Some guideline costs for farming based on equipment power consumption.
UK electricity price < GBP 0.12 / KWhr (May 2014)
This is 0.12 * 24 / 1000 GBP per watt per day
Or GBP 0.00288 per watt per day (CORRECTED)
Or 0.3 pence per watt per day (CORRECTED)
At a 100-200 Watt roughly for a standard (active) desktop (without screen), this is about 30-60 (CORRECTED) pence a day. So better to have a bigger disk; more farming space for roughly equal electricity cost (not so if you start adding disks though!!)
Another reason why I should deploy my NAS storage @happybeing ! I’m really curious to see how the B3 will perform as a farming device. Sorry Ive not come around to doing that yet!
@benjaminbollen looks like we’re stalled on the B3 …
B3 @Ross and @dirvine have been helping me and we got quite a long way. I’m not sure if all avenues are exhausted, but it may not be best use of their time and I don’t think I can proceed further on my own so I’m looking at alternatives (see my Farming Hardware posts under Safecoin topic).
BeagleBone boards are cheap and low power, but I’m not sure about storage for them. Beaglebone Black Rev C should ship soon but only has 4GB flash RAM, which is why I’m looking at the Odroid-U3 (about 5W) which has up to 64G flash RAM and can handle a HDD / SSD via USB2.0.
I’ve been exploring netbooks and other devices with low-power intel atom processors, then attaching external usb drives for storage. With a low-resource OS, like ubuntu xfce, etc., the speed of these is pretty good, the power usage is minimal, and they have built in battery backup (laptop battery). Most of these are dual core, run 64 bit, and can have between 2 and 4 gb ram.
There are some thin clients with same specs (sans battery) in which an internal hard drive can be installed.
Not high end processing, but from all I’ve heard @dirvine say in interviews, etc., they should be more than adequite for nodes.
Some of our CI machines on the dashboard are odroids, they seem pretty powerful. @Ross can maybe add some comment here. We have an ubuntu version we tweaked for them, when I say we I mean me and I cannot remember what I did, but we have an image that works 
@fergish I like 
hope you’ll post your findings at some point
@dirvine I was going to ask :-). I like the odroid cos its a bit beefier than the other sbcs and probably than B3, still low power, plus the option to add a USB drive. Not as cheap as beagles but maybe better farmer in the longer term?
Yes I agree, these will cope with cpu requirements later on for network wide computation.
The odroid is pretty impressive as just now it is running the same CI builds and tests as linux boxes with 6 cores and 24gb of ram and almost passing the same amount of tests - check our nightly jobs I need to explore / test how it functions purely as a stand alone vault more, but thus far I have been pleasantly surprised. Also it is very small, silent and the 24/7 uptime has not been an issue either. I am not on commission 
The B3 device has also impressed and I have not given up yet on these… I am stubborn and will return to it.
The B3 device has also impressed and I have not given up yet on these… I am stubborn and will return to it.
Very glad to hear @Ross think of it as a badge of honor!
Manipulative? Moi?
Fergish - again if you check out CI-Atom-Ubuntu on the dashboard it is a wee Atom Netbook running Ubuntu 14.04 and 1gb of memory - it copes very well 
Keep us posted with your findings.
I just bought one and put a fresh 2TB drive in it, so for sure, I’m going to give it a try too. Just haven’t gotten around to it. Maybe tonight!
@benjaminbollen see my post on building MaidSafe for B3 on the excito forum - these are up to date and Ross still looking into the compile error I’m hitting.
@happybeing .12 * .24 / 1000 GBP / w / day = GBP .00288 w / day = .3 pence / w / day. Your calculations are off by an order of magnitude.
Oops, thanks @HelloWorld! You know as I looked at those I thought, “gosh, that looks too cheap” but couldn’t see my error, which was confusing pence and pounds I think! Thank you - I have updated the figures.
@Ross, I’m not hot on the developer rolls. Could you help me find what dashboard you’re talking about so I can follow up on what your tip?