Optimising power management for NAS-use PC

[tfboy]

Hi chaps.

Following on from a previous thread, I've decided it's time for me to reduce my electricity bill.

Issues I now have is the NAS-like PC is not "used" that often. OK, I have the ocassional linux torrent coming down or the odd MP3 / Video file sharing on the LAN working, but most of the time, it just sits there doing nothing.

Going along the basis that the new PC build will feature mini ITX stuff, I want to optimise the power management as much as possible and was thinking of how this could be done. Of course, the hardware will be low power stuff, but taking things even further, I was wondering about hibernation and the like.

I remember using WOL - the good old "magic packet" stuff. But what I don't know is if there are ways of waking up a PC from hibernation with other network-type signals. Simply, I would like the box to go into sleep / hibernation after x minutes of idling. Then, when something along the network requests access to it, it wakes up and serves the media. What I don't know is how this could be managed at best? Is there any software out there that does this? Presumably, there has to be some level of hardware-awareness because if the PC's in hibernation, then it's up to the hardware to wake up the system.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings What do you all reckon? Am I being to optimistic with hibernation and only standby really works? What software / hardware / BIOS feature do I need to look out for? Anyone done this in practice and can recommend from experience, etc.

Ta muchly. Love you all

[Will404]

what about wake on LAN, would this not wake your computer from its hibernation mode.
Also you could try sleep mode on vista, as this is a lower power state than standbye, but is as fast to come back to life - hibernation can be quite slow

[Agent]

"Sleep" in Vista is STR (Suspend to RAM) and isn't OS specific.
XP and every modern Linux distro I know can use it

[tfboy]

what about wake on LAN, would this not wake your computer from its hibernation mode.
Also you could try sleep mode on vista, as this is a lower power state than standbye, but is as fast to come back to life - hibernation can be quite slow

Hi Will. Yes, wake on lan would work (I did say WOL ). But the issue is how can you initiate a WOL state? Is it only via "magic packets" or is there some other way? The device that would need to have the machine wake up would need to be able to send the wake up message, or possibly my Linksys router. I'll do some more reading

"Sleep" in Vista is STR (Suspend to RAM) and isn't OS specific.
XP and every modern Linux distro I know can use it

If I go down the sleep route (and not the hibernate route), I guess it's easier to implement because the OS is aware of it and will wake up as soon as any kind of resource is asked (CIFS share, DLNA access, FTP access maybe?). Question then is is some hardware better, i.e. more energy friendly in sleep mode? Obviously, power down hard disks, graphics card on standby, etc, but I really want to minimise power consumption as the sleep mode will be active about 90-95% of the time