The 24 hour torrent downloader plus file server !

I have been obsessed with power consumption for a little while and have been considering ways to bring down the same in my home. One of the big power drainers was the downloading of movies via torrents. The PC used to be up all night downloading movies using up a full 140 watts with a super fast quad core processor and a graphics card drawing good amount of power while just idling. So I was looking for ways to prevent this.

The second issue I had was with the sharing of data between the multiple devices at home and having too much redundant data across drives for various purposes. The ideal solution was to have a network drive which allows all the devices to talk to the drive over the network. But NFS drives are prohibitively expensive and come with too many caveats. So I wanted something simple and cheap.

So here is one great solution. I purchased the ASUS WL-500g Premium V2 wireless router for Rs 5.5k and this one device does all that I want and consumes less than 8 of power for all the wonderful work it does. Here is the router :



The hardware chip on this router is a broadcom, which means that you can flash plenty of opensource firmwares onto this and make it into a full fledged linux machine. DD-WRT, Oleg and Tomato were the options for firmware and I choose the Oleg's firmware since it closely resembles the Asus factory firmware and is well extensible. Here is the link for the firmware: http://oleg.wl500g.info/

Next step, install "transmission", a torrent client to this linux box. Install the windows agent onto your PC and bingo, you have a torrent downloader running on the router, controllable from the PC. Here is how the PC applicaiton looks like when it connects to "transmission" running on the Asus router.



Im sure you are wondering where the downloaded file is saved ? Now the beauty is that the Asus router has two USB ports. Connect a USB drive to it and the linux OS on the router shares the whole drive on the network as it was a network file system. Works like a charm !

Part two of the project was to make sure that I get a USB device that itself that does not draw too much power. So I opted for a 1.8" hard disk with a external enclosure that consumes 1 watt of power. Gives me space for 60 gigs of download space and also serves as a swap disk for the linux box.



Just for the sake of curiosity, above is a picture that shows four external USB drives, a Verbatim 3.5" disk, a Transcend 2.5" disk, a Diva 1.8" disk and a regular USB flash disk. The 1.8" disk seems to be the best compromise between pocket size, speed and price.

So folks, project succeeded ! I connect to transmission on the router from my PC, start off a any download (FTP, torrent and HTTP) and switch off the PC. Download happens all night and the electricity meter is hardly running. And I can monitor it using the transmission internal webpage from my mobile phone !!!

Do remember that all this does not change the main job of the router and it still functions as a fantastic wireless router.

And to top it all up, I have connected a 1 terabyte external hard disk to the Asus box. I switch it on when I need to and it gives me a 1TB network disk !

Aah the sweet satisfaction of a job well done...