As I stated I've been looking to shrink my power needs even more, a while back I started working on a new HTPC (which also might get an update later as I'm still not happy with it completely) to shrink my power usage as technology has gotten a lot better and I don't need huge power drawing systems to do the same thins. Also the savings on my power bill are certainly welcomed.
Currently I have a 20 bay Norco case running dual Opteron 4 core CPU's on a server grade motherboard with a 700 watt PSU. It's loud, and it definitely eats up power. My firewall box is a blade server that runs a celeron server grade platform, again it's loud and it gets pretty hot and uses a lot of power. The firewall box currently runs Untangly but I think I'll switch to PFsense when I migrate.
So I'm looking to shrink these things down, my current list is located here. It's a Mini-ITX platform, with a nice Mini-ITX case that'll hold 7 3.5" drives and 1 2.5" drive all at the same time. The motherboard has 7 SATA ports as well and I'll likely use a high speed USB device for the OS. Also adding a dual intel based NIC that will give me better throughput and reliability. This should more than cut my energy usage on my network equipment in half I believe.
