Seriously — laptop disks in a server?
It might sound strange, but laptop disks actually have a lot of
advantages for an always-on home server: they use less energy, run
very quiet, and take up little space. Although you pay roughly
double the price per gigabyte compared to 3.5" disks, you pay less
for electricity, and thus save money in the long run.
I seriously doubt the power savings over the lifespan of a hard drive (5-6 years) are greater than paying twice as much per gigabyte. After all, if they were, Backblaze themselves would be using 2.5" disks.
In any event, the disks in a home storage server are going to be spending most of their time spun down, and drawing very little power.
So, figure the drives are mostly idle, but spinning, you would be $4/year for the 3.5" and $1/year for the 2.5", but you might need twice as many of the 2.5" drives to get the storage if you really need 2TB, but if you don't, then it will be 10 years to recover the savings on electric, but that is your own fault for not figuring out how to spin down your drives, and not understanding opportunity cost, you can invest that $30 you saved and make $1.5/year forever, even after your drives detect the end of their warranty and fail in 3 years.
[1] Don't buy this drive. Something went horribly wrong in WD QC land. 1/3 of these that I bought failed their S.M.A.R.T. conveyance tests right out of the box and more failed in the first few months. The reviews at NewEgg suggest this is not an isolated experience. But, they are the ones I'm saddled with and know their data. Mine live out their lives happily spun down but for a few minutes a day and are closely monitored and mirrored, so their admittedly high risk of failure is acceptable.
Says 11.2ct/kWh in the US per 2011 (close enough to the $0.12/kWh cited elsewhere in this thread).
$/kWh $/W year
--------------------------------
USA 11.20 0.98
Germany 30.66 2.69
Belgium 11.43 1.00
Netherlands 34.70 3.04
UK 18.59 1.63
You can calculate prices for other countries by looking it up on the table on Wikipedia and using Google Calculator to convert to dollar per Watt year:
Additionally, I propose that we redefine the name for the unit of "dollar per Watt year" as one Belgium.
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Aside: is Wolfram Alpha ever useful for anything? Every once in a while I think of a question that would be perfect for WA to answer, and every time it disappoints me and I have to get the data from Wikipedia or Google, when WA could have also done the cost-per-year conversion for me straight away. This time it failed because as soon as you mention "energy price" WA assumes "US energy price" and tells me it has "no data" for the US energy price in Europe (which is technically correct, of course).
The variation is amazing. While most of the prices are around the average you mention, some are quite low, with a decent number of people paying under 4 cents/kWh. On the other side of things, on place in Alaska pays over 100 cents/kWh, and a lot of others are well above the highest figure on your table. For somebody who buys power from the Middle Kuskokwim Elec Coop Inc, 1W costs $9/year.
For what it's worth, your figures for the power draw of the WD20EARs seem to be too low -- Storage Review% measures R/W 6.5W-7.1W, idle 6.3W (odd) -- while the 2.5in drive figures are about right, but maybe a bit on the high side.
And your rule of thumb for energy prices doesn't work in Germany (and possibly other countries), where 1W of electricity for one year will go for about USD 2.50, if not more.
The numbers I used are from WD's spec sheet. The Storage Review discrepancy is too large to easily explain. Either something is wrong with that test, or WD has posted fictitious numbers.
The $1/year/watt rule is for the United States with a $0.12/kwHr cost. Even in the US the cost varies wildly, but just getting people within one order a magnitude on their electricity reasoning is worthwhile.
I had no idea German electric rates were so high, but it does help explain why large solar power projects are feasible there despite the less than exciting insolation.
I agree that the discrepancy is unusually high. The idle power consumption for other drives reviewed by them is lower and more in line with expectations.
Everything is more expensive in Germany, energy in particular. A rather high VAT (19%) in addition to taxes specific to energy, including gasoline and eletricity, cause this. Part of this is due to a conscious political decision to encourage energy conservation and investment into renewable energy; in fact, of the 0.2 EUR/kWh, about 0.03 EUR are a flat tax/allocation towards renewable energy. This has spurred photovoltaics, but particularly wind energy, which in 2010 accounted for 6.2% of the total electricity.
