@@techster1689 He touches on that in the video.. I think it would be great but could be costly as you'd need a laptop that has 2 nvme slots with enough lanes
Example with old China bitcoin miner is not a best one, because even old S5/S7/B8 miners is aprox 25.000 more efficient and consume 175.000x less energy comparing to even modern CPU ;-) all the rest is good and useful. We build and optimize server solutions for years...
Very useful info. How I solved it right now is having 3 i3 NUCs in a cluster with 1 i3 SFF Mobo with SSD storage, where I move loads to one if not needed and shut down 2 hosts. When I plan on using it more intensively, I spin both hosts up and it will load-balance automagically. One NUC is 15w top, 5w on no load. The TrueNAS i3 uses roughly the same.
I rarely ever engage after watching a video, but I have recently tried to do some research myself, and I had *a lot* of difficulty finding any good resources at all. This must have taken a very long time and it explains the relevant properties to look out for really well. Thank you for that!
As someone who is about to build my very first NAS and live in a country where our power bills literally cost an arm and a leg, this video is very helpful. I bought my hard drives yesterday and am going o do the setup and configuration today. Thank you for taking the time and effort to make this video.
Same. My roommates won't let me run my computer because it looks scary (Dell PowerEdge case) and they think it will with absolute certainty trip the breaker. Meanwhile they're willfully oblivious to the 1800 watts the space heater uses.
@@user2C47 My microwave combined with a coffee maker trips the breaker every second day when I inevitably forget that I can't use both at the same time.
I'd absolutely love if there was a company that produced an appliance that is as power efficient as possible but maintains nearly the identical amount of performance to competitors or prior products. Like for example, instead of a 250W CPU we could theoretically have a 5-10W CPU with around the same performance and features will little to no noticeable difference. We need more efficient appliances with the same amount of computing horsepower instead of strongarm components that will blow a fuse if you even look at it wrong.
@@FatherlyFox that's exist and possible with cutting some useless functions and focusing on task goals. Like I mentioned upper fpga do their job already. Or limited arm/rockchip/realtek boards.
@@FatherlyFox Apple has already sort of done it but without the modularity. I have heard Qualcomm has a project to produce something similar but we'd need something that had feature parity from a gaming and business pov I feel before that would really be viable.
In the last 5 months I go on and off research on my little free time to get to a power efficient nas conclusion and my mind is dizzy from so much confusion and too much knowledge… I almost gave up till I found this video. You have no idea how much of a help is this. Thank you for all the really hard work you did on this and for all the information provided! Amazing! Just amazing!
Yeah our power costs in Australia compared to the rest of the world. Fortunately we have great solar plans so we only really need to be worried about power usage at night
@@thecookeman Where I am we don't really.. so even with my off grid system I try to keep everything as low as possible because my panels + batteries don't last all night sadly
Hi, in Ukraine before the Russian attack on the energy infrastructure the price for electricity was very low, but now, we must save energy and all your manual staring very actually. So thanks!
Thank you for introducing me to powertop. Absolutely spot on, I used to run my home PC (gaming spec) and a Xeon based NAS with 10 spinners and they added 1/3 to my energy bill (not all wasted though, they do heat my small office). However, with the recent energy price increases, looking around for savings, they were the first to go, much to the displeasure of my wife, losing Plex. I've recently set up a mini PC with external USB 5 bay chassis with SSDs and am running Proxmox for a power consumption that's a fraction of previous. I'll revisit my NAS but the old ebay 10gig rack switch had to go, that was 50W+ sitting idle all day. It's crazy how all this adds up to a base vampire load. I can comfortably afford the cost of energy, just refuse to subsidise the inept, criminally corrupt UK energy market.
