever. =) HN strikes again.

yeah, seems like my $10 VPS is a little overloaded right now .... will try to move the images off, that should help.

For things like this, I suggest S3+CloudFront. I don't know how well it compares to other CDNs in terms of cost-at-scale and performance-worldwide, but it is very good and can be set up without a sales process.

anyone else notice this site has a Poor rating on Senderbase?

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