[HN Gopher] 7 watts idle - building a low powered server/NAS on ... ___________________________________________________________________ 7 watts idle - building a low powered server/NAS on Intel 12th/13th gen Author : ryangibb Score : 167 points Date : 2023-12-31 12:10 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (mattgadient.com) (TXT) w3m dump (mattgadient.com) | ggm wrote: | Sort of not surprising how variant divergent chipsets go with | power states, and other things. | | How does he get raidz2 to spin down without busting the raidset? | Putting drives into sleep states isn't usually good for in-CPU | zfs is it? Is the l2arc doing heavy lifting here? | | Good comments about ECC memory in the feedback discussion too. | phil21 wrote: | I've found ZFS to be extremely forgiving for hard drives having | random slow response times. So long as you are getting a | response within the OS I/O timeout period, it's simply a matter | of blocking I/O until the drives spin up. This can honestly | cause a lot of issues on production systems with a drive that | wants to half fail vs. outright fail. | | I believe this is on the order of 30-60s from memory. | | l2arc likely works quite well for a home NAS setup allowing for | the drives to be kept spun down most of the time. | | Strangely I also built (about 10 years ago now) a home NAS | utilizing a bunch of 2.5" 1TB Seagate drives. I would not | repeat the experiment as the downsides in performance was | simply not worth the space/power savings. | | Then again, I also built a ZFS pool out of daisy chained USB | hubs and 256 (255?) free vendor schwag USB thumb drives. Take | any advice with a grain of salt. | paulmd wrote: | yup. the problem is really with the SMR drives where they can | (seemingly) hang for _minutes at a time_ as they flush out | the buffer track. ordinary spin-down isn 't really a problem, | as long as the drives spin up within a reasonable amount of | time, ZFS won't drop the disk from the array. | | ZFS is designed for HDD-based systems after all. actually it | works notably kinda poorly for SSDs in general - a lot of the | design+tuning decisions were made under the assumptions of | HDD-level disk latency and aren't necessarily optimal when | you can just go look at the SSD! | | however, tons and tons of drive spin-up cycles are not good | for HDDs. Aggressive idle timeout for power management was | famously the problem with the WD Green series (wdidle3.exe | lol). Best practice is leave the drives spinning all the | time, it's better for the drives and doesn't consume all that | much power overall. Or I would certainly think about, say, a | 1-hour timeout at least. | | https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/hacking-wd- | greens-... | | However, block-level striping like ZFS/BTRFS/Storage Spaces | is not very good for spinning down anyway. Essentially all | files will have to hit all disks, so you have to spin up the | whole array. L2ARC with a SSD behind it might be able to | serve a lot of these requests, but as soon as any block isn't | in cache you will probably be spinning up all the disks very | shortly (unless it's literally 1 block). | | Unraid is better at this since it's a file-level striping - | newer releases can even use ZFS as a backend but a file | always lives on a single unraid volume, so with 1-disk ZFS | pools underneath you will only be spinning up one disk. This | can also be used with ZFS ARC/L2ARC or Unraid might have its | own setup for tiering hot data on cache drives or hot-data | drives. | | (1-disk ZFS pools as Unraid volumes fits the consumer use- | case very nicely imo, and that's going to be my advice for | friends and family setting up NASs going forward. If ZFS | loses any vdev from the pool the whole pool dies, so you want | to add at least 2-disk mirrors if not 4-disk RAIDZ vdevs, but | since Unraid works at a file-stripe level (with file | mirroring) you just add extra disks and let it manage the | file layout (and mirrors/balancing). Also, if you lose a | disk, you only lose those files (or mirrors of files) but all | the other files remain intact, you don't lose 1/8th of every | file or whatever, and that's a failure mode that aligns a lot | better with consumer expectations/needs and consumer-level | janitoring. And you still retain all the benefits of ZFS in | terms of ARC caching, file integrity, etc. It's not without | flaws, in the naive case the performance will degrade to 1- | or 2-disk read speeds (since 1 file is on 1 disk, with eg 1 | mirror copy) and writes will probably be 1-disk speed, and a | file or volume/image cannot exceed the size of a single disk | and must have sufficient contiguous free space, and | snapshots/versioning will consume more data than block-level | versioning, etc. All the usual consequences of having 1 file | backed by 1 disk will apply. But for "average" use-cases it | seems pretty ideal and ZFS is an absolutely rock-stable | backend for unraid to throw files into.) | | anyway it's a little surprising that having a bunch of | individual disks gave you problems with ZFS. I run 8x8TB | shucked drives (looking to upgrade soon) in RAIDZ2 and I get | basically 8x single-disk speed over 10gbe, ZFS amortizes out | the performance very nicely. But there are definitely | risks/downsides, and power costs, to having a ton of small | drives, agreed. Definitely use raidz or mirrors for sure. | justsomehnguy wrote: | > home NAS utilizing a bunch of 2.5" 1TB Seagate drives. I | would not repeat the experiment as the downsides in | performance was simply not worth the space/power savings. | | 5400 drives? How many and how bad the