I'm completely new to this field and I apologise if this is the wrong forum. I am looking to buy 3x Dell PowerEdge 1850 and 1x PowerEdge 2850 servers for home use. However, I am worried about their power consumption. In layman's terms, how much would running these servers impact my power bill?
Thanks in advance :)
Update: I'm going to be using it for a web server and other minor tasks, nothing especially intensive.
2 Answers
I moved to a Poweredge 2900 end of last year running (2) CPU, (8) Sticks Mem, (8) Drives, Dual NICS, and (2) Power Supplies, and many standard size plug & play fan modules. It pulls about 350 watts @ idle. Plus it is a noisy thing and the heat needs actively mitigated via a blower because it is not placed in an open room and shares its closet with other electronics. In the end this translates to about $20/mo in my area @ 24/7 run time @ approx $0.08/kWh + 50 watts for the blower ($3/mo).
BUT, it has redundant everything (not literally), even memory can be setup in redundant mode. The drives do not need individual cables as they are in trays in the front eliminating problems from the tangled mess of wires, and everything except the drives are enterprise grade in terms of reliability. So I trade $20/mo power cost for uptime, simplicity, and reliability.
The backup server however is currently the old server in a normal midtower and it has less drives (5) 3.5" with many wires and fans and is a mess to work on. The cables need to be just right or you get connection errors and it makes replacing fans and drives a formidable tast. And of course their is very little redundancy besides drives and controllers. In short, it fails more and is more difficult to maintain. But it cost about $5 to run /mo.
I fight paying the cost every month a bit but to outsource would cost more so it helps with the heat 8 months out of the year. And this is to run many services for home and business including web and self served cloud that get used every day many times a day by many people and we have too much to do besides worry if the thing is up and running.
IMO, if it were for home use only I would move to a low power setup. I would recommend an ITX setup running Linux. Servers like you have are power hungry and it will cost you.
Best recommendation for that age to reduce power consumption is REDUCE THE NUMBER OF COMPONENTS IN USE. The memory of that age consumes a lot of wattage, so reduce the sticks to a minimum, run 1 CPU, use the "L" series Xeons, run 1-2 larger drives instead of more smaller drives. The power supplies do not really matter but using only one will use slightly less. Even after all of this expect to use 200-250 watts of power at idle; maybe a tad less; this translates in my area to about $13/mo.
Wish I would have seen this question 4 months ago.
Just like with desktop PCs, the simple answer is; "it depends".
The power supplies will be rated for a peak current draw, so you could work out the theoretical maximum power output if they were supplying that current on a 24/7 basis, but the reality is they won't (or shouldn't) be.
The components inside the server - number and type of hard drives, number and type of the CPUs etc - and their usage will dictate the amount of power being used.
For example, if you are running some kind of heavy calculation (Bitcoin mining for example) that will be continuously thrashing the drives and processors the power usage will be greater than if you're using them as a low-use file server where everything is sitting idle most of the time.
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