Lately I have been groaning at my electric bill. Here in Southern California they charge a good deal for electricity. On top of that, if I go over some limit, the charge at a higher rate.
One of my solutions to this is to see if I can make a low power machine to cut back the usage of my always on torrent downloader.
Since I used to build custom routers for radio towers, I am pretty well versed in low power machines.
The real low power 5 to 7 watt boards don't have the I/O I would need for this sort of job. My next choice was a Mini-ITX or Nano-ITX board. That would have standard I/O ports for hard drives, mouse, keyboard, etc.
This is a neat thing to do if you want to save power, and it works well. Anyone can do it with a minimum of technical skill. It is a very simple system build, with exceptionally few parts.
The rest of this message will only be of interest to people who want to do this, or want to read about my doing it, or who just like to read about some tech who rambles on about the systems he tweaks.
In the end I decided on a
EPIA-EK8000EG by VIA. Here is why:
* The 800 MHz CPU is enough power for what I want to do.
* It is fanless when using the 800 MHz CPU.
* It has DDR support, and I had spare DDR.
* It has 2 IDE headers, and 2 SATA headers. I had a spare IDE DVD-R/W, and HD, but in the future I will go to SATA.
* Mini-ITX mounts in an assortment of small form factor boxes.
* The maximum power draw under load is 19 watts.
This adds up to enough machine power to do the job, but very little electrical power. The HD draws about 15 to 20 watts, and unless I use it, the DVD-R/W is practically nothing. Since I am not driving the system hard, the motherboard does not consume the max 19 watts it uses. That is why I say that overall this is a sub 40 watt system.
Unfortunately, I don't have one of those little wall plug watt meters to prove out the true draw.
I put this in an Antec Minuet 300 case. Here is why:
* It will take a Mini-ITX board
* The Antec 300 watt power supply should last indefinitely with such a small load.
* It takes standard 80mm fans, so I can get 14 dB enobal bearing fans for it (super quiet).
* It will fit a standard HD and Optical, as opposed to laptop ones.
* It can act as a stand for my scanner, therefor taking no extra space.
The side fan is set to the lowest speed it supports, and the system never heats up. Between that, and the PSU fan, there is plenty of air flow, but nearly no noise. The PSU fan is even blowing cold air! Well, room temperature air, without the warmth a regular machine adds. So this system is cool and quiet.
You might also like the lunchbox configuration cases for this type of unit, but most of the ones I saw did not support 80mm fans. The few that did had other issues for where I wanted to keep the unit. If I was using this elsewhere, they would have been a good solution.
The Nano-ITX and really small Mini-ITX boxes all relied on laptop parts. That was why I did not use them.
As for the OS, I am trying out ubuntu. I started with xubuntu for the lower memory load, but it proved to be disagreeable in other ways. So I went over to ubuntu, the parent of xubuntu, to see if that would help.
I am not completely unfamiliar with LINUX, having another ubuntu machine I never look at, and having set up and managed BSD servers in the past. Well, when I started in LINUX, you still had to get Slackware Tape Archives. I remember 1.3 in particular. But that did not last long for me because OS/2 did what I needed with less hassles. I then hit LINUX again around the Redhat 5.1 days, and even have the books and disks for that around somewhere. But at work I went over to BSD for mail filters running Postfix, so I was more of a command line user than anything else.
Though I did use Mepis to simulate user activity on networks because it was free, and I did not want to buy a bunch of Windows copies for load test machines. Windows would have wasted my budget!
Frankly, I was not too impressed with the torrent clients I had available. I like having my completed torrents auto-moved but still seeded, so I know what is done, and what is not. I used to use ZipTorrent for that, and after that project grew really stale, moved to micro torrent (uTorrent)
So in the end, I loaded uTorrent under wine to get me what I wanted, but it is not integrating too well with the web browser links. Firefox does nothing, and Konqueror downloads the torrent, but does not pass it very well. I think I can get Konqueror working because it seems to be some sort of a permissions issue, but that will take a little time.
With samba I can get the files on and off the system with no real issues. Under xubuntu it did not want to keep the file names intact, and since CAPS are important to torrents, I was not happy. I fixed that, but then there were all sorts of permissions issues. So I went to ubuntu, and it did not have the same config tools. So I ended up looking up some howto on samba, added a few lines to the conf to make a public folder, and restarted the service. It then worked great!
The problem with xubuntu was probably because I did not start looking for a howto from the word go. Once I found the one at
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edgy for ubuntu I was much happier.
In the end, if this gives me issues, I'll see if I still have a 2000 tag somewhere. If so, 2000 should have a reduced system load, work on the ELAN chip, and let me use the programs I am used to. But otherwise, I'll leave things as they are.
And that is my power saving torrent box.
I'll keep watching things on this machine, so my load will go up the few hours this things is on. Still, the other 16 to 20 hours a day I'll be using far less electricity!
Topic: Less Power (in a good way) (Read 1914 times)