performance was? | louwrentius wrote: | I have the same amount of storage available in a ~9-year-old | 24-bay NAS chassis that does 150 Watt idle (with drives | spinning). | | My NAS is powered down most of the time for this reason, only | booted (IPMI) remotely when needed. | | Although the actual idle power consumption in the article seems | to be a tad higher than 7 watts, it's so much lower, it's not | such a big deal to run it 24/7 and enjoy the convenience. | | Loved the write-up! | newsclues wrote: | I had the same issue of picking a motherboard with limited SATA | ports and then having to deal with extra expansion cards. | | 4 is not enough for homelab type servers. | chx wrote: | Why not the N100? | | Even an N305 fits the purpose, the N100 would be even less | https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/12fv7fh/beelink_eq... | cjdell wrote: | I'm very impressed with my N100 mini PC (fits in your palm) | that I bought from AliExpress. Takes between 2-8W and uses just | a plain old 12V plug-style power supply with a DC barrel. | Perfect for Home Assistant and light virtualisation. | | Performance is actually better than my quad core i5-6500 mini | PC. Definitely no slouch. | imglorp wrote: | Because author said they wanted a bunch of disks. | hrdwdmrbl wrote: | +1 for the Nx00 series of chips. I just bought myself a pre- | built mini pc with an N100. Low power, good price, great | performance. | | I wonder if in a few years they might not eat the whole mini PC | market. If the price can come down such that they're | competitive with the various kinds of Pis... | arp242 wrote: | N100 wasn't yet released when this was written in May (or was | only _just_ released). | | Also the N100 only supports 16G RAM, and this guy has 64G. | Number of pcix lanes (9 vs. 20) probably matter for their use | case as well. And the i5 does seem quite a bit faster in | general. | | Comparison: | https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?pro... | s800 wrote: | I'm running a home server on an N100 (ITX model) with a 32GB | DIMM, works well. | adrian_b wrote: | It has been widely reported that Alder Lake N actually | works with 32 GB, but for some reason Intel does not | support this configuration officially. | | The same happened with the previous generations of Intel | Atom CPUs, they have always worked without any apparent | problems with more memory than the maximum specified by | Intel. | trescenzi wrote: | I bought a tiny, fits in the palm of my hand, N100 box on | Amazon for $150[1]. It currently does basically everything I | need and idles at 7.5W. | | I've got cloudflare setup for dns management and a few simple | sites hosted on it like blogs and Gitea. It has an sd card slot | that I use as extra storage. | | Sure it's not nearly as awesome as the setup detailed here but | I couldn't recommend it more if you just want a small simple | home server. | | [1] https://a.co/d/cIzEFPk | MochaDen wrote: | Low-power is great but running a big RAID long-term without ECC | gives me the heebee jeebies! Any good solutions for a similar | system but more robust over 5+ years? | ianai wrote: | Agree. Didn't even see ECC discussed. | | Apparently this board supports ecc with this chip: Supermicro | X13SAE W680 LGA1700 ATX Motherboard | | Costs 550. | | One option is building around that and having some pcie 4.0 to | nvme boards hosting as many nvme drives as needed. Not cheap | though but around home affordable. | ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: | You need workstation chipsets to have ECC on intel desktop | CPUs. | | And yes they start at around 500. | philjohn wrote: | If you go back a few generations, the C246 chipset can be | had on boards costing 200, and if you pair it with an | i3-9100T you get ECC as well as pretty damn low power | usage. | ianai wrote: | You are limited to pcie 3.0 speeds there though. But good | suggestion. | faeriechangling wrote: | Embedded SOCs like AMDs which are used by Synology etc such as | AMD V2000. | | If you want to step up to being able to serve an entire case or | 4U of HDDs, you're going to need pcie lanes though, in which | case w680 with i5-12600k and a single ecc udimm and a SAS HBA | in the pcie slot with integrated Ethernet is probably as low | wattage as you can get. Shame w680 platform cost is so high, | am4/zen2 is cheaper to the point of still being viable. | | You can also get Xeon, embedded Xeon, am5, am4 (without an | iGPU). | | There's nothing inherently wrong with running a raid without | ecc for 5 years, people do it all the time and things go fine. | eisa01 wrote: | Been thinking to just get a Synology with ECC support, but | what I find weird is that the CPUs they use are 5+ years old. | Feels wrong to buy something like that "new" | | Same with TrueNas mini | cpncrunch wrote: | It depends what your requirements are. Ive been using a low | end synology box for years as a home dev server and it is | more than adequate. | faeriechangling wrote: | For the most part, these are computers which are meant to | stick around through 2-4 upgrade cycles of your other | computers. Just doing various low power 24/7 tasks like | file serving. | | You could be like "well that's stupid, I'm going to make a | balls to the wall build server that also serves storage | with recent components" but the build server components | will become obsolete faster then the storage components, it | can lead to incidental complexity to try and run something | like windows games on a NAS operating system because you | tried to consolidate on one computer, being forced to use | things like ECC will compromise absolute