Dell Mini 9 as a low power (5-6w idle, 10w load) server/router

[Romir]

I couldn't find much discussion on the web about using a Mini 9 as an ultra low energy server so I bought one to look into it. As reported by others, a mini 9 uses 5-6w while idle with the screen off and a with a 100mbps network link. Add another 4w and you have the 100% load number.

 

 

While the system boots with the lcd screen removed, the vga output relies on the os drivers and settings. Selling the screen and bezel to recover nearly half of the base cost is still an option with systems that can reliably remote administrated. The oem battery is worth a good chunk too. No screen or battery is a bastardized setup, but there are certainly some niches it could fill at that low cost. Itx builds, especially with mobile components, are expensive.

 

I'm going to go ahead and replace my old domain server laptop with one of these. My mini-itx build isn't working out well for me anyway.

 

I have a couple usb 2.0 network adapters that PfSense supports, so I'll try running that too. Untangle too, once the relatively cheap Super Talent 32gb pci-e ssd arrives next week. ESX-I and Hyper-V could open up some interesting possibilities too.

 

Oh, yes it boots unRAID, has a working network adapter, and the drive is detected. One drive kind of defeats the point though. It sure looks nice booting up and at the login screen though!

[heffe2001]

For me, I'd not have the heart to cut the head off a Mini-9 to make it a low-powered server.  I'd much rather get a m-itx Atom-330 based intel board (about 79$ from Newegg), and go with a nice, small mini-itx case.  You'd get more processing power (it's a dual-core, as opposed to the Mini-9's single-core), uses standard memory, has sata ports, and is also lower power draw than a regular PC mobo (I'd have to put mine on the meter to get the power consumption, but I'm not using a green power supply on it at the moment, so it's measurements would be a bit off.  I've got mine in a jukebox-conversion project (gutted an old CD juke and replaced it with this board, and a 30g sata SSD, connected to a fairly high-powered car amp, running off a 750w power supply, sounds better than the original juke, and plays mp3's/wma's fine, with way more speed than I really needed) but I'm sure it would handle much more than I'm throwing at it.  If the n230 processor has enough horse-power, those are even lower priced (65-69).