I do think it can achieve that while waiting for network packets (see e.g. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested).
But in terms of money savings it would rarely make sense, as you need to make it back during the time you run the system. If we assume 6 years lifetime then it would only make sense to pay $120 more. But yes, I’d also go for a system that runs regular Linux :)
I don’t have one (and I don’t want one), but Anandtech measured the M1 version at 4.2W in idle. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested I think you can also get that from other Mini PCs (e.g. NUCs).
I would disagree with idle power not being important for a home server. Most of the time, your system will be doing very little and wait for something to happen. I also don’t think a typical server has a display attached. Wolfang explains this quite well: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=94&si=zyjEKNX8yA51uNSf
I don’t have a Mac Mini, but for always-on systems, the idle power consumption can become quite significant.
If you pay 0.30$/kWh, running your old 100W gaming PC all the time would cost you 263$ per year. My NAS is 45$ per year…
It also depends on what you need/want from the machine. The Mac Mini doesn’t have any HDDs and can’t run a regular Linux distro, for example.
No, they’re almost entirely unrelated. Almost all CPUs will idle close to 0 W (with correctly working drivers). The main idle power contribution comes from the mainboard and other devices (e.g. disks). The Mini PCs you mentioned should have a very low total idle power, probably below 10W.
Check out Wolfgang on YouTube, he has some great videos on the topic: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM
I’ve also recently built my own NAS and I’ve gone through similar considerations. One of my mayor decisions was not to use btrfs because it’s not recommended for Raid Z1/Raid 5. With that, I landed on ZFS and TrueNAS Scale. Note that RAID expansion should be landing in both very soon.
Things with TrueNAS were pretty easy, very quick, and everything worked nicely. However, I noticed that it was constantly accessing the disks and preventing them from spinning down. I really wanted to keep the power consumption low (<20 W idle), so I eventually decided to just go with Vanilla Debian + ZFS. I can recommend that if you want to tinker with things yourself. Otherwise, I’d recommend TrueNAS Scale.
As for migration, you might be able to create a degraded pool initially, copy over the data, and add the parity disk last. Raid expansion would ofc also help there…
What kind of junk energy is there to harvest from a car (in meaningful amounts)? I guess breaking is the obvious answer, but that’s already covered by regenerative breaking. Most car-based energy harvesting systems seem to employ speedbumps that clearly take useful (kinetic) energy away from the car (probably at a very poor efficiency).
How would a turbine that takes energy from the air current generated by a passing car decrease the energy of the car?
Not sure where you got that idea from, but how would that generate a meaningful amount of energy? It seems very unlikely that such a system would ever recover the energy spent on its construction.
Sure, but those are completely different approaches. Dams have the advantage that they have a much larger capture area for water and that they can accelerate the water beyond the 10 m/s terminal velocity of raindrops.
Raindrop energy harvesting is a rubbish idea. The raindrops simply don’t have a meaningful amount of energy to begin with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907674
This “new law” was passed more than a year ago… But, it’s still a step in the right direction.
It’s an Apple Silicon Mac Mini. Do you have a particular reason to think the new one is less efficient?