Anyone Try Lenovo Tiny for SageTv Server

[Electronicbuff]

I'm trying to lower my electric bill. I put a meter on my old Windows XP computer and it is often burning near 300 watts. Way too much with today's rates running 24-7.

Has anyone tried using one of those Tiny form (low power drawing) computers?

I've been looking at the Lenovo M700 Tiny and the M900 Tiny which only pulls 68 watts under load. I would add an external hard drive and connect via USB 3.0 which will pull some power but I'm hoping someone could advise.

I think its time to retire the 300 watt Windows XP unit.

[Denali]

My previous XP based system used Foxconn 865G7MF-SH & PENTIUM D 948 @ 3.2GHz motherboard with 2GB and a GFORCE 7600GS video and it used over 150 watts. The rebuild in my signature comes it at 50 watts using integrated video.

[dgeezer]

I recently built a low power and cheap desktop and server. It draws between 14 and 20 watts when running windows 10. My desktop requirements are fairly minimal. I run Quickbooks, spreadsheets and a browser mostly. Here's my setup:

ASRock dc powered motherboard: Mini ITX DDR3 1066 N3150DC-ITX
16GB Ram Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3L
250GB SSD: Samsung 850 EVO - 250GB

I originally installed this in an old tower case I had lying around the basement but then I broke down and bought this case;
Antec ISK 600M Black

I also moved a 2tb WD Red drive into this box from my old pc. My original cost, before the case, was about $285.00.

I also bought a laptop power adapter to power this computer since it doesn't use a conventional power supply. Overall I've been very happy with this small and quiet pc. I use 2 hdhomerun tuners so I didn't need any pci or pci-e slots to run SageTV. I am able to run comskip on this pc while recording.

This was a truly simple pc to put together since the CPU is already installed on the motherboard. It's just 4 screws to hold it in the case, install the ram, the ssd and the hard drive. I've been running a <cough>unactivated</cough> copy of windows 10 since March.....

[wayner]

I believe that more recent Intel CPUs are way better at throttling down when they don't need a lot of horsepower. This can pull your power consumption way down.

[dgeezer]

I moved my kill-a-watt to my unraid server today to see what it draws.

This is a couple year old lenovo core i-3 2130 tower which used to run windows 8.1 but now runs unraid. It's running the SageTV docker as well as several other dockers such as the plex server. I plan to switch to using the SageTV docker as my main SageTV device since it has proved to be very stable.

I currently have 2 6tb wd red drives installed. The power draw when relatively idle is 37 watts. I started a download, which uses both drives since I don't have a cache drive installed yet, and started a movie on Kodi and the power usage jumped up to 40 watts.

Most everything I read on the unraid forums made me think that the celeron J3160 wouldn't be up to the task of running unraid. I still wish that I had tried it since it would have cut my power usage in half.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by dgeezer

Most everything I read on the unraid forums made me think that the celeron J3160 wouldn't be up to the task of running unraid. I still wish that I had tried it since it would have cut my power usage in half.

I would think you could have gotten away with a celeron... IF you are not doing any on the fly transcoding. SageTV would likely run fine, and a cache drive would help. I think Plex would be the biggest problem on a low powered machine. The docker containers and unRAID itself is pretty efficient... but on the fly transcoding is the killer (I think).

[BobPhoenix]

Also skip the second parity drive and the Celeron would have been fine. Add the 2nd parity drive and unRAID needs more power and your Celeron might slow down the parity checks some.