What can be done about your server costs? (Get rid of that old PC)

A lot of Geeks have servers that run 24/7. Often built out of left-over computer parts, Geeks typically brag about how little they spent on their server, yet fail to consider the cost of electricity. That old box of parts can cost big dollars compared to purpose-built boxes.

I had assembled just such a server class machine in a full size tower. Based on an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ CPU, it ran three 500 GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration. The Asus motherboard provided on-board video, which generally was not used. This was my pride an joy, hosting my music and photo collection. It was also my 'home' server and ran 24/7.

Imagine my shock when I metered the power usage and found that it was pulling 400 watts 24/7. That server was costing me about $1.75 per day (or $55 a month) to operate.

To make matters worse, because it was a perfectly acceptable desktop as well, I would occasionally use it for other purposes. Inevitably a blue-screen-of-death would develop that would cause me to have to do an ungraceful shut-down. That generally caused the RAID array to have to recover from a fault -- a process that would take over 24 hours to complete.

It was clear that the classic solution to a home server was simply not economical in this instance. So I began to research purpose built NAS devices. Most of them suffered horrible performance issues (typical of the low cost disk box with a USB and Ethernet interface sold by just about all the disk drive manufacturers). A few vendors, like Thecus and Buffalo came out with some interesting devices, and I finally settled on a Thecus N5200.

At the time, the Thecus N5200 was the fastest RAID array on the market (unless you compared it to hardware that cost 10 times as much that was intended for corporations), especially in terms of write performance. It was physically small (about a half-cubic foot in volume), and allowed up to 5 SATA drives. Because it was purpose built to be a RAID box, I suspected the power supply would be optimized, and it was.

Extensive testing of the Thecus N5200 indicated that the cost to operate was $0.26 a day ($8.17 a month). This was 1/6 the power needed for my original box. In fact, based on power savings alone, I paid for the original cost of the Thecus in 13 months (I reused the same three disk drives from my big-iron server). Before the end of 2008 I will have saved an additional $1600 in operating costs.

What did I gain by using a purpose built NAS? An increase in write speed of about 4X. An increase in read speed of about 2X, start-up that is automatic (no console needed), a whole bunch of desk space, and a much lower power bill. What did I give up? Well I can't use it as a spare computer anymore, but that just avoids crashing the RAID array anyway.