In my last two posts I posted about my little storage cloud I created.
Looking back I see the reasons I set out to do that project were this:
- Need to make sure pictures(<100GB) from my life are somewhere safe. Check
- Need at least 2TB of space for media files that do not require backups and stuff really. Check
- Learn about Gluster, XFS, ZFS and other fun Linux stuff. Check
- The pictures portion needs to be cheaper than Google & Dropbox. Whoops!!
I recently got a sweet gift for my Birfday. My Dad gave me a $20 gift card for Amazon and I bought a Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor. I’ve been wanting to get one of these and finally did because I had a feeling that my little project may be digging into the expense account a little too much.
I plugged the cluster into the device and turned on each unit one at a time and here are the readings after each device was on for a bit:
- Dell SC1435 – 160 Watt
- Dell Vostro 200 – 75 Watt
- Thermaltake – 60 Watt
This is far from a perfect experiment to determine the values, but I’m guessing it is close enough to make a good decision if it is costing too much or not. So an hour later after poking around on our electric companies website(Pepco), Google Drive Pricing, and Dropbox Pricing I created a nice spreadsheet to show how much it cost.
Here is the link to the spreadsheet: Spreadsheet
So as you can see, the estimated cost to run that cluster 24/7 is about $42/mo. You can also see that it comes out to about $0.015/GB. This is interesting in that Google charges $0.05/GB and Dropbox charges $0.083/GB. So while having my own storage at home costs quite a bit less per GB it costs a lot more for what I actually require.
There are some other factors to take into account as well such as:
- Google/Dropbox require no maintenance work on my part
- Google/Dropbox are a cloud solution that does backups/version control of all files
- Google/Dropbox are accessible anywhere
- My solution is local making it much faster
- My solution allows me to store anything I want and I don’t have to worry about prying eyes into my files
- I could find lower power computers to run the cluster
- I probably don’t need the cluster on 24/7(running it for 5hr/day comes out to be about $9-$10/mo)