Does using fewer large drives in a server save enough power to matter?
In his recent Home Media Server Guide, Brian Won of Ars Technica briefly discusses the heat and space issues involved with packing lots of hard drives in to a personal server. Since these problems are handled nicely by cases such as the Cooler Master “Stacker” line and the Antec Nine Hundred, I started thinking about power consumption.
My question then became whether it would make sense from a financial perspective to pay extra for larger hard drives which you could then use less of, thus burning less power.