13:52 Note that larger capacity drives generally have faster read/write, my 16TB EXOS 7200RPM drives have something like 250MB/s over SATA, if you are targeting power efficiency over IOPS you could get fewer larger drives, the up side is added room for expansion later. The downside is that re-building/resilvering an array can be harrowing if you dont have on-site redundancy, as re-building a 16TB drive can take days, and puts a lot of load on the remaining drives that were bought around the same time and have been in use for just as long as the drive that just failed If you dont have on-site redundancy, get more more smaller drives in software raid6/ ZFS-Z6 equivalent. With on site redundancy, i still recommend raid 6(lose any 2 drives without losing data) but you dont need as many drives to get the same usable storage, meaning lower power consumption. When buying drives i reccomend staggering their purchase and deployment. If you're moving from an old file server to a new one, i reccomend keeping the old file server up and running as redundancy, and after things are moved to the new server, wait a few months, then replace the drives in the old server with enough drives to give you redundancy for your main server. This waiting period also applies to if you are building 2 new servers. The reason i suggest spreading the ordering/deployment of the drives is that if they are all deployed at the same time, and one of them fails, that means they may all be close to failure, and re-building the array on the new machine might be enough to take down multiple drives, leaving you with only your backup server, and if they were purchased at the same time, and put through the same wear as the primary server, re-building the primary server may also render the secndary server's pool degraded.
I recently just moved to Europe and boy oh boy do I need this video. Thank you so much, Wolfgang for all the work you put into finding all this information out
Your work is definitely not in vain. I've been influenced by a lot of North American tech content that hasn't been focused on energy consumption and now my wallet reaps the energy bill consequences ;) thank you very much for sharing your own sound!
I'm sorry to hear you see it that way. I was referring to the difference in energy prizes at that moment in time. Of course 'consumerism' occurs in many places outside of the north American continent as well, but I was not saying or implying that in any way, anyhow.
I am *so* grateful for you to covering this topic and in such detail: I was coming round to the view that I was the only person in the world that cared about idle power consumption.... THANK YOU!!!
Greetings @Wolfgang, I just have to say that I'm amazed with all your videos. I love your detailed explanations and depth of knowledge. Thanks for sharing it with the world and please keep up the great work!
01:47 One more practical reason, possibly more important than all the other reasons, is that if you have (you should) a UPS connected then it'll greatly extend the system uptime during a power outage when it's more efficient.
Some really good points made here. Followed some of your advice & adjusted my spindown times similar to what you suggested. It's not a huge difference in terms of waiting for the drive to spin back up. 17:05 That did kill me! LoL Something about that noise, gets me every time Ha ha
built a power effecient nearly passively cooled nas/homeserver/media pc several years ago, still using it to this day, it has been running roughly 7 years now 24/7. idle consumption ranging between 10-20 watts and under max load/boot its roughly 60 watts. still proud of it. but yes power-save cpu states are mandatory and so is using a ssd for OS/boot disk. and then there is choosing the right OS for the build.
Modern systems can boot in a few seconds, so for a home with a small number of users you might be able to power off the server when it has been idle for an extended period. A low power home automation system can monitor the people and client devices in the home to sense when to turn the server on.
This is super useful. Thanks. Power is relatively inexpensive here (USA) but my energy costs have doubled in the past year. The local power company has some power reduction program but from anecdotal reports, it has been abused by the power company. I'd like to do a local-only version that controls all systems, shuts off idle systems either on demand or via schedule,
Ich finde es so geil, dass das einfach einer der deutschesten Themen ist. Leute aus den USA so: Power zum günstigsten Preis Während wir Deutschen das beste aus allen drei wollen: Power für einen günstigen Preis und günstigem Stromverbrauch. Ich selber hab zwar ne 12 kw/h Solaranlage mit 14 kw/h Speicher, jedoch achte ich auch sehr darauf nicht zu viel zu brauchen
I really enjoyed this video. I've been considering making a small home server, and regardless if I just piece together something from spare parts or go power efficient, your video gave me great ideas.
I only just came across this video today but what a find! I love this and have really learned to appreciate power efficiency etc. Over time, I have replaced all my lights at home with low-power alternatives, etc. Most of my PCs are now mini PCs, etc. Not sure what the power costs here, (Melbourne, Australia), I think the average is 30c per kWh, minus our solar panel rate, which, I think, is around 6c per kWh, although I don't think it's exactly cheap, still, why waste it if you don't have to. Thanks very much for this video, really learned a lot from it!
Improvements in power efficiency are really more impressive than improvements in speed over the history of computing, IMO. E.g. the ARM9 (2008) was almost 300,000 times faster than the Manchester Baby (1948), but consumed almost 200,000 times *less* power. That's an improvement in energy per instruction of 50 *billion* times. Mind-blowing.
also ich bin sehr beeindruckt, was du alles herausgesucht hast und hier in einem kurzen Video aufbereitet. Hervorragend genau solche Informationen habe ich dringend gesucht. Außerdem ist dein Englisch hervorragend.
