This is a longer-term up­date on the state of my home serv­er. You can read more about it in these 1 2 3 4 5 post­s.

Not much has changed in it, to be hon­est.

Hard­ware's the same as in the past, ev­ery­thing is work­ing fine. I have a good back­up of the serv­er us­ing what I de­scribed here and I have ac­tu­al­ly test­ed it. I can bring it back up in un­der half an hour, which is ok.

I am con­sid­er­ing get­ting a bet­ter USB hub, be­cause the one it's us­ing now is pret­ty slow for the stor­age. Not slow enough that I can no­tice but slow­er than it could be.

I may re­do the case be­cause I have learned a lot about mak­ing cas­es and can do a bet­ter one :-)

What could im­prove?

• Some things are tricky to de­ploy in ARM
• Some of my ad-hoc im­ple­men­ta­tions are clunky
• I am not re­al­ly us­ing the whole me­dia serv­er im­ple­men­ta­tion all that much

How hap­py am I with it? Su­per hap­py. I use it ev­ery day, it's re­li­able and ba­si­cal­ly main­te­nance-free.

Just ran in­to this video where the host ex­plains how he's us­ing a home serv­er and how he made it use un­der 23W, and the steps he took to make it qui­et and ef­fi­cien­t.

So, know­ing that our servers are not com­pa­ra­ble I want­ed to check how much pow­er my serv­er used.

Yes, my serv­er is pret­ty un­usu­al, you can read about it here: 1 2 3 4 5

First let's look at MAX­I­MUM pow­er draw for all com­po­nents.

• Com­put­er (Radxa Ze­ro): 900 mA at 5V
• HD­D: 500 mA at 5V (x2)
• Net­work USB adapter: 500 mA at 5V

There is al­so a USB 3.0 hub there but the pow­er us­age is neg­li­gi­ble, prob­a­bly be­low 100 mA at 5V.

So, the max­i­mum pow­er us­age is ~2400 mA at 5V, which is about 12 watts.

When more or less idle, mea­sured with a USB thingie, the Radxa Ze­ro us­es ~200 mA and the Net­work adapter nev­er seems to go above 150 mA, so a low­er bound is maybe about ~1300 mA, or about 6 watts.

And then there's cost. My whole sys­tem (which does ev­ery­thing I want nice­ly AFAIC­S) costs un­der 100 dol­lars. And my pow­er bill from it is, if it runs full throt­tle ALL THE TIME (it does­n't) ... $87

Mind you, that's 87 ar­gen­tini­an pe­sos, or be­tween 50 and 25 USD cents, de­pend­ing on your ex­change rate.

I think I'll man­age.