I have a pair of set-top box PCs I’ve been using as always-on servers. I used them because they’re silent, but lately I’ve been thinking about power consumption. They were pretty good when I bought them in 2006 and 2008, but there’s much better stuff available now. I spent £60 on a Raspberry Pi and some supporting bits; given that it uses roughly a tenth the power of one of the set-top boxes it will have paid for itself in about two months.
While reorganising everything I also decommissioned an old Netgear switch which was likely costing £100 a year to run. Maybe it’s time you looked in your networking cupboard too!
Yes, the raspberry is great and you can build a quite capable home server out of it, which needs 6 watts only.
My setup is described here: https://btux1984.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/build-your-own-6-watts-home-server-using-an-raspberry-pi/
Maybe its an inspiration for someone.
I use a VIA Nano X2 system instead: dual core, gigabit, hardware AES/SHA acceleration and the whole system draws ~10W in normal operation(which includes a HDD). Much more practical and power efficient than the Pi :)
That looks pretty nice. What distro did you use?