The guys behind the very neat home servers sold by Excito, just started a kickstarter project for their private cloud solution.
This is so last year, or it will be when SAFE launches, but this little box might be a great choice for some always-on farming. 1.5W power consumption.
We have to get SAFE running on it first, which may not be straightforward - just ask Ross who is helping me build MaidSafe on the b3, the last box these guys designed when they were at Excito
OPI
Ubuntu based home server running ownCloud with 2G flash RAM and slot for 64G microSD that consumes 1.5 W just launched on kickstarter as OPI
While this is a great initiative, I’m not quite sure it fits with MaidSAFE best. SD cards have a limited number of writes before they start degrading. My understanding is that MaidSAFE will cuase a very large amount of read and writes and users request and post data.
The power usage is quite enticing, but I see the sdcard being worn out before too long and it having to be replaced.
Besides, I wonder how viable home mining could be. I don’t have an especially flaky home connexion, but it still suffers from the occasionnal disconnect, sometimes for hours on end.
Knowing that the network will tend to chose more reliable nodes over less reliable ones for storage, a few disconnects might be enough to exclude your home mining rig from most store requests, as long as it’s competing with very reliable nodes (e.g. hosted on VPSs) and even if those actually have less available storage space.
I do know that they are trying to push for having more home connections than huge farming connections. They had planned on trying to work it out in an algorithm somehow to make it so (I’m not sure if/how well they’ve done it yet). I can be pretty sure that having a connection that drops out completely will almost definitely have a negative effect on your “node score” though.
I plan on running on my home connection a 25/10 Mb/s connection and hooking up my media server with about 7TB free on it and farming using that. If it turns out that farming is indeed profitable, I may consider setting up a vps or something of that nature. We’ll see.
A neat idea, which looks very well executed - hope these guys know about the SAFE Network and design something just as nice - for a low power personal vault I was thinking of something like with a lego case - My personal view is that low power consumption is key for always on farming.
Yes Ross, the Pi looks tasty too. It will be interesting to see all the setups people choose.
I think you may be right that low power consumption will turn out to be very important in the long run, and certainly something I’d like to encourage. The Pi’s are 2.5W and 3.5W according to the specs, plus any add-on drive.
I might start with an excito and a Pi - the OPI seems quite expensive.
I’m not sure how to measure the actual power consumption - maybe there are little gadgets you can plug them into? I must look into that, but I doubt they’ll be accurate at such low levels. I have a clamp meter, but that won’t measure accurately either, so I may be left just with the spec sheets.
