Power draw vs hard drive price drop

NotAGolf · 20 Jan 2012 at 17:47

Bit of a random one this.

I'm in the market for a USB hard drive for my media player. I'm looking at a portable 1TB (so around the £90 mark). Obviously this price is a lot higher than it used to be due to the cost of hard drives rocketing up a few months ago.

In the mean time, I'm using my desktop PC to stream to my media player.

Now my question is, which of these options is going to be cheaper:
- Having my PC running for around 4-5 hours every night, and waiting for the price of hard drives to drop.
- Splashing out the extra cash on a hard drive now and saving the cash in the long run by not having my PC on as much.

My PC is a AMD X4 3.2GHz, 4GB ram, gtx 460, 2 hard drives and a blu ray drive. According to a couple of power calculators, that's around 400W at 90% load, so it'll obviously be less when it's pretty much idling when streaming.

How do I go about converting this into a usable figure for how much my computer is costing me in electricity per week for example?

RomanNose · 20 Jan 2012 at 17:52

400w is 0.4kwh
0.4kwh * 5=2kwh
Times that by your unit price and the number of days you are using it for.

Le_Petit_Lapin · 20 Jan 2012 at 18:02

Mines on 24/7 and its only about £30 a month, they really don't use a whole lot while idle its a bit less than half of full load wattage. Electric rates in Northern Ireland are higher than mainland UK though, so it'll be less than that for you.

I connect to it from work to grab files, its just handier than mucking around with USB sticks, dropbox etc.

Even if you were fully loaded, at all times, 24/7, right through the month, and assuming your electric there is 13p incl vat (I dont know mainland rates, mines 17p incl. VAT IIRC) it'll cost you:

0.5 (power usage in KwH) x 24 (Hours in day) x 30 (days in Month) x 0.13 (Price per KwH) = £46.80 a month.

NotAGolf · 20 Jan 2012 at 18:13

Right, so my unit price works out at ~14p.

So 14p x 7 days x 2kWh = £1.96 a week. And that's at 90% load, which is not the case. That's a lot cheaper than I thought.

Looks like I'll wait for hard drives to come down in price and get a bit bigger then

.

Thanks guys.

Le_Petit_Lapin · 20 Jan 2012 at 18:15

Yeah, its cheap enough isn't it. I do believe that the other half leaving the water heater on all the damn time actually uses more electricity.

daver · 20 Jan 2012 at 18:19

1TB externals can be had for about 70 atm, perhaps less if you wait on a special offer

Fourstar · 20 Jan 2012 at 18:22

mpledge52 said:
My PC is a AMD X4 3.2GHz, 4GB ram, gtx 460, 2 hard drives and a blu ray drive. According to a couple of power calculators, that's around 400W at 90% load, so it'll obviously be less when it's pretty much idling when streaming.

My machine (Phenom II x6, 2 sticks ram, GTX 460, 2 HDD, 1 SSD, DVD drive, 3 case fans) draws 100W at the plug when sitting idle viewing the desktop. Under Linux 150W as I could never get the 460 running in powersave mode without crashes.

NotAGolf · 20 Jan 2012 at 19:37

daver said:
1TB externals can be had for about 70 atm, perhaps less if you wait on a special offer

. Maybe for desktop externals, but I want a nice small portable one!

I want a 2TB drive really as my 1TB in my pc is full, but I think it'l be while before we see portable 2TB for a reasonable price.

DragonQ · 20 Jan 2012 at 21:25

My file server only uses about 30-35 W when idle (which is most of the time), which is about 25 kWh per month. Since we easily burn through our "expensive" units, it only contributes to our "cheap" units. Thus the cost is only about £2.50 per month.