Just for fun, here are some power consumption figures (based on data from storagereview.com%):
Idle power draw (3.5in drives): around 5W
Load power draw (3.5in drives): around 6.5W
Spinup power draw (3.5in drives): around 15W
Idle power draw (Samsung 2.5in): 0.58W
Load power draw (Samsung 2.5in): 2.53W
Spinup power draw (Samsung 2.5in): 3.89W
Of course spun-down (as opposed to idling but spinning) HDDs draw far less power. I found a 2008 report# which measured spun down power, and it ranges widely but 10 to 20% of idle seems to be about right. (Not sure if there's a 2.5in drive among those they tested; I only skimmed the report.)
If you disregard the spun-down thing for a moment, you get about 4W savings all the time, ie. 20W for the full array. That's about 175 kWh over a year. Assuming 0.20 EUR/kWh (which seems fairly typical for Germany), that's 35 EUR you save, per year. I guess that number can serve as an upper bound for the savings you can expect, chances are it'll be much lower: not a full array, 50% or more time spent spun-down, your energy prices might be lower.
The other advantages he mentioned (reduced heat, vibration, and as a consequence noise) would outweigh the price difference for a "living room" storage server.
I certainly wouldn't want multiple 3.5" HDDs in my living room...
The disks are quiet, but the cooling fans they often require are not (at least that's what I've learnt from having a Drobo with four 3.5" disks in my living room).
yes, that is true, the disks will run fine without. airflow is mostly for any heat generated by the sheeva and port-multiplier boards .... just to be on the safe side.
well, it partly depends on the local electricity rate you are paying .... which is probably a little higher here in europe than in the states, i guess. haven't really calculated the amortization time yet, though.
Put a second Ethernet port on it and let me use it as a NAS/Router box. That would be really cool. I'd like a NAS, but I'd also desperately like to ditch my DSL router.
What's the average (idle) power draw like? The PSU is rated for 20W (output, I guess). This seems to be just enough, since current 2.5" drives draw up to 4W when starting (are you doing a staggered spinup?). For a single drive, idle consumption should be below 1W. So I guess idle power should be way below 10W? More like 5W? That sounds good for an always-on appliance.
At those loads, I'm sure the system is virtually silent, particularly given the humongous fan. The fan grill looks like it would block a huge amount of the airflow, but I guess it's not much of an issue. Does the fan pull air in or blow it out? It would be really nice if everything could go no-moving-parts during idle periods, ie. fan turned off and all HDDs spun down.
Sadly, even with a second ethernet port, I probably won't be in the market, it's just too expensive for me. But I'm sure you'll be able to sell a few batches to the MBP toting internet nouveaux riches in Berlin. :) As a bonus, it's small enough to bring along to the Wifi equipped coffee shop. SCNR.
Sorry, but that isn't saying much. Average power consumption doing what? Or is that range meant to be the minimum and maximum draw, ie. idle power draw 10W, loaded power draw 20W? I don't see why the device should draw 10W with idle disks, much less with spun-down disks.
Regardless of whether this is the "best" solution for everyone, I'm excited to see people trying these ideas, open sourcing their designs and creating space for there to even be a discussion like this.
Pardon the cheesy line, but it's a move from just reviewing hardware to being able to actually revise it if you don't like something the original designer decided to do.
Then some sort of 1 to 5 eSATA / SATA multiplier like this - http://www.amazon.com/5-Port-Port-SATA-II-Multiplier-SiI4726... . I didn't know these even existed until I was trying to figure out how you attached the 5 drives to 1 eSATA port. I'm guessing this is powered by running a connection over from the Sheevaplug
120 MM Fan
Then all of the metalwork and clips. I like the design on that.
This definitely something I am going to build to decommission the ATOM nettop I am currently using to share a stack of external drives.
The design is nice, but why buy this thing for €429 excl. disks if you can buy a Synology DS211 with 2x2GB for the same price including the great diskstation software? Ok, the design is nice, but hey, it's a NAS, you can just go ahead and hide it somewhere, there's no real need for it to be on a desk or in a living room.