performance, | you'll want to have the computer by your desk potentially | but also in a closet since it has loud storage, you're | liable to run out of pcie lanes and slots, you want to use | open cooling for the high performance components and a | closed case for the spinning rust, it's all a bit awkward. | | Much simpler is to just treat the NAS as an appliance that | serves files, maybe runs a plex server, some surveillance, | a weather station, rudimentary monitoring, and home | automation. Things for which something like a v2000 is | overkill. Then use breeding edge chips in things like cell | phones and laptops. Then have the two computers do | different jobs. Longer product cycles between processors | makes things like support cheaper to maintain for long term | periods of time and offer low prices. | hypercube33 wrote: | I have a 3u Nas I built in 2012 or something with a two | core sempron running windows and using storage spaces and | it still holds up just fine. | tyingq wrote: | If you're on a budget, a used HP Z-Series workstation supports | ECC ram. A bare-bones one is cheap, though the ECC memory can | be expensive since it's not the (plentifully available) server | type RDIMMs. Not a low-power setup either :) | philjohn wrote: | That's why I went with an i3-9100T and an Asrock Rack | workstation board, ECC support (although UDIMM vs RDIMM) | a20eac1d wrote: | This sounds similar to a build I'm planning. I cannot find | the workstation mainboards at a reasonable price though. They | start at like 400EUR in Europe. | philjohn wrote: | There's an Asus one that's available as well, the ASUS C246 | PRO - it's about 250 GBP. | | I did build mine 2 years ago, so the 246 motherboards are | less available now, the C252 is another option which will | take you up to 11th gen Intel. | rpcope1 wrote: | I think the trick is to go with a generation or two old | Supermicro motherboard in whatever ATX case you can scrounge | up, and then use either a low power Xeon or a Pentium/Celeron. | Something like the X11SAE-F or X12SCA-F (or maybe even older) | is plenty, though maybe not quite as low power. I still use an | X9SCA+-F with some very old Xeon for a NAS and to run some LXC | containers. It idles at maybe 20-30W instead of 5, but I've | never had any issues with it, and I'm sure it's paid itself off | many times over. | j45 wrote: | I would never run a self-hosted nas when a synology/qnap are | available as a dedicated appliance for around the same price. | | The hardware is much more purpose equipped to store files long | term and not the 2-3 years between consumer SSDs' | | It's not to say self-hosting storage can't or shouldn't be | done, its just about how many recoveries and transitions have | you been through, because it's not an if, but a when. | justinsaccount wrote: | > The hardware is much more purpose equipped to store files | long term | | What hardware would that be, specifically? The low end | embedded platforms that don't even support ECC? | | > how many recoveries and transitions have you been through | | 3 or 4, at this point, using the same 2 disk zfs mirror | upgraded from 1TB to 3TB to 10TB. | dbeley wrote: | The hardware is basically the same as self-hosted NAS, the | motherboard could even be of a lower quality. The software | though is closed source and most consumer NAS only get | support for 4-5 years which is outrageous. | jhot wrote: | I'm running truenas on a used e3 1245 v5 ($30 on ebay) and an | Asus workstation Mobo with 32 GB ECC and 4 spinning drives. Not | sure individually, but the nas along with a i5 12400 compute | machine, router, and switch use 100W from the wall during | baseline operation (~30 containers). I'd consider that hugely | efficient compared to some older workstations I've used as home | servers. | NorwegianDude wrote: | I've been running a E3-1230v3 for over 10 years now. With | 32GN ECC, 3 SSDs and 4 HDD and separate port for IPMI I'm | averaging 35 W from the wall with a light load. Just ordered | a Ryzen 7900 yesterday, and I guess the power consumption | will be slightly higher for that one. | Dachande663 wrote: | Is there not an element of penny-wise, pound-foolish here where | you end up optimizing the cpu/mono side of things but then run 6+ | drives vs fewer larger ones? | bluGill wrote: | You should buy drives in multiples of 5 or 6. Of course this is | subject to much debate. Drives fail so you need more than one | extra for redundency - I suggest 2 so when (not if!) one fails | you still have procuction while repacing the bad drive. 3 | drives in a raid-1 mirror for the price of one is spendy so | most start looking at raid-5 with dual parity. However putting | more than 6 drives in those starts to run into performance | issues better handled by striping across two raids. (if you do | try more than 6 your odds of 3 drives failing become reasonable | so start adding more paricy stripes) which is why I say 6 | drives at once is the sweet spot, but others come up with other | answers that are not unreasonable. | | of course one input is how much data do you have. for many 1 | modern disk is plenty of space, so you go raid 1 and redundancy | is only so you don't need to wait for off site backups to | restore after failure. | jnsaff2 wrote: | I have a 5-node ceph cluster built out of Fujitsu desktops that I | got for 50 euro a piece. | | 4 nodes have 8gb ram and one has 16gb. | | CPU in each is i5-6500. | | Each has an NVMe that is split for OS and journal and a spinning | HDD. | | The cluster idles at 75W and full load about 120W. That is | intense ceph traffic not other workloads. | Throw839 wrote: | That fujitsu part is