From Puerto Rico, I find this very useful! We have crazy expensive electricity that goes out on the daily in many areas, so we have to rely on UPSs, solar and batteries, or a generator. So either we will pay too much or our backup power source runs out quicker. Thanks!
Awesome video, I'm also probably a little too obsessed with power consumption on devices on my home network. Even relatively low-power smart home devices and SBCs can result in substantial increases in utility costs when running 24/7 and in numbers (smart bulbs, plugs, displays etc.)
Wonderful video! Thank you. This answers the questions I had, as well as questions I hadn't even thought of yet! I was about ready to deploy my first home server, but it idles at 72W with the two WD Blacks (don't judge, they were very cheap) only consuming 8W each. Now I know where to look in order to optimize it :)
One thing I do for saving power with my NAS is having it turn itself off when I don't need it. I don't use it in the morning and during the night so I have it turn itself off during that time. I used an old 50 Euro office pc I bought on ebay, put a few used WD Red drives in there, put Ubuntu server on it and my power consumption is still under 25 Watts at idle (IIRC). It's not a super fast machine but it's plenty fast for Samba and Jellyfin.
Nicely done. Here in the US we have relatively cheap power in most places (around $0.10 per Kwh which works out to about $1 per year per watt) but you still get a lot of people running 24/7 servers based on old “boat anchor” servers or their old gaming PC, etc. Many have no idea they’re needlessly spending hundreds of dollars a year to power these hungry servers. I really like the Asrock J5040-ITX for server builds. It’s a fanless CPU and efficient motherboard. The J5040 has excellent performance per watt compared to the earlier generations like the N3xxx series, J1800, etc. The German “database” on low power builds is interesting. I’ve not seen anything like it in English just occasional discussions on Reddit and DIY server forums.
12:05 "if your building a conventional desktop PC, you're probably not gonna let it sit at idle and let it do nothing for the whole day" stairs at RGB lights for 8 hours
Component selection is important. 8 years ago I built my 3-node ESXi cluster and DIY SAN with a total consumption of 120W for all four servers *and* my network stack. It can be done! Modern hardware packs even more compute into fewer watts.
What a great video! Exactly what I have been looking for! I am in Europe as well (Sweden) and the electricity prices really make you think twice before deploying anything that will draw power all the time.
Its worth noting that you can also use LVM caching to accomplish something similar and frequently used files will remain available from your cache drive(s) automatically, without moving files around with a script.
This video is so useful i've been interested a lot by home server lately with NAS. And i've watched your previous vids about it and they were very good and this one is perfect to know more about which parts to look at. Thanks man 👍 definitely be useful in the future Edit: also great memes
Wolfgang this is the first video of yours I have seen but I am glad to see someone talking about power. I am in the UK and like you it is expensive and I found it confusing how nobody seemed concerned about the costs. I currently use a laptop as my home server, I will purchase a nas for storage to get me off the cloud and properly setup. I think this with the laptop is just about perfect. Low power, and a laptop is powerful enough to transcode 4k on the fly as well with the Intel graphics. Used laptops have some great features and often just don't cost that much at all and are plentiful. In the UK if you buy from cex used, everything has a 2 year warranty as well. Win.
I'd go quite a bit further - start by first looking at this from a data-use viewpoint. I have been doing this type of thing for about 15 years as I was running in Australia where power was 3x the price of Canada. Eventually I realised that the best approach was a super-low always-on solution and then block archiving to a "usually off" system (not in standby but powered off). You can use WoL to wake the archival server and in the end I've found that the archival servers (I use N36L's) are on perhaps once a month for dumping or retrieval. I run a Pi 4b with a 2.5" drive via USB3 - does all I need to for "active use" material, downloading (e.g. aria2 downloading service provider), etc. It also lets me archive in a disciplined manner, albeit in a time consuming one. I'm not sure of your use case scenario here (sounds like you've got a lot of video footage for editing, etc.) so that may not work the same way but for most people I think it's crucial to think from the information management perspective first - how am I going to use this thing, is an all-in-one system better or is it better to split the systems up, etc. The other big advantage of splitting is that you can bring in a lot more horsepower when you really need it and quite cheaply. I don't need that much but I have an ESXi Xeon e3 (ancient system) that I fire up when doing tests, etc. and I even have a half-missing thinkpad which I built from parts (it has no screen, keyboard, etc) but I wake it and use its old i5 to chomp on archives at a whim. You can script the wake and sleep cycles with the job you're running, the thing is completely powered off or in total standby almost all of the time each month.
