I’ve got a NAS built in a Node 304 mini itx case that works great, but uses a ton of power. In Unraid (the OS for my NAS) there is some kind of issue with the Ryzen 3900x processor that I’m running that means I have to disable all sleep states - so it’s always at it’s 100W TDP. Power is super expensive where I live so I’d love to find something more power efficient.
Does it make more sense to buy a more recent(ish) 5th gen ryzen in hopes that the sleep states will work, and thus save money by keeping my existing motherboard?
Or I could go with something a bit more interesting. I’ve seen on Aliexpress motherboards with mobile CPU’s soldered which are very power efficient. For example the N100 has an insane 6W TDP and comes on special boards with lots of sata ports and 2.5G networking (link). The worry with the n100 though is that it only officially supports 16G of ram which might not be enough for zfs.
Any thoughts? Is anyone running a power-efficient build who could throw some advice my way? Thanks!
If you’re really worried about power use, you could switch to an itx motherboard with an soc laptop chip in it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
itx motherboard with an soc laptop chip
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Have you measured the power consumption with a kill-a-watt (or similar)?
I have the nas connected to a UPS that reports it’s power draw and it sits at about 100W at all times. There are one or two other small devices connected to it usually, so the nas itself is probably using a hair less that that at idle, but still it’s quite high.
This seems very suspicious, get a cheap watt metter and test it with that. If it still says 100W I would say there’s something wrong in your CPU, motherboard or software. Not necessarily the CPU, can be the motherboard or simply your Linux is set to run the CPU at full clock all the time.
Btw, I have a Ryzen 5 2600 and that thing goes down to 20W or so.
I specifically had to set things up in the BIOS so that it would never enter any efficient power/sleep states. It’s a bug in the OS I’m using that was forcing me to do it, otherwise the whole thing would lock up on me.
That said, I have some smart-plugs that do power monitoring. I can try hooking up the nas to one of those just for kicks, it should be accurate enough for this sort of thing.
Edit: Just measured and looks like I was about right: 100W under load and around 80W idle
I’ve got a 3800x that has plenty of performance but also uses a lot of power and I’m seriously considering upgrading to a 5700G. It’s about 170 from Amazon right now.
Also, I don’t think you’re going to want your NAS to sleep/standby, that’s really not typical.
I guess that’s a good point, but then is the right move to just get the lowest power CPU possible? I really don’t need it to do all that much and rn it’s hogging power.
Honestly, when Unraid is the culprit, why not change that instead?
I would, and I plan to someday, but my whole storage system is setup on it and migrating would be an enormous pain. Also right now I rely on it’s ability to create a RAID array with differently sized drives. Next time I upgrade, I plan go get homogeneous drives, so maybe then would be the time to move away from Unraid.
Hm, you could set up a virtual machine on whatever host OS and have Unraid run in that instead.
I’ve thought about that before, I’ve used proxmox in the past and liked it. The hope I guess would be that proxmox is better able to handle the physical hardware than Unraid is, and the Unraid can blissfully mismanage it’s vCPUs all it wants! I don’t love the overhead of having a hypervisor, but maybe it would be worth it in this case.
It’s certainly odd that your current CPU draws so much power if it isn’t under load. I would try to investigate that further.
That said, zfs ram requirements are related to the total storage. If you don’t have hundreds of terabyte storage, 16GB ram should be sufficient.
I’m looking at the TerraMaster F4-423 which is basically an Intel NUC soldered to a SATA controller. It has 4x 3.5" SATA bays, an internal USB slot for the OS, 2x m.2 slots, HDMI output, 2x 2.5G LAN, etc. Comes with 4GB RAM, supports up to 32GB. I think it’s the smallest NAS with custom OS you can get.
