low power linux PC?

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Sun Apr 6 23:04:07 EDT 2008


On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 10:07 PM, Peter Dobratz <peter at dobratz.us> wrote:
> Is there anything out there that can run Linux, have a
> few 250 GB or greater hard drives, and run on around 50 Watts or less?

  I suspect the hard drives will be pushing things.  Figure 15 watts
per disk.  Three disks -- without anything else -- will then consume
basically all of your 50 watt power budget.  But you can have them
power-down when not in use, brining your long-term average power
consumption down quite a bit.

  That leaves the rest of the system, and solutions in this area are
plentiful these days.  Some possibilities:

Various vendors have all sorts of bity-boxes with USB ports.   You
could use one of those, and attach external USB hard disks.  Koolu
(http://koolu.com/) is one big name -- it claims to use <10 watts.
LinkSys has all sorts of crap that might fit the bill.  See
http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware for a list of other possible
devices.

Soekris (http://www.soekris.com/): While targeted mainly at
flash-based storage, some of their SBC (single-board computer) designs
have parallel IDE, and all are very low power.

Mini-ITX motherboards are often lower-power designs.  I've seen
mention of models with at least four SATA ports.

-- Ben


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