Thanks Wolfgang's. I have a different reason for wanting a power efficient server. We in South Africa have load-shedding. Where the power goes out 2 to 4 times a day for 2 Hours each. So I run battery backup's to keep the power on my server going. So I try keep the wattage down so the battery's last longer.
Great Video! As a demonstration of how much a similar rated power supply can vary, I dropped from 37w to 29w idle by swapping out a bronze corsair 450w (1YO) to a gold (older) corsair SF450 supply I had kicking about. Testing it with just one sata ssd came down to 21w at the wall - not bad for a 8 year old Supermicro X10SLL Haswell setup with IPMI / E3-1271-V3 / 32gb mem.
Thanks Wolfgang, I now have a Pico ATX using the same hardware & some power saving advice from yours truly & gone from a system idling around 52kw to 17kw!
The thing I’m most interested in, after idle power draw is the ssd cache tier. I hope you spend a lot of time in various ways to configure it adequately for like truenas and a few others if you could. Logistically I hope the ssd cache is transparent, where the nas shares always present the ssd first and then falls back to hdd. There’s also the annoyance of windows explorer wanting to generate previews or access key frames of video, which in my experience cause random spin ups of my nas drives.
I'm wondering if it would be better with two NVMe arrays instead of just one "cache" array. With true tiering you would write anything to the cache array - the data would be moved. But for things such as logs, containers, VMs, etc, they should probably stay on a none-cache NVMe array, then use another NVMe array for caching only (read/write). This would require a minimum of 4 NVMe SSDs. Maybe something for Wolfgang to look into when he gets his new SSDs...? I'm using an old silent tower server for testing TrueNAS Scale to see if I can get rid of my 8 bay Synology NAS, and replace it with a 2-4U rack solution. But finding silent rack servers (might need two; one server and one jbos rack case) aren't that easy (in Norway). I would love for my disks to be able to spin down though as 9x% of the disk usage is new data (last month).
There's a lot of lording around by some people that like to be like "electricity costs nothing" I'm glad their lack of empathy does not deter good creators like you to make content that matter. Thank you Edit: I'm SURPRISED that those fujitsu boards are so efficient.. This link (german board) is amazing. As someone who has stuck with a terribly aged Dlink NAS and still working on putting together an efficient Homelab server for years I'm floored at the amount of info in there. So far I was not even thinking about the difference between ITX and mATX.. I had all the setups using full ATX (vs DC like mini pcs/laptops) categorised in my mind as ultra bad in idle (30W+) and seeing a board at 5W is CRAZY.. even the mini pcs I got with like 8100T are at 7W idle lol I'm going to dive in there like crazy
Kudos for the correction! Also thanks for teaching me about the idle consumption - didn't realize that was so importnat and that TDP correlates poorly with it.
Great video wolfgang, I live in Denmark and have been struggling for years to get information just like this. The hardware information in this video is extremely useful, and I'd love to see an OS/software setup equivalent. I run Proxmox on my homeserver, and the PM community isn't very interested in the subject of low power servers. Also, any experience with spinning down ZFS arrays? Taking inspiration from this video I've started collecting parts to try another ultra-low power build (my current idles at 40watts), but it would be great learning from those who have already tried this.
> any experience with spinning down ZFS arrays Personal experience, I have an iMac running 24/7 with a Firewire-800 ZFS drive as my daily driver, it stores the movies I want to watch short-term. Long-term storage is a ZFS tower with 2 pools, 6x4TB for Blurays and 4x6TB for DVDs. If you're not currently using a pool, you can ' zpool export ' it and run ' hdparm -y ' on the drives that make up that pool. This pretty much guarantees those drives won't spin up again until you re-import the pool, as nothing will be trying to send I/O to them. But to save maximum money, I only turn the tower on during the weekend - when electricity is cheaper - and copy short-term movies over to my iMac.
if you are worried about power consumption a laptop isnt a terrible choice. ive currently got my laptop "server" sitting in the room at idle sipping between 4.5 and 6.1 watts. (i think the "big" gap there is the external hard drive) it wont be as performant as something with a bit more effort put into it like what is in this video, but it will do filesharing and allow you to do stuff like turning on devices remotely via wake on lan using a remote desktop app such as parsec or chrome remote access. im also using it to sync a password database between my phone and pc so that i can self host my own "cloud" password manager. ive even run a few game servers like factorio, stationeers, rimworld open world (not the same colony multiplayer mod) and minecraft, though the lack of ram ended up killing that one within 3 weeks. its not a perfect solution, but its been very fun to mess with and is working pretty well for an old laptop from around 2016 and with minimal effort put into power savings.
