Computers

Well being an IT Support person i bring it home. I try not to but it happens.. (Dont ask the wife as she will tell you iv got more computers than Shoes. Well we all know thats not possible.)

Anyway for a house hold of 2 we have a few.

Main Computer. (270 Watts at desktop 400 playing games.)

Normaly used to play games and edit Photos on.

Q6600 under volted to 1volt instead of 1.26 volts.
8Gb of RAM
160Gb intel SSD
1TB Maxtor green disk
Geforce 260GTX GPU
2 x 19" LCD Screens.
Watercooled

Other Kit
Apple TV
Wii
Xbox 360

Laptops.

Advent (Robs)
HP (Sarahs)

Servers

Windows Home Server.

I bought a copy of Windows home server as i needed a way of backing up laptops with out having to worry about doing it, also needed a way of allowing Sarah to look at all our photos that we have taken. I had already got a share on the main computer but in order to save some energy this was normaly off when we wanted to look at the photos so decided to get a home server to do all of the above. I also wanted a way to protect its self incase of a disk failure. The Windows home server does all of this and more.(Its Windows 2003 SBS but they dont tell you that, It does not have exchange or SQL etc, Although you can make it a Domain controler)

Well iv moved all our photos on it all 200Gb of them and also have a synctoy copy of my itunes directory on it as well. 1Tb of music and tv stuff that streams to the Apple TV in the living room. Also we both have our own home area as such so you can store files on it and then use them on another computer..

The best thing is the Backup. It takes a full copy of your computer Say XP but if you have another computer running XP it does not make 2 Copies of the same files it uses the first ones only files that are different take up any space. Also to restore the computer to simple put in a boot cd and boot tell it the computer you would like to restore and wait.. once rebooted its like your computer was never broken eg Disk failure. Also WIFE friendy.

Hardware.

Chose a Via C-7 over the intel Atom at the time the Intel boards only had 3 Sata ports and 1 PCI slot and 100Meg Network the C-7 had PCI express 16x and 1x 1GB and 1x100 Meg.

Via C-7 - 1.8Ghz 2Gb
2x Icebox = 4HDD enclousures each. Holding. 2 x Maxtor 1Tb Green disks 2 x 1TB Seagate disks (one has failed as of 20/11/2009) 2 x Maxtor 250Gb Disks 2 x Maxtor 500Gb disk
Clocks down to 800Mhz when not in use also the HDDs power down after 5 mins. just need some way of slowing the fans as its noisy does not seem to support speedfan etc also most of the noise is from the HDD enclousures..

IPCOP firewall.
Via somthing C-3 I think. 800Mhz 1 Gb RAM 10 Gb disk. Running IPCOP (looking to move away from this to maybe smoothwall)
Also looking at changing the HDD to a SSD or a compact flash card.

08/2009 Removed the PicoPSU and joined the Windows Home Server and the IPCOP boards to the same PSU.. Guide to follow. Means that the PSU can run more in the effecient range it was suppost to as both boards as VERY low power.. When all disks are idle and spun down it draws around 80Watts (Needs checking again)

Saving energy on the servers

Well both are set to spin down the Harddisk after 5 mins, the Windows home server is set to proccessor power save eg clocking down the cpu when it can. Both servers share the same PSU.
Both computers have all the unused excessories turned off EG Sound cards/ USB apart from 2 / Printer ports / Firewire ports. This saves a few watts per port and adds up.

Looking at doing.

Moving both servers to VMs on either EXSi or Hyper-v to share the same Hardware.
Shutting down the Windows Home server at night to save more power.