The Green Angle

Beyond the space savings and performance increase, I also achieved another thing I was after: reduced power consumption. I don't consider myself a particularly hardcore "Green" person, but I do try to reduce waste wherever I can, and I knew that my power-hungry Frankenbox was wasting power.

Some things of note related to power consumption (all measures with the super-cool Kill A Watt), thanks to some help from Chris Gohlke:

• My old Frankenbox, with all the external hard drives included, used 178 watts of power at idle. That number would increase depending on what the server was doing, but since most of the time a Windows Home Server is idle, I used 178 watts as the baseline measurement.
• When I set up the new HP EX485, with the Seagate 750 GB hard drive, it was using 40 watts at idle.
• After I swapped out the Seagate drive for a single 1 TB Western Digital Green drive, it was using 36 watts at idle. That's 11% power savings from changing a single hard drive - not bad!
• After installing all four 1 TV Western Digital Green drives, the HP EX485 was using 50 watts at idle. That's 356% less power than the Frankenbox. Wow!
• Based on my real-world electricity charges of 0.076 cents per killowatt hour (kwH), over the course of a 12 month period if both servers were left on 24 hours a day, my Frankenbox would cost me $118.51 in electricity. The HP EX485 with the four 1 TB Western Digital Green drives would cost me $33.29, a savings of $85.22. Or, put more impressively, a cost savings of 71.9%.
• I can gain additional power savings by putting the server to sleep daily between certain hours. Home-built Windows Home Servers don't have this functionality.

Figure 10: The HP Windows Home Servers can be configured to shut down between certain hours.

Here's the reality check with "going green" however: replacing something that's functioning, even if it's inefficient, with a "green" equivalent rarely results in immediate savings. I'd have to run the HP EX485 for almost seven years to recoup in electricity savings what it cost me to purchase it - and that's not factoring what it would cost me to purchase the four 1 TB Western Digital Green drives. I did sell some of those external hard drives from my old server, so the profit from that help offset the cost of the new server. I donated the old Frankenbox to a family member, and gave away many of the spare internal hard drives right here on Digital Home Thoughts in contests last year.

For me, the combination of saving space, generating less noise, simplifying my setup, getting greater performance, and using less electricity made for a compelling case to switch from a custom-built Windows Home Server to an HP EX485 Windows Home Server. The addition of the Western Digital Green hard drives gave me even more storage than before, without driving up the power consumption. I'm thrilled with the way this setup works now!

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys photography, mobile devices, blogging, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, his son Logan, and his sometimes obedient dog. He thinks everyone with more than one computer should have a Windows Home Server.

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