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Comment by mynameisvlad | Hacker News Reader

Highly disagree.

Said in another comment, my server averages around 100-200W. It's equivalent to running a gaming PC.

The reason there's a lot of cheap servers on eBay is that their support contracts expired and are absolutely ridiculously expensive to maintain for a big company. It's easier to get a new server (which will likely have performance and efficiency upgrades as well) than to continue maintaining a server that no longer has a support contract.

The reason there's not many servers in people's hands is size and noise. Servers aren't meant to go in a house; most people don't have server racks in their home. And by default, the fans are jet engines, even behind closed doors.

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You probably live in the USA, because 200w 24/7 would cost me about 600€/year which is definitely significant.

one of the upsides to living in texas, lots of cheap wind power lol. even with more expensive electricity i can still run old hardware for cheap. means less e waste also.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-TEX-ERCO

Your cheap TX electricity is, unsurprisingly, mostly gas. And if you look at data from 12h ago it was more coal than wind.

Yearly averages are probably the most sensible to look at. Wind is at 20% which is still nothing to sneeze at:

> According to ERCOT, nearly half of Texas’ electricity was generated by natural gas-fired power plants in 2019. Coal-fired plants and wind power each generated about 20 percent, while the state’s two nuclear power plants — the South Texas Project near Bay City and Comanche Peak near Glen Rose — supplied a total of 11 percent. Solar, hydroelectric and biomass resources provided most of the remainder

https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2020/augu...

I live in the USA - California, and 150W 24/x would cost about $550/yr. In fact it would cost me a lot more, as my family shifted to time-of-use billing to save money (yeah, it means we don't do certain things between 4-8pm, but with some adjustment it's made a difference in our bills).

A fan replacement and activating quiet mode on the server (usually a bios option or sometimes a hardware tweak) helps with the noise a ton at the cost of slightly less thermal ceiling.

That's why I said "by default". I have done the IPMI toggles needed to lower the fans but it's still not quiet by any stretch of the imagination.

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