Power efficiency in consumer computer systems has improved by leaps and bounds in the 25 years I've been using them. I'm super impressed when I see desktop systems that can hit an idle point at or under 10 watts. I found my recent gaming boards though to not be as efficient, idling around 20 watts. What were you using to monitor power usage over time?
Living in a big city in the US. I don’t have huge concerns with power. But it’s really fun to optimize it all! If it saves me money on running costs then that’s a plus to me!
Here's that single user. Job done. But seriously, there is not a lot of info out there for building a server that is quiet and not a complete overkill or a raspberry pi. Kudos!
Great vid, just a side note. Being a "T" series CPU sometimes affects more than just TDP. For example, the i5 3470 is a 4core, 4thread part but the i5 3470T is actually a 2 core, 4 thread chip.
Love those who say power efficiency is a waste of time to save such a little bit. First multiply that by billions of systems across the globe, then you see a far greater picture of the over all need for power efficiency. The impact against the environment is huge with even a slight change to power draw...as an over all picture. And in society, it is about working together to make sure we all have a good environment to live in. If you aren't going to work together, there is no need for society at all. We came together to help educate our young, build a better tomorrow, etc. If you can lower the power use from your systems, it is a honorable thing to do for society, the planet, and for the human race. Love videos like this that help us to think of better ways to save energy use.
Power efficiency was always my concern when I started learning selfhosting, since I would be running the hardware 24/7. That's why I've been sticking with a raspberry pi and an old x240 thinkpad. Now I've gained more knowledge on how to upgrade my hardware while still keeping the power cost down. Just curious, are Pico ATX reliable on a 24/7 usage?
Thank you. Even if I didn't care about electricity bills, which I do (power here is extremely expensive as well) you're helping us to build a more power EFFICIENT system, and I love efficiency, either power or anything else. Thank you.
Love your home server videos - currently I'm using a Raspberry Pi with an external SSD as my "home server', but I'm excited to go through your videos again when the time finally comes to upgrade to something beefier :-) One question - would you say your current build when idle is quiet enough to have in a Wohnheim?
This is a excellent and important video. It is a shame more are not covering this subject. Whilst I realise it is country dependent based on energy prices, the days of picking up some cheap second hand server off ebay to make a homemade 27/4 NAS are long gone. Any savings would be quickly lost due to power usage.
Thank you for the informative video, exactly what I needed during this odd period. What kind of hardware/software do you use to monitor your power usage?
If you need a server that will host few apps for your local home lab, I will always recommend buy used Dell Wyse 5070 with J5005 CPU and 8GB ddr4 and some m2 SSD. It has 4 cores, idles at ~4,7W with max 10W. Much better alternative than RPI4, perfect for Home Assistant or just docker host. For home NAS, you'd need to look for something with SATA ports.
Really interesting! I wanted to make a video about this but concerning gaming desktop PCs, for example a PC with a 12900K and a 3090Ti vs a PC with the most power-efficient parts without sacrificing too much performance. Do you think it's worth chasing as a topic, or is the cost negligible at that point?
Another thumbs up here! LTT also did an ultra-low power build under the guise of the 'Prepper' PC recently that touched on that, but a more detailed take would be interesting. Just having similar concepts doesn't necessarily make it copying or unoriginal as its all in your execution and take on the idea. There's definitely a lot of room for exploring low-power and efficient gaming... Even just taking a quick example of Xbox Series S vs top tier dedicated graphics as a comparison; the Series S pulls about 70-75w in use but maxed out 3090Ti rig is probably 10x that!
Not even half way through your video, but I must say: Thank you. I'm living in Germany and, yes, not only the (higher and higher) energy bill is something I consider but also the environment. I'm searching since month to get the most performant vs. energy saving ratio server for home labs. Thanks for your video. Keep up the good work and don't get to much into that stupid haters.
