Mac Mini/XBMC - was krankshaft format solution found

[John Rennie]

>Dont tell me you also run your ratsauce file server off a macmini as well:)

It's worse than that :-) hawkstuff.ratsauce.co.uk is an Acer Revo 3600
i.e. an Atom 230 (1.6GHz single core!). It runs Windows Server 2003,
and if all you're doing is web sites this isn't very CPU intensive so
even though it's a low powered machine it works fine. It's located at
a local ISP's datacentre, and the reason for choosing the Revo was
that the ISP charges depend on the power consumption (which is
reasonable since they have to pay the electricity bill :-).

I have a home server, but I don't use it for the web site because my
ADSL line isn't fast enough. If/when BT bring their fibreoptic
rollout to Chester I might bring the site back to my house.

My home server is a Dell Poweredge 440 with a Perc5/i disk controller
and four 2TB disks. The power consumption is 99W so it costs about
£100 to run 24x7. I keep my 2,300 albums (35 years collecting!) on
that server and play them through the network on the Mac Mini. For
comparison, it costs £340/year to host the Hawkstuff server, though I
share it with a friend and only pay half.

BTW the Mac Mini has a power consumption of 19W at idle, and this
rises to about 30W when playing a 720p video. Allegedly the new Mac
Minis are even lower power consumption. This is only slightly more
than an Ion2/Intel Atom based system. To play 1080p you probably need
the newer Minis with a NVIDIA chipset. Mine is a 1.66GHz Core Duo
(Core Due not Core2 Duo) and it will play some 1080p videos as long
as the bitrate isn't too high.

The main reason I've stuck with the Mac Mini is that the quality of
the audio circuit, i.e. the DAC, is very good. It's noticably better
than my Revo. Having said that, if you have a home cinema system with
a digital audio connection to the amp there wouldn't be any
difference between the two. Even so I'd still keep the Mac because,
well, it's gorgeous :-)

JR


-----Original Message-----
From: BOC/Hawkwind Discussion List [mailto:BOC-L at LISTSERV.ISPNETINC.NET] On Behalf Of Jamun
Sent: 06 April 2011 17:44
To: BOC-L at LISTSERV.ISPNETINC.NET
Subject: Re: Mac Mini/XBMC - was krankshaft format solution found

Dont tell me you also run your ratsauce file server off a macmini as well:)

But that is a real question. I was thinking of doing something like you have
done with the Hawkwind boots. I am just building a very low power
consumption machine now for 365/24/7 use and wanted it to be a web server,
FTP server etc. What machine do you use, or is it hosted on a site etc etc.