important. Many mainstream brands do not | implement power states correctly, Fujitsu seems to be focused | on power consumption quite lot. | skippyboxedhero wrote: | The NUC and Optiplex aren't bad either. There are also very | good AsRock boards (I can't remember what the modern ones are | called but H110T is one, I used this for a bit, idled at 6W, | laptop memory and power brick). But Fujitsu is the S-tier. | | In practice, I found I needed a bit more power but you can | get some of the Fujitsu boards with a CPU for $30-40, which | is hard to beat. | ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: | I have a HP ProDesk powertop shows up to C10 which I never | reach. Must be the SSD or NVMe I have. But yeah The BIOS in | those are super cut down and there are hardly any energy | settings I can change. | paulmd wrote: | fujitsu has always been underappreciated in the mainstream | tbh. there has always been a thinkpad-style cult following | (although much smaller) but japanese companies often do a | pretty terrible job at marketing in the west (fujifilm being | another fantastic example). | | my university issued T4220 convertible laptops, with wacom | digitizers in the screens. I rarely used it but the pivot in | the screen made it indestructible, it survived numerous falls | hitting the corner of the screen/etc because the screen | simply flops out of the way and pivots to absorb the energy. | I later got a ST6012 slate PC that my uni bookstore was | clearing out (also with a wacom digitizer, and a Core2Solo | ULV!). Both of them are extremely well-thought-out and | competently designed/built hardware. Doesn't "feel" thinkpad | grade, but it absolutely is underneath, and featured PCMCIA | and bay batteries and other power-user features. | | https://www.notebookcheck.net/Fujitsu-Siemens- | Lifebook-T4220... | | https://www.ruggedpcreview.com/3_slates_fujitsu_st6012.html | | They also did a _ton_ of HPC stuff for Riken and the other | japanese research labs, they did a whole family of SPARC | processors for mainframes and HPC stuff, and pivoted into ARM | after that wound down. Very cool stuff that receives almost | no attention from mainstream tech media, less than POWER | even. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0GqCxMmyF4 | | Anyway back on topic but my personal cheat-code for power is | Intel NUCs. Intel, too, paid far more attention to idle power | and power-states than the average system-integrator. The NUCs | are really really good at idle even considering they're using | standalone bricks (my experience is laptop bricks are much | less efficient and rarely meet 80+ cert etc). A ton of people | use them as building blocks in other cases (like HDPlex H1 or | Akasa cases), they don't have a _ton_ of IO normally but they | have a SATA and a M.2 and you can use a riser cable on the | M.2 slot to attach any pcie card you want. People would do | this with skull canyon f.ex (and HDPlex H1 explicitly | supports this with the square ones). The "enthusiast" style | NUCs often have multiple M.2s or even actual pcie slots and | are nice for this. | | https://www.amazon.com/ADT-Link-Extender-Graphics-Adapter- | PC... | | And don't forget that once you have engineered your way to | pcie card formfactor, you can throw a Highpoint Rocket R1104 | or a SAS controller card in there and run multiple SSDs (up | to 8x NVMe) on a single pcie slot, without bifurcation. Or | there are numerous other "cheat code" m.2 devices for | breaking the intended limits of your system - GPUs (Innodisk | EPV-1101/Asrock M2_GPU), SATA controllers, etc. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9TcL9aY004 (actually this | makes the good point that CFExpress is a thing and is very | optimized for power. No idea how durable they are in | practice, and they are definitely very expensive, but they | also might help in some extreme low power situations.) | | Personally I never found AMD is that efficient at idle. Even | with a monolithic apu you will want to dig up an X300TM-ITX | from aliexpress, since this allows you to forgo the chipset. | Sadly AMD does not allow X300 to be marketed directly as a | standalone product, only as an integrated system like a nuc | or laptop or industrial pc, despite the onboard/SOC IO being | already quite adequate for beige box usage. Gotta sell those | chipsets (hey, how about _two_ chipsets per board!?). But OP | article is completely right that AMD's chipsets just are not | very efficient. | eurekin wrote: | What effective client speeds are you getting? | jnsaff2 wrote: | Currently only gigabit network and I can easily saturate | that. | | Thinking about chucking in 25gbit cards. | jeffbee wrote: | I wonder if this system is connected with wired ethernet or wifi. | I found that it makes a large difference on my NAS. With a wired | link the SoC can't reach a deep sleep state because the ethernet | peripheral demands low-latency wakeup from the PCIe root port. | This is power management policy that is flowing from the link | peer all the way to your CPU! I found that wifi doesn't have this | problem, and gives better-than-gigabit performance, sometimes. | skippyboxedhero wrote: | If you have an network card over PCIe then there may be an | issue with the card. I have never had an issue reaching low | sleep state, you can modify WoL behaviour too. Wifi is, again | in my experience, uses significantly more power. I have seen | 3-5W and usually switch if off. | jeffbee wrote: | I don't think it's an issue with the card. It's a combination | of ethernet and PCIe features that make this happen. There is | a standard called "energy efficient ethernet" that