Yup. Seems like pointless, instant-gratification consumerism when server boxes are far faster, cheaper and greener. Worse, it's an un-upgradable device to buy and throw away. Anyone that needs more horsepower, it's far simpler to either trade up, use a real server or just use a cloud/VPS similar to AWS.
"server boxes are far faster, cheaper and greener. Worse, it's an un-upgradable device to buy and throw away."
How many of these devices would you have to buy and throw away to match the environmental material footprint of even one 1U rack-mount server? They're tiny. Orders of magnitude matter.
(Similar effect: However "disposable" USB flash drives may superficially seem, compared to the floppies they replaced they are nothing. And I do not just mean that the USB sticks can hold lots of stuff... I mean that if you pile a normal computer user of the 2015 era's USB sticks in one pile, and a normal computer user of the 1990 era's floppy disks into another pile, the floppies would tower over the entire pile of USB drives and almost certainly have a much larger environmental footprint. I hedge only for the possibility that the nasty flash memory might dominate the floppies manufacturing, but the floppies do irreducibly have an awful lot more plastic in them, so I'm still guessing the floppy pile comfortably "wins".)
Floppies are plastic and vinyl. Flash drives require an entire foundry worth of heavy metals and exotic compounds. I doubt it is the clear win you think.
The drive needs electronics as well, consuming possibly as much of heavy metals and exotic compounds. And you need a lot of floppies to be on par with capacity of a flash drive.
How many of these sticks, powered hubs and controlling computers would you have to buy to equal one green 1U server? On the order of 64 USB sticks, 15 powered hubs AND one computer... That's 15 cheap bricks and a computer's power supply that have to be made and suck down power versus a quality, high-efficiency switching PSU that is about ~98% efficient. Doing the math on the supply chain sourcing of each component is pointless, because it wouldn't be practical, and at present, it's impossible to source all materials from goods to actual, verified origin (not shady middlemen).
Also, how much power would be lost by all those cheap bricks compared to a single, efficient switching power supply?
It also would be 65 systems to maintain.
Renting a fraction (via cloud/VPS) of a green server (good PUE DCs and LP gear) is far cheaper and greener. But more importantly, waste fewer computing resources.
How does a cloud VM satisfy the 'intel stick' use-case? Where is the HDMI port?
Also, since you're piling on every possible thing you can to make your case, you should also include the power systems of every networking device between your cloud VM and you.
It's been too long since I built a PC so I'll take your word on the faster/cheaper argument, but greener? Can you really build a server box that uses less power than a 1-2A USB device?
>Can you really build a server box that uses less power than a 1-2A USB device?
Not sure, but I think the point was that its "greener" because you can swap out individual parts over time using the same case and ultimately producing less waste. You may also argue that individual components are easier to recycle.
At scale, compute boxes are rarely upgraded because it's TCO cheaper to invest in newer systems (or CPU, mb, RAM). IOW, it's cheaper to wait and refresh everything, that is unless you're adding RAM, CPUs or disks.
If form factors don't change, reusing the mounting hw, PSUs and enclosures can be doable. Some web shops wait until boxes die entirely before replacement while IT shops lifecycle out all gear (usually everything but racks) in 4-6 years.
These hotdog USB sticks aren't upgradable at all and they're limited to the processing power of 5-10W.
