And that 110W MiniMac is already very good in power consumption compared to what is normal. That ca. 100W is rather typical for a laptop I think.
Modern PCs have sort of a power problem. They use plenty, especially when a nice graphic card is installed.
A fully equipped PC with a high-end graphic card can take 300W. With a dual graphic SLI solution over 400W. Insane but nothing too special any more. After all 600W power supplies are not considered exotic any more. Once they were. Now 800-1000W (you can buy such ATX power supplies!) is exotic.
Ok, noone is gonna use such a system for a server unless he’s nuts. But buy any standard PC and you already get some mid class graphics that will add up with all the other compounds to quite a bit of power consumption.
CCRDude got is exactly right. Calculate how fast a NSLU+ext. spinning down drive will be amortized and you get dizzy.
[offtopic rant on]
But thats the same thing with the light bulbs. 2/3 of the friends I have use normal light bulbs. OMG. That takes not even 6 months to amortize the 10 extra bucks for a good energy saving “lightbulb”. Let alone the hassle that normal light bulbs have to be exchanged 10 times more often for defect. That alone should be enough but well, the majority of people still use normal light bulbs. And man that adds up over time. 10W vs 60W is 50W saved. Have a few bulbs on every evening. Quite some money I prefer using on nice computer gear. 8-P
And a friend of mine once complained that he had double the electricity bill than I have despite me having some electronic gadgets. LOL I could only lough. He halike 20 conventional bulbs in his rooms, an old washing machine of -likely- energy class Z etc. pp.
Count it all together it can be as much as 30-40 bucks/month if you compare low energy equipment with the worst that is there and do that consequently for the whole house.
[offtopic rant off]