Have you considered looking into MSI's ECO motherboard lineup? It has plenty of features for low-power use, like disabling parts of the motherboard, optimization for S and T Intel CPUs, etc. The second generation motherboard supports up to 2400MHz DDR4 and 7th-gen Intel CPUs. I don't see anyone else discussing the lineup much, but I feel you might find it fascinating.
Hooo this one is useful to know. I've never thought of power efficiency for home server before this, all the tutorial I've seen is only "build your own server" or "cheap server for your home" but never mentioned power consumption. Good to know :D
Nice video and information! I think it would also be interesting with a video about what can be done if you want a desktop PC that could both do crazy high performance and have low idle power consumption as well. Like a Ryzen 7900x with a 10-20W idle, for example. (Perhaps a hotkey in windows to enable/disable cores, motherboard features, graphics card performance, etc, to manually help it go to lower power would be necessary?).
Check the settings under "Energy" in Windows Settings. There is quite a lot you can configure. Also, modern graphics card power down while under low load automatically (they reduce clock frequency of GPU and RAM quite significantly, for example). CPUs themselves go into lower power states in milliseconds.
where to put the nuclear waste? is america offering a suitable depot that can provide 50000 years of safety? the price for that energy is paid by our children’s children and so forth when something goes wrong
@@pflegefachkraft7595 Nuclear waste production has been reduced significantly at every generation, it's not the 1950s anymore. The fourth generation that's only a couple of years away will be another huge leap in that department, with recycling and transmutation of waste. It's a long topic to present in a comment on youtube, but in short we produce a lot more energy, way more efficiently, with a lot less combustible and a lot less waste, and the waste left will have way shorter half-life. Not to mention the moment when we begin making fusion reactors in the future. Not "if", when. That's the ultimate win : free energy forever. If you want to know more about waste management, don't look at the USA, they suck at it. Look at the french. In any case, for our children, we must help the planet with the CO2 problem while not sending them back to the stone age and also giving them the tools to one day conquer fusion... and then space. For that, the only solution is nuclear energy.
@@billmurray7676 i don’t see the correlation between supporting nuclear power and fusion reactors. The nuclear waste that already leaks out in abandoned salt-mines provisionally is just waiting to become a problem and to my knowledge france just about recycles 40% - and while recycling you get plutonium which is the stuff for atom bombs… the whole matter about nuclear just doesn’t leave a good gut feeling…
@@pflegefachkraft7595 It's fine, you're just uneducated on the subject, like most people. Also, I don't know where you are, but some countries (like Germany for example) also suffers from heavy anti-nuclear propaganda, in part from anti-technology extremist groups who dream about the stoneage and the other part is probably russian propaganda if you're in Europe. Anyway, I suggest you do your own research. It's really important for people to know the truth on this subject because nuclear energy is the only way forward.
Regarding the start / stop argument and the 300k value found in the forums: All WD Ultrastar are made for "only" 50k start / stop circles. This is stated in their >300 pages huge "user manual" pdf, which can be easily found online. I never seen a higher value. But finally in 10 years you still would have 14 spins per day, which should be still hard to reach.
I recently build myself a little Homeserver with an i3 4130 for the occasional transcoding needs. That thing runs idle on 7.3 Watts and with storage for movies on about 14.5 watts. Absolutely loving it. The system cost me around 50 bucks in total. The drives I'm using are worth 4 times the system 😂. If i ever need more CPU horsepower, I could chug in my old 4690k. Really nice to have that as an option
Power efficiency == higher performance. Also superior design. Even when power is cheap(er), I always am power consumption conscious. Because excessive heat in the Summer only compounds inefficiency in need to cool the environment with A/C. Here, we spend in excess of $600.00/month in electricity to cool some homes in the middle of Summer in the desert. So, this is a great video. Low noise, low power consumption, is as worthy a pursuit as overclocking. After all, it's trying to get the most bang our of your buck! Replacing an older Samsung cold cathode tube monitor with a modern LED lit Asus, dropped power from 160W to 11W! 80Plus PSUs are a must and no one should still run legacy PSUs that were 50-60% efficient. My daily drivers have been converted to business laptops in docking stations to become desktop replacements. The drop in power consumption is significant. As well as noise. These systems I leave running 24/7. Always accessing something, or providing media server duty. I will have to review your build in detail, as its power requirements are impressive!
