Building a Green Windows Home Server

Microsoft’s The Power of Software blog has a post about Building a Green Home Server.

Building a Green Windows Home Server

And now for something a little different. So far we have focused on the energy costs of datacenters, but since patterns & practices is a development team, we obviously have a lot of team members that have, shall we say, a little hardware at home as well.

Ade Miller, our development manager, has an interesting series of posts on his blog describing his foray into building an energy efficient Windows Home Server to back up his other PCs, serve music, and act as a print server. You can read the series starting at http://www.ademiller.com/blogs/tech/2008/09/building-a-windows-home-server-choosing-the-hardware/.

I went to Ade’s site, and he has some good information.  At the end Ade asks a good question, How Green is It’? When I saw he was going to get a kill-a-watt to measure power I contacted him and told him I’d loan him my Smart Watt device.  Given Smart-Watt uses .NET and a sql express database, I knew Ade would find it much more useful to create power consumption graphs.