I stopped being interested when I came across the price. I'm running two Intel SS4200's with FreeNAS x64. Cost of each was 129.99 last year (closeout price) + ~30ish bucks for 2GB DDR2 mem (they charge more for last-gen mem) + ~20ish for a usb serial adapter + cabling ==> roughly 180 for a DIY server. Only other things needed are a 4gig flash drive for the OS, and hard drives.
The drives can be swapped without any tools. My only regret was the 2GB ram limit due to the outdated chipset -- it scares me a little that i'm running ZFS with less than the 6GB recommended minimum FreeNAS recommends, but I'd rather use ZFS than worry about RAID bitrot/etc.
I'm with you. Infrant ReadyNAS, LaCie 4big Quadra, etc., there are a lot of really reliable and known high performance (needed for high volumes of DSLR images or 1080P video) chassis designs out there in the 430 Euro USD 600 price range.
Yes, and many of those devices come setup with very reliable RAID without any special configuration by the user. Running 5 1TB disks with no redundancy on standard Ubuntu ext4 is like pleading for data loss.
With the Evercube, I pay double for 2.5" storage and have no redundancy? 5TB of storage but only 512MB for the OS? At those prices the OS storage should be at least 1GB so that users have more options. Standard Ubuntu Minimal requires a lot of manual configuration (no room for GUI in 512MB), especially if you want network sharing and RAID. Then, because it's Ubuntu I can guarantee that there will be major changes in the configuration process at the next version upgrade.
Compare this with ZFS on BSD/Solaris which exports NFS shares with a single command. Upgrade process is predictable and requires little intervention.
Or compare with my setup: Arch Linux with ZFS-FUSE in RAIDZ2 configuration: 4x2TB HDD = 7TB of storage that can survive dual drive failure. And just the Evercube shell without drives costs much more than my setup!
Whoever buys the Evercube will be looking for a pretty solution instead of a technically solid one. Ubuntu 9.04 is outdated and no longer supported. To spend this money and go this far on design on hardware, and then fall so flat on software is really disappointing.
That was my immediate thought upon seeing it. Those vent holes on the front in particular. It's a simple design and seems close to looking good, but it's missing the machining know-how. It would look like a dumpster next to a MacBook Pro.
This is awesome, but totally overpriced. It's a shame, because this is exactly the sort of hardware people need to start using in the home. I suspect the case is slightly overengineered - an extruded aluminium case may have even given a better finish. Also, Ubuntu on a NAS? Overkill?
That's a pretty unique interior setup. I built my own living room server that has comparable power usage (uses ~20 W from the wall in practice) with more traditional computer parts. I'm so used to the x86/x86-64 options of Intel, AMD, and Via that I have never considered building my own system with something other than x86.
With low power/heat/noise as importance factors, one's x86 options are very limited. I went with an Intel Atom for my own build, which resulted in very limited choices for motherboards as far as number of SATA ports, hardware RAID controllers (for redundancy), etc.
I am very interested now to see what options I might have now to build my own ARM server.
I just setup my Tonidoplug yesterday (based on the same basic technology from what I understand). Primarily as a backup server, but the sharing between pc, laptop and mobiles is definitely cool: http://www.tonidoplug.com/tonido_plug.html
not to ruin the spirit of this post/project, but if you're looking into a low power, inexpensive home server why not consider an old laptop with a few USB drives?
With an old laptop you get battery backup (UPS) for free. Bonus points if you find a super cheap one with a broken display.
Disclaimer: I've been doing this for years and it rocks.
This would be sweet for running CrashPlan on. Are there other SAN solutions that work with CrashPlan? I looked about 2 years ago and didn't find a good option (to me, good = I don't have to leave my computer on all the time).
For things like this, I suggest S3+CloudFront. I don't know how well it compares to other CDNs in terms of cost-at-scale and performance-worldwide, but it is very good and can be set up without a sales process.
In any event, the disks in a home storage server are going to be spending most of their time spun down, and drawing very little power.