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Comment by thesorrow | Hacker News Reader

I use an old Intel Macbook to selfhost this kind of services. The idle draw is around 2W and you get a free UPS if your battery is still working.

The sleep management on macOS is really well done and you don't even need a magic packet to wake the computer. You can configure `pmset` to wake on modem access (ring).

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Thanks for the idea. Currently i have a Raspberry Pi3 with an external USB-SATA 1TB disk connected which is on 24/7 doing stuff like PiHole, Navidrome, etc. I wonder if putting that all on a fairly new laptop with all the energy savings enabled would actually be more energy efficient.

Even on a fairly old one (my "home server laptop" is 8 years old) it's really close in terms of power usage. And the laptop is much faster than the Raspberry and usually comes with fast SSD storage built in.

I'm still in doubt. I don't really need a huge performance boost, though the 1Gbps Ethernet connection of a laptop would be nice.

According to specs my Pi 3 takes 5.1V and 2.5A which is 12.75Watt. An HP (Probook 650 G3) laptop takes 19.5V and 2.31A which is 45.045Watt.

I know it does not eat up all that maximum power, but i still wonder if even the best power saving options would make it less than 12,75Watt.

Did the same with 16GB i7 Dell E7420 laptop (2013), it draws 4W when idle, can spin up two cores instantly and fairly quickly transcode video with iGPU or host multiple Minecraft worlds. No way phone or RPi can get these params.

Same here but with an XPS 13 model. Power usage from laptop chips is great for home servers. They're still really fast when needed compared to a Raspberry Pi, and typically come with 256gb or even 512 of built in fast SSD storage.

The battery in mine is old, but with the screen off it still lasts several hours as a sort of UPS.

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