DIY Nas Project Kick Off

As you can see in my recent posts, I've been thinking about how much power electronic junk around my house consumes. The reason is because my MacPro is running out of hard drive space and consuming over 200 watts while idling as the house file, iTunes, print, and Time Machine backup server. It goes to sleep after 20 minutes of inactivity, but I'm not satisfied. I want to replace the MacPro with an extremely expandable energy sipping home file and media server which could possibly double as a DVR backend with MythTV. If all goes well, the MacPro and Tivo are sold on Craigslist to the highest bidder and I'm left with a single machine consuming less than 60 watts while idle and money in my pocket.

Incredibly Efficient Power Supplies Coming

I've been researching PC equipment to build the cheapest, fastest, and most efficient DIY NAS device possible. It looks like I'm going to want to wait a while on the power supply. My system shouldn't need more than a 300 watt supply. Check out the specs on this reference design for a 250 watt supply from NXP. If you spend some time thumbing around on 80plus.org comparing efficiency curves, you'll find those are incredible numbers. Almost 93% efficient at 20% load! That is insanely good.

The application notes for building these supplies came out 8 days ago so it is probably still a few months before we see some products.

7 Watts

My sleeping MacPro with 6 gigs of fully buffered dimms, 4 hard drives, and 4 cores consumes only 7 watts of power. This is really amazing to me because it goes to sleep instantly and wakes almost instantly. It doesn't appear to be dumping ram to the hard drive so the ram is being refreshed. 7 watts? Really? That's low, low, low. An AppleTV's "sleep" mode is twice that!

How Much Power Does a Sleeping MacPro Consume?

I just measured it with a Kill A Watt. Take a guess in my poll to the right. No cheating by looking online!

Fix WinXP Search Within Files of Unknown Type

I just had the lovely experience of searching for a string with in vhdl files in a directory on Windows XP only to have it report nothing matching when there were about a dozen files matching.

I fixed it with the following Microsoft support article:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309173

Only the last method worked for me:
"Network administrators can configure this setting by modifying the registry. To do this, set the FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions DWORD value to 1 in the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex"
Be careful in that registry!