They really need to investigate low energy lightbulbs... never seen one of those tick along at 163 watts at full brightness.

To be (slightly) fair, the 163 watts is at full load, but even quartering this for idle mode, it's still somewhate more than a low energy lightbulb.

Still, 163 watts and not sounding like a miniature vacuum cleaner is much preferable to the normal server - would be nice to see something like this in a rack unit rather than a space wasting tower though.

I don't know how they end up with a "low energy" device that consumes so MUCH power. I run a Mac Mini as a home server and it consumes only about 70W in total, including two external 3.5" hard drives connected via Firewire. Been running faultlessly (using MacOS X Server) for over 250 days, too.

"The company claims the server has better energy efficiency than a lightbulb..."

Amusingly enough, most computers have an energy efficiency of 0%. That is, the ratio of useful output energy to total output energy is 0%. Why? Computers don't exist to produce energy in any form - they exist to manipulate information, which is independent of energy. Just as the weight of the punched cards was irrelevant, because "we only use the holes", a computer uses just about the same amount of energy whether it is idle or solving problems of huge importance. Strictly speaking, all the energy is waste.

I can't imagine for a second that the electricity cost saved by such a machine is greater through it's entire lifetime than the additional cost of using 2.5 inch disks.

I could see a greater use for a bigger, equally quiet machine that consumes more power but has several times the disk space for the same price.

Nick, I'm sure the Mac mini is stable and all but that would be a poor solution for an office (assuming you are not using RAID1, although even then i'd still want internal disks)

the standard "light bulb", the incandescent coil variety is so inneficient that governments are legislating against them ... not a good comparison.

You leave that thing on all the time?? at 75watts???

I have a thecus NAS box running 500Gig of hard disk - fully active it consumes under 40 watts, disks spin down after 10 mins inactive and power drops to under 10 watts...

We use Lex Light machines for our smaller customers - draws 15 watts flat out, and it's fanless. I can't believe companies are jumping on the green bandwagon with a claim of over 10 times that power ! The Lex Light is perfectly adequate as a file server and web proxy for 10-15 users - no need for a stonking great Xeon processor when it's just going to sit idle most of the time.

Fujitsu-Siemens produces whopping huge mainframe computers. Of course a "small" server is going to look amazingly "green" to them. Any mini-ITX system will beat them hands down. I have cheap 27W 1.3GHz Celeron servers which run just fine.

Everyone here seems to be comparing this machine to others that use less power, but they are really not comprable.

Can you fit 8gb of memory in that Mac Mini, or your Mini ITX system? How about SAS ports? Hardware Raid?

This thing is clearly not designed to be a file server and web proxy for 15 users. It would likely be designed to run an MTA, LDAP directory, databases, VPN, intranet web portal, and who knows what sorts of in-house designed apps, plus it'd have room to grow.

For as serious a machine as this is, 163 Watts seems to be fairly reasonable, especially considering that I draw that much with only one of my 3 monitors.