If you’ve been to my place, you know my basement sounds like a hair dryer. I have 5 machines running 24/7 most of the time. Noise and electric bills finally got to me, so I picked up a Kill-A-Watt to track power usage, per machine. What I found out is that having those machines on constantly accounts for 1/3 of my electric bill, almost 330 kilowatt-hours per month.

The 2 biggest hits towards power usage were # of drives, and processor type. More drives = more motors to spin. The most power-hungry drives were the Ultra320 SCSI drives, followed by PATA drives and finally SATAs. Processor power usage seemed to follow a slightly different curve, with a 2nd gen P4 using the most power, followed by P3s, Pentium Ds, and the Core 2 Duo.

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Tags: atom, electricity, green, power