makes it | not happen, but my switch doesn't do it. | jauntywundrkind wrote: | I feel like I see a good number of nas builds go by, but rarely | are they anywhere as technical. Nice. | squarefoot wrote: | For those interested in repurposing a small mini-PC with no Mini | PCI ports available as NAS, I recently purchased a ICY | IB-3780-C31 enclosure (USB3.1 to 8xSATA), and although I still | have to put it in operation (will order new disks soon), I tested | it with a pair from my spares and can confirm it works out of the | box with both Linux and XigmaNAS (FreeBSD). Just beware that | although it can turn back on after the connected PC goes to sleep | and then wakes up (the oddly named "sync" button on front panel | does that), it doesn't after a accidental loss of power or power | outage _even if the connected PC is set up to boot automatically_ | , which to me is quite bad, therefore having recently moved to a | place where power outages aren't uncommon and can last longer | than a normal UPS could handle, I'll probably modify the | enclosure by adding a switchable monostable circuit that emulates | a short press of the power button after power is restored. That | would mean a big goodbye to warranty, so I'll have to think about | it, but the problem can indeed be solved. | ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: | 7950X3D, X670E Taichi, 96GB 6400MHz CL32, 2x4TB Lexar, 4x18TB | Seagate Exos X18, RX570 8G, Proxmox. | | Idle no VM ~60-70W. | | Idle TrueNAS VM drives spinning ~90-100W. | | Idle TrueNAS & Fedora Desktop with GPU passthrough ~150W | | In a few weeks the 570 is replaced by 7900 xtx. The RAM adds a | lot of W. 3-5W per 8GB of RAM depending on the frequency is | common for DDR5. | | I was expecting around 50-100W for Proxmox+TrueNAS. I did not | consider the power draw of the RAM when I went for 96GB. | eurekin wrote: | What about networking? Did you go over 1gbit? | ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: | It has 2.5G. There are X670E with 10G if you desire more. | | My home net is 1G with two MikroTik hAP ax3 which are | connected with the single 2.5G poe port they have (and one | powers the other). | hypercube33 wrote: | I really want the Ryzen Embedded and or Epyc 3000(?) series | that has dual 10gbe on package for something like a NAS but | both are super expensive or impossible to find. | ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: | AsRock Rack B650D4U-2L2T/BCM, 2x10G, 2x1G, IPMI | | For less power consumption Ryzen 8000 is coming up (wait for | Jan 8th, CES) and the APU tend to be monolithic and draw a | lot less power than the chiplets. | tw04 wrote: | Even that uses Broadcom 10gbe, not the embedded AMD | Ethernet. It's really strange, I can only assume there's | something fatally wrong with the AMD Ethernet. | AdrianB1 wrote: | Or it just tells the customers of this kind of equipment | want proven solutions instead of other (novelty) options, | so the manufacturers build their products with that in | mind. Stability and support are very important to most | buyers. | tw04 wrote: | If that were the case I'd expect to still see at least | SOME products utilizing the AMD chipset, even if budget | focused. I have literally not seen a single board from | any MFG that utilizes the built in NIC. Heck there are | Intel Xeon-d chipsets that utilize both the onboard NIC | and external Broadcom to get 4x for cheap. | j45 wrote: | It may be possible to install, or add an external 2.5 or | 10GbE device. | | Either way, it's awful there is not more 10 GbE connectivity | available default. There's no reason it shouldn't be the next | level up, we have been at 1 / 2.5 for far too long. | ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: | You can find what you desire but you always have to pay for | it. | | ASUS ProArt X670E-Creator WIFI, 10G & 2.5G at 460EUR | | 10G simply isn't that cheap. The cheapest 5 port switch is | 220EUR. Upgrading my home net would be rather expensive. | vetinari wrote: | What makes is more expensive is insisting on 10GBase-T. | 10G over SFP+ is not that expensive; the cheapest 4 port | switch (Mikrotik CRS305) is ~130 EUR. | MrFoof wrote: | You can go down to 50W idle, but it requires some _very | specific_ hardware choices where the ROI will never | materialize, some of which aren't available yet for Zen4. | | I have... | | * AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5750GE | | * 128GB ECC DDR4-3200 | | * Intel XL710-QDA2 _(using QSFP+ to a quad-SFP+ passive DAC | breakout)_ | | * LSI 9500-16i | | * Eight WD 16TB HDDs (shucked) | | * Two 2TB SK Hynix P41 Platinum M.2 NVMe SSD | | * Two Samsung 3.84TB PM9A3 U.2 NVMe SSD | | * Two Samsung 960GB PM893 SATA SSD | | So that's the gist. Has a BMC, but dual 40GbE and can sustain | about 55GbE over the network _(in certain scenarios, 30-35GbE | for almost all)_ , running TrueNAS scale purely as a storage | appliance for video editing, a Proxmox cluster _(on 1L SFFs | with 5750GEs and 10GbE idling at 10W each!)