{"id":7092,"date":"2016-04-03T02:33:33","date_gmt":"2016-04-03T06:33:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7092"},"modified":"2016-04-03T02:33:33","modified_gmt":"2016-04-03T06:33:33","slug":"sometimes-i-should-give-in-to-my-impulses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7092","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes I should give in to my impulses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For at least five years now I&#8217;ve been telling myself that, as nifty as it would be to play with the hardware, I really shouldn&#8217;t spend money on a small-form-factor PC.<\/p>\n<p>This was not an easy temptation to resist, because I found little systems like the Intel NUC fascinating.  I&#8217;d look over the specs for things like that in on-line stores and drool. Replacing a big noisy PC   seemed so attractive&#8230;but I always drew back my hand, because that hardware came with a premium pricetag and I already have working kit.<\/p>\n<p>Then, tonight, I&#8217;m over at my friend Phil Salkie&#8217;s place.  Phil is a hardware and embedded-programming guy par excellence; I know he builds small-form-factor systems for industrial applications.  And tonight he&#8217;s got a new toy to show off, a Taiwanese mini-ITX box called a Jetway.<\/p>\n<p>He says &#8220;$79 on Amazon&#8221;, and I say &#8220;I&#8217;ve thought about replacing my mailserver with something like that, but could never cost-justify it.&#8221;  Phil looks at me and says &#8220;You should. These things lower your electric bills &#8211; it&#8217;ll pay itself off inside of a year.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><em>Oh.  My. Goddess.<\/em>  Why didn&#8217;t I think of that?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Because of course he&#8217;s right.  A fanless low-power design doesn&#8217;t constantly dissipate 150 watts or more. Especially not if you drop an SSD in it so it&#8217;s not spinning rust constantly.  There&#8217;s going to be a break-even point past which your drop in power consumption pays off the up-front cost.<\/p>\n<p>Now to be fair to my own previous hesitation, it might be that the payback period was too long to be more than a theoretical justification until quite recently.  But SSDs have been dropping in price pretty dramatically of late and when the base cost of the box is $79 you don&#8217;t have to collect a lot of savings per month to keep the payoff time below 12 of them.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m expecting the new hardware (which I have mentally dubbed &#8220;the microBeast&#8221;) to arrive in two days.  I ended up spending a bit more than that $79 to get a 250GB SSD; with the DDR3 RAM the whole thing came to $217.  This is pretty close to what I&#8217;d pay for yet another generic tower PC at my local white-box emporium, maybe a bit less &#8211; itself a sign that the crossover point on these things has indeed arrived.<\/p>\n<p>I could have gone significantly cheaper with a conventional laptop drive, but I decided to spend a bit more up front to pull the power dissipation and longer-term savings as low as possible.  Besides, I like quiet systems; the &#8220;no bearing noise&#8221; feature seemed attractive.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll take notes on the microBeast installation and probably post a report here when I have it done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For at least five years now I&#8217;ve been telling myself that, as nifty as it would be to play with the hardware, I really shouldn&#8217;t spend money on a small-form-factor PC. This was not an easy temptation to resist, because I found little systems like the Intel NUC fascinating. I&#8217;d look over the specs for&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7092\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Sometimes I should give in to my impulses<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7093,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7092\/revisions\/7093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}