Taking a system which was conceptualized about a quarter of a century ago and serves much different needs than what a datacenter in space needs (e.g. very strict thermal band, compared to acceptable temperature range from 20 to 80 degrees) isn't ideal.
The physics is quite simple and you can definitely make it work out. The Stefan Boltzman law works in your favor the higher you can push your temperatures.
If anything a orbital datacenter could be a slightly easier case. Ideally it will be in an orbit which always sees the sun. Most other satellites need to be in the earth shadow from time to time making heaters as well radiators necessary.
These data centers are solar powered, right? So if they are absorbing 100% of the energy on their sun side, by default they'll be able to heat up as much as an object left in the sun, which I assume isn't very hot compared to what they are taking in. How do they crank their temperature up so as to get the Stefan Boltzmann law working in their favor?
I suppose one could get some sub part of the whole satellite to a higher temperature so as to radiate heat efficiently, but that would itself take power, the power required to concentrate heat which naturally/thermodynamically prefers to stay spread out. How much power does that take? I have no idea.
With Debian as VM this would probably much leaner. Was shocked about current Ubuntu image sizes. E.g. no need to have to download about 500MB of firmware packages with each new kernel.
1. Improve longevity by charging Li-Ion only up to 85% of marketed capacity (can be configured at least on Thinkpads).
2. Open up the laptop and check if battery is swollen. After about 10 years, it's also a good idea to replace the CMOS battery before leaking.
3. Without opening, sometimes keys/trackpads don't work anymore as expected. This might be due to swollen battery packs (we had several Dells where this happened).
A fire risk? I think it'd be exceptionally rare for that kind of thing to lead to a fire instead of just dead parts (assuming no overtemperature protections). Even people with the 600 w melting GPU cables don't end up with an actual fire.
Batteries, however, are absolute hellfire when they go wrong (because of chemistry - not just the temperature).
If you're not sure to invest in special hardware, cloanto offers bundles including most kickstarts and some software (games / apps).
That's the easiest and cheapest way to get started. A500mini might also be a relatively cheap option with some modern possibilities (SD cards instead of floppy disks).
Only if you allocate (and pay for) more than 400GB. And if you have high traffic 24/7 beware of "EBS optimized" instances which will fall down to baseline rates after a certain time. I use vantage.sh/rds (not affiliated) to get an overview of the tons of instance details stretched out over several tables in AWS docs.
reply