What NAS solution should I buy?

[rpedde]

@CCRDude wrote:

The NAS I use is a Kurobox, it’s using 17 Watt, meaning about 150 kWh/a. In Germany, that’s about 28 Euros for non-stop power.

A good desktop machine might use about 100 Watt, which means an additional cost of 137 Euros. Two years, and the Kuro will have paid itself.

Might well be a MacMini is less power hungry than the above 100 Watt (on the other hand a server might have even more, see mas), and energy in the US for example is cheaper than here.

edit: from Apple site on the MacMini: Maximum continuous power: 110W

Hrm. So maybe the nslu2 with the spun-down drives is still the best answer, if power (or temp!) is your biggest concern.

— Ron

[S80_UK]

@rpedde wrote:

Hrm. So maybe the nslu2 with the spun-down drives is still the best answer, if power (or temp!) is your biggest concern.

You said it. I just measured 5 (FIVE!) watts in standby with my slug and 320GB Western Digital drive (also unslung to a stick). That comes to 11VA if I also take the power factor into account caused by the switched mode power bricks. Active, while doing a scan to build the database, its just about 9 watts (and maybe 20VA).

Cool! (literally!)

[mas]

And that 110W MiniMac is already very good in power consumption compared to what is normal. That ca. 100W is rather typical for a laptop I think.

Modern PCs have sort of a power problem. They use plenty, especially when a nice graphic card is installed.

A fully equipped PC with a high-end graphic card can take 300W. With a dual graphic SLI solution over 400W. Insane but nothing too special any more. After all 600W power supplies are not considered exotic any more. Once they were. Now 800-1000W (you can buy such ATX power supplies!) is exotic.

Ok, noone is gonna use such a system for a server unless he’s nuts. But buy any standard PC and you already get some mid class graphics that will add up with all the other compounds to quite a bit of power consumption.

CCRDude got is exactly right. Calculate how fast a NSLU+ext. spinning down drive will be amortized and you get dizzy.

[offtopic rant on]

But thats the same thing with the light bulbs. 2/3 of the friends I have use normal light bulbs. OMG. That takes not even 6 months to amortize the 10 extra bucks for a good energy saving “lightbulb”. Let alone the hassle that normal light bulbs have to be exchanged 10 times more often for defect. That alone should be enough but well, the majority of people still use normal light bulbs. And man that adds up over time. 10W vs 60W is 50W saved. Have a few bulbs on every evening. Quite some money I prefer using on nice computer gear. 8-P
And a friend of mine once complained that he had double the electricity bill than I have despite me having some electronic gadgets. LOL I could only lough. He halike 20 conventional bulbs in his rooms, an old washing machine of -likely- energy class Z etc. pp.
Count it all together it can be as much as 30-40 bucks/month if you compare low energy equipment with the worst that is there and do that consequently for the whole house.

[offtopic rant off]

[jfrogg10]

I use an Infrant ReadyNAS at home. It actually supports AFP, performance blows the slug away, and it comes with mt-daapd preinstalled. Problems with it though, are 1) it’s relatively expensive; and 2) it uses an old version of mt-daapd. But it sounds like they’re testing a newer SVN FireFly version and it should be included in their release soon. Power consumption is more than the slug (which is why it’s faster), but it’s still much less than running another desktop (peak is ~75 watts with 4x750GB hard drives spinning).

[rpedde]

@jfrogg10 wrote:

I use an Infrant ReadyNAS at home. It actually supports AFP, performance blows the slug away, and it comes with mt-daapd preinstalled. Problems with it though, are 1) it’s relatively expensive; and 2) it uses an old version of mt-daapd. But it sounds like they’re testing a newer SVN FireFly version and it should be included in their release soon. Power consumption is more than the slug (which is why it’s faster), but it’s still much less than running another desktop (peak is ~75 watts with 4x750GB hard drives spinning).

Hrmph. I might have a higher opinion if they offered hardware at cost to developers of the software they bundle. 🙂

j/k.

Does look like nice hardware. Too rich for my blood, though.

[CCRDude]

Infrant? I think they’re in bed with Slimserver, maybe they don’t offer you discount because once people would run Firefly on it, they would notice how much faster it is and don’t buy any of those other boxes any more 😀

[rpedde]

@CCRDude wrote:

Infrant? I think they’re in bed with Slimserver, maybe they don’t offer you discount because once people would run Firefly on it, they would notice how much faster it is and don’t buy any of those other boxes any more 😀

snarfle.

[Author]

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