_ mostly running | Apache Spark, a Pi4B 8Gb k3s cluster and lots more. Most of | what talks to it is either 40GbE or 10GbE. | | There is storage tiering set up so the disks are very rarely | hit, so they're asleep most of the time. It mostly is serving | data to or from the U.2s, shuffling it around automatically | later on. The SATA SSDs are just metadata. It actually boots | off a SuperMicro SuperDOM. | | ---- | | The Zen 3 Ryzen PRO 5750GEs are _unicorns_ , but super low | power. Very tiny idle _(they're laptop cores)_ , integrated | GPU, ECC support, and the memory protection features of EPYC. | 92% of the performance of a 5800X, but all 8C/16T flat out _(at | 3.95GHz because of an undervolt)_ caps at just under 39W | package power. | | The LSI 9500-16i gave me all the lanes I needed _(8 PCIe, 16 | SlimSAS)_ for the two enterprise U.2 and 8 HDDs, and was very | low idle power by being a newer adapter. | | The Intel dual QSFP+ NIC was deliberate as using passive DACs | over copper saved 4-5W per port _(8 at the aggregation switch)_ | between the NIC and the switch. Yes, really. Plus lower latency | _(than even fiber)_ which matters at these transfer speeds. | | The "pig" is honestly the ASRock X570D4U because the BMC is | 3.2W on its own, and X570 is a bit power hungry itself. But all | in all, the whole system idles at 50W, is usually 75-80W under | most loads, but can theoretically peak probably around 180-190W | if everything was going flat out. It uses EVERY single PCIe | lane available from the chipset and CPU to its fullest! Very | specific chassis fan choices and Noctua low profile cooler in a | super short depth 2U chassis. I've never heard it make a peep, | disks aside :) | ianai wrote: | Is the "e" for embedded? Ie needs to be bought in a package? | I'm not seeing many market options. | MrFoof wrote: | Nope. The extra E was for "efficiency", because they were | better binned than the normal Gs. Think of how much more | efficient 5950Xs were than 5900Xs, despite more cores. | | So the Ryzen PRO line is a "PRO" desktop CPU. So typical | AM4 socket, typical PGA (not BGA), etc. However they were | never sold directly to consumers, only OEMs. Typically they | were put in USFF (1L) form factors, and some desktops. They | were sold primarily to HP and Lenovo _(note: Lenovo PSB | fuse-locked them to the board -- HP didn 't)_. For HP | specifically, you're looking at the HP ProDesk and | EliteDesk _(dual M2.2280)_ 805 G8 Minis... which now have | 10GbE upgrade cards _(using the proprietary FlexIO V2 | port)_ available straight from HP, plus AMD DASH for IPMI! | | You could for a while get them a la carte from boutique | places like QuietPC who did buy Zen 3 Ryzen PRO trays and | half-trays, but they are _long_ gone. They 're also well | out of production. | | Now if you want one, they're mostly found from Taiwanese | disassemblers and recyclers who part out off-lease 1L | USFFs. The 5750GEs are the holy grail 8-cores, so they | command a massive premium over the 6-core 5650GEs. I | actually had a call with AMD sales and engineering on being | able to source these directly about a year ago, and though | they were willing, they couldn't help because they were no | longer selling them into the channel themselves. Though the | engineer sales folks were really thrilled to see someone | who used every scrap of capability of these CPUs. They were | impressed that I was using them to sustain 55GbE of actual | data transfer _(moving actual data, not just rando network | traffic)_ in an extremely low power setup. | | -- ----- | | Also, I actually just logged in to my metered PDU, and the | system is idling right now at just 44.2W. So less than the | 50W I said, but I wanted to be conservative in case I was | wrong. :) | | 44.2W that has over 84TiB usable storage, with fully | automagic ingest and cache that helps to serve 4.5GiB/sec | to 6.5GiB/sec over the network _ain 't bad_! | ianai wrote: | Nice! Wish they were easier to obtain!! | MrFoof wrote: | Agreed! Despite being PCIe 3.0, these were _perfect_ home | server CPUs because of the integrated GPU and ECC | support. The idles were a bit higher than 12th gen Intels | _(especially the similarly tough to find "T" and | especially "TE" processors)_ mostly because of X570s | comparatively higher power draw, but if you ran DDR5 on | the Intel platform it was kind of a wash, and under load | the Zen 3 PRO GEs won by a real margin. | | My HP ProDesk 405 G8 Minis with a 2.5GbE NIC (plus the | built in 1GbE which supported AMD DASH IPMI) idled at | around 8.5W, and with the 10GbE NICs that came out around | June, are more around 9.5W -- with a 5750GE, 64GB of | DDR4-3200 (non-ECC), WiFi 6E and BT 5.3, a 2TiB SK Hynix | P31 Gold (lowest idle of any modern M.2 NVMe?), and | modern ports including 10Gb USB-C. Without the WiFi/BT | card it might actually get down to 9W. | | The hilarious thing about those is they have an onboard | SATA connector, but also another proprietary FlexIO | connector that can take an NVIDIA GTX 1660 GB! You want | to talk a unicorn, try _finding_ those GPUs in the wild! | I 've _never_ seen one for sale separately! If you get | the EliteDesk (over the ProDesk) you also get a 2nd | M2.2280 socket. | | I have three of those beefy ProDesk G8s in a Proxmox 8 | cluster, and it mostly runs Apache Spark jobs, sometimes | with my PC participating _(how I know the storage server | can sustain 55GbE data transfer!)_ , and it's hilarious | that you have this computerized stack of napkins making | no noise that's fully processing _(reading, transforming, | and then writing)_ 3.4GiB /sec of data -- closer to | 6.3GiB/sec if my 5950X PC is also participating. | | ----- | | If you want a 5750GE, check eBay. That's where you'll | find them, and rarely NewEgg. Just don't get Lenovo | systems unless you want the whole thing, because the CPUs | are PSB fuse-locked to the system they came in. | | 4750GEs are Zen 2s and cheaper _(half the price)_ , and | pretty solid, but I think four fewer PCIe lanes. Nothing | "wrong" with a 5750G per se, but they cap more around | 67-68W instead of 39W. | | Just if you see a 5750GE, grab it ASAP. People like me | hunt those things like the unicorns they are. They go | FAST. Some sellers will put up 20 at a time, and they'll | all be gone within 48 hours. | | ----- | | I really look forward to the Zen 4 versions of these | chips, and the eventual possibility of putting 128GiB of | memory into a 1L form factor, or 256GiB into a low power | storage server. I won't need them _(I 'm good for a | looooong time)_, but it's nice to know it'll be a thing. | | Intel 15th gen may be surprising as well, as it's such a | massive architecture shift. | | Obscenely capable home servers that make no noise and | idle in the 7-10W range are utterly fantastic. | ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: | I'm looking at an LSI 9300-16i which is 100EUR (refurbished) | including the cables. I just have to flash it myself. Even a | 9305 is triple the cost for around half the power draw. | | My build is storage, gaming and a bunch of VMs. | | Used Epyc 7000 was the other option for a ton more PCIe. I | have no need for more network speed. | MrFoof wrote: | Yep. 9300s are very cheap now. 9400s are less cheap. 9500s | are not cheap. 9600s are new and pricey. | | As I said, you can't recoup the ROI from the reduced power | consumption, even if you're paying California or Germany | power prices. Though you can definitely get the number | lower! | | I had this system _(and the 18U rack)_ in very close | proximity in an older, non-air conditioned home for a | while. So less heat meant less heat and noise. I also | deliberately chased, _" how low can I go (within reason)"_ | while still chasing the goal of local NVMe performance over | the network. Which makes the desire to upgrade non- | existent, even 5+ years from now. | | Not cheap, but a very fun project where I learned a lot and | the setup is absolutely silent! | dist-epoch wrote: | > 3-5W per 8GB of RAM | | I think that's wrong. It would mean 4*6=25W per DIMM. | | I also have 48GB DDR5 DIMMs and HwInfo shows 6W max per module. | 1letterunixname wrote: | I feel like an petrochem refinery with my 44 spinning rust units | NAS 847E16-RJBOD, 48 port POE+ 10 GbE switch, 2 lights-out and | environmental monitoring UPSes, and DECISO OPNsense router using | a combined average of 1264W. ]: One UPS is at least reporting a | power factor with an efficiency of 98%, while the other one isn't | as great at 91%. | | APM is disabled on all HDDs because it just leads to delay and | wear for mythological power savings that isn't going to happen in | this setup. Note that SMART rarely/never predicts failures, but | one of the strongest signals of drive failures is slightly | elevated temperatures (usually as a result of bearing wear). | | This creates enough waste heat such that one room never needs | heating, but cooling isn't strictly needed either because there's | no point to reducing datacenter ambient below 27 C. | syntheticnature wrote: | I was looking into water heaters that use heat pumps recently, | and a lot of them function by sucking heat out of the room. | While water and computers don't mix, might be an even better | use for all that waste heat... | Palomides wrote: | amusing to read this very detailed article and not have any idea | what OP actually does with 72TB of online storage | | 1gbe seems a bit anemic for a NAS | alphabettsy wrote: | Very cool write up. Good timing too as I find myself attempting | to reduce the power consumption of my homelab. | vermaden wrote: | Good read. | | Tried something similar in the past: | | - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/silent-fanless-fre... | | - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/silent-fanless-del... | uxp8u61q wrote: | I know nothing about building NASs so maybe my question has an | obvious answer. But my impression is that most x64 CPUs are | thoroughly beaten by Arm or RISC-V CPUs when it comes to power | consumption. Is there a specific need for the x64 architecture | here? I couldn't find an answer in TFA. | hmottestad wrote: | You can very easily run docker containers on it. That's why I | went with a ryzen chip in mine. | | You could always use an rpi if you want to go with ARM, and | you'll want something with ARMv8. | adrian_b wrote: | Most Arm or RISC-V CPUs (with the exception of a few server- | oriented models that are much more expensive than x86) have | very few PCIe lanes and SATA ports, so you cannot make a high | throughput NAS with any of them. | | There are some NAS models with Arm-based CPUs and multiple | SSDs/HDDs, but those have a very low throughput due to using | e.g. only one PCIe lane per socket, with at most PCIe 3 speed. | arp242 wrote: | > my impression is that most x64 CPUs are thoroughly beaten by | Arm or RISC-V CPUs when it comes to power consumption | | Not really. | | ARM (and to lesser degree, RISC-V) are often used and optimized | for low-power usage and/or low-heat. x64 is often more | optimized for maximum performance, at the expense of higher | power usage and more heat. For many x64 CPUs you can | drastically reduce the power usage if you underclock the CPU | just a little bit (~10% slower), especially desktop CPUs but | also laptops. | | There are ARM and RISC-V CPUs that consume much less power, but | they're also much slower and have a much more limited feature- | set. You do need to compare like to like, and when you do the | power usage differences are usually small to non-existent in | modern CPUs. ARM today is no longer the ARM that Wilson et al. | design 40 years ago. | | And for something connected to mains, even doubling the | efficiency and going from 7W to 3.5W doesn't really make all | that much difference. It's just not a big impact on your energy | bill or climate change. | pmontra wrote: | I'm using an Odroid HC4 as my home server. It has an ARM CPU | and it's idling at 3.59 W now with a 1 TB SATA 3 SSD and some | web apps that are basically doing nothing, because I'm their | only user. It's got a 1 GB network card, like my laptop. I can | watch movies and listen to music from its disk on my phone and | tablet. | | There is no need to have something faster. The SATA 3 bus would | saturate a 2.5 GB card anyway. The home network in Cat 6A so it | could go up to 10 GB. We'll see what happens some years from | now. | sandreas wrote: | There is a german forum thread with a google docs document | listing different configurations below 30W[1]. Since there are | very different requirements, this might be interesting for many | homeserver / NAS builders. | | For me personally I found my ideal price-performance config to be | the following hardware: Board: Fujitsu D3417-B2 | CPU: Intel Xeon 1225 V5 (better the also compatible 1275v6, but | its way more expensive) RAM: 64GB ECC RAM (4x16GB) | SSD: WD SN850x 2TB (consumer SSD) Case: Fractal Design | Define Mini C Cooling: Big block no name, passively cooled | by case fan Power: Pico PSU 120W + 120W Leicke power supply | Remote Administration via Intel AMT + MeshCommander using a DP | Dummy Plug | | I bought this config used VERY CHEAP and I am running Proxmox - | it draws 9.3W idle (without HDDs). There are 6 SATA ports and a | PCIe port, if anyone would like to add more space or passthrough | a dedicated GPU. | | It may be hard to get, but I paid EUR380,00 in total. Does not | work very well for Media Encoding, here you should go for a Core | i3 8100 or above. Alternatively you could go for the following | changes, but these might be even harder to get for a reasonable | price: Boards: GIGABYTE C246N-WU2 (ITX), Gigabyte | C246-WU4 (mATX), Fujitsu D3517-B (mATX), Fujitsu D3644 (mATX) | Power: Corsair RM550x (2021 Version) | | Cheap used Workstations that are good servers are Dell T30 or | Fujitsu Celsius W550. The Fujitsu ones have D3417(-A!) boards | (not -B) having proprietary power supplies with 16 power pins (no | 24pin ATX but 16pin). There are Adapters on Aliexpress for 24PIN | to 16pin (Bojiadafast), but this is a bit risky - I'm validating | that atm. | | Ryzen possibilities are pretty rare, but there are reports that | the AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G with a Asus PRIME B550M-A Board is | drawing about 16W Idle. | | Hope I could help :-) | | [1]: https://goo.gl/z8nt3A | manmal wrote: | For anybody reading this - I think it's a great config, but | would be careful around pico PSUs in case you want to run a | bunch of good old spinning disks. HDDs have a sharp power peak | when spinning up, and if you have a couple of them in a RAID, | they might do so synchronously, potentially exceeding the | envelope. | agilob wrote: | to go deeper, depending on a file system, some FS won't let | HDDs go to sleep, so they always consume power for max RPM. | ksjskskskkk wrote: | b550m with a amd5 pro from 2023 (will double check models and | post on that forum) | | i get 9w idle and amd pro cpus have ECC support which is a | requirement for me on any real computer. i disable most | components on the board. it's bottom tier consumer quality. | | best part is when i need to burn many more watts the integrated | gpu is pretty decent | ulnarkressty wrote: | As exciting as it is to design a low power system, it's kind of | pointless in the case of a NAS that uses spinning rust as storage | media - as the author later writes, the HDD power consumption | dwarfs the other system components. | | If one uses SSD or M.2 drives, there are some solutions on the | market that provide high speed hardware RAID in a separate | external enclosure. Coupled with a laptop board they could make | for a decent low power system. Not sure how reliable USB or | Thunderbolt is compared to internal SATA or PCIe connections | though... would be interesting to find out. | V__ wrote: | Don't they stop spinning when idle? | layer8 wrote: | Not by default, but you can have the OS have them spin down | after a certain idle period. Doing that too frequently can | affect the life time of the drive though. You save maybe 4 | Watts per drive by spinning them down. | orthoxerox wrote: | They are never idle if the NAS is seeding torrents. | nabla9 wrote: | You can shut down HDD's when you don't use them. | sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdX | homero wrote: | Crucial Force GT supposed to say Corsair | treprinum wrote: | My NAS has Pentium J 4-core and is way under 7W idle, inside some | small Fractal case with 6x20TB HDD. Why would you need 12th/13th | gen for file transfers? | wffurr wrote: | For encoding maybe? OP says "reasonable CPU performance for | compression" and also it was a CPU they already had from a | desktop build. | dbeley wrote: | Interesting I assume it's with all drives off, how many Watts | with some disk usage? | jepler wrote: | Author seems to have built 5 systems from 2016 to 2023, or around | every other year. | | Some parts (e.g., RAM) are re-used across multiple builds | | It's interesting to wonder: How much $$ is the hardware cost vs | the lifetime energy costs? Is a more power-hungry machine that | would operate for 4 years better than one that would operate for | 2 years? | | The motherboard + CPU is USD 322 right now on pcpartpicker. At | USD 0.25/kWh (well above my local rate but below the highest | rates in the US), 36W continuous over 4 years is also about $315. | So, a ~43W, 4-year system might well be cheaper to buy and | operate than a 7W, 2-year system. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-12-31 23:00 UTC)