Thanks for your amazing videos. I bought a Fujitsu D3401-H mobo, an i3-6100 and a Pico Psu with 3 sata connectors (no splitter needed), all together with less than 70 euros and now the system idles at 10 Watts (used to be 27). Something prevents the system from going lower than C3, but I don't think I want to remove any hardware. The only problem is that with the Fujitsu Mobo, I can't manually control the fans, or maybe I am blind. :)
While watching your video I remembered I had an old Fujitsu, I checked it and it is CELSIUS W550 POWERn model with a D3417 motherboard, Intel xeon E3-1245, everything for a NAS. Thank you !!
I retired my relatively power hungry esxi hosted home server (dell 1u chassis) for a combo Raspberry PI (router/firewall with docker home automation server... less than 4 watts) and Synology diskstation (15-40 watts depending on what it's doing but generally less than 20 watts). Amazing how when you're paying the electric bill yourself you start thinking of power efficiency as pretty important.
I recently grabbed an old HP ZBook 15 G3 as a home server. The laptop was so cosmetically damaged that it was hardly worth anything. But: 4x DDR4 SODIMM slots with ECC support 2x M.2 SSD slots 1x 2,5" HDD/SSD slot 2x thunderbolt ports Intel networking Battery serves as UPS Quadcore Xeon CPU which idles at ~5W but can really throw punches at ~45W load Idle, the server uses about 10-15W. Under load (and I need to add some more storage) it's about 40-50W.
The last mechanical hard drives I owned used 14 watts a piece. I had 10 of them in my video editing workstation in 2008 and it pulled a lot of power. I've since switched to all solid state drives which use about a quarter of a watt each so that was my biggest savings and energy my editing workstation uses 62 Watts at idle. Now I also bought a small fanless mini computer for my web server that uses between 10 and 15 watts and that's on 24/7. It also uses two solid state drives.
Very much agree with your philosophy here. my plex server is built from an Asrock j5005 ITX (with processor soldered on) board with 16gb so-dimm ddr4 ram, 256 samsung 960 evo (c:drive) a Crucial mx500 500gb swap drive, a 16tb WD spindle drive, and an older 8tb Seagate drive, powered by a 120 watt pico-pcu from an old 12v laptop pcu. At rest it consumes around 16 watt, measured at the wall, and when "serving" 18-20 watt. When i surf the web and do daily (though simple) things it pulls 18-24 watt. It's not for heavy tasks at all, but for what it is for, it is fine. and it's sooo frugal.
This is probably one of the best videos I’ve watched on RUclips on a long time. Thank you for the huge efforts put into this, and teve detailed information
I find this Video very useful and helpful. I'm in the US and in this town and state the power cost is $0.14Kwh. So keeping my power bill down is what I have to do but Running over 200 servers for customers is hard to keep power cost down. So I balance it out between cost of the server and power bill.
Power is pretty expensive in the UK, I run a blade system with 16 Blade Server each with Dual E5649 (Westmere EP) Based processors and two EMC SAN arrays and that is my home lab, running over 100 VM's. This solution provides a maximum of 2TB of usable ram in my current setup and approximately 110 TB of storage (Not including NAS drives that are used for general stuff storage). Now clearly for my use case this type of low power approach just would not cut it in terms of my demand for low latency and low CPU ready running my vSphere environment, if all you need is a low density server for a couple of VM's here or some low powered bulk storage there this solution will work great but it is not the kind of solution that will replace the large scale lab for anyone that has a need to do high levels of virtualised compute. Very informative. well researched and detailed video and might well come in handy to build things for friends but I can't see this type of solution replacing my setup any time soon.
I have looked at the WD lineup and while they have interesting colors (green for "light computing", blue for "capacity for creators", black for "tuned for gaming" and red for "performance of NAS systems"), there are other colors that people don't usually get in contact with. They also have gold for "reliable performance for enterprise applications" and purple for "high-capacity for 24/7 use". I have invested into a few WD purple drives for my server and I am quite happy with their performance. I also put WD purple SD cards into one of my surveilance cameras and until now, that one has outlasted all the other SD cards that I have.
IN my case I live in an apartment and electricity is included in the rent but with a single circuit for all devices in my living room. that includes the air conditioning. If I run a traditional server and the AC at the same time, I blow the circuit. Part of the issue I believe is the breakers are from the 1 70's and worn and need to be replaced as well. So, If I can get a server that runs on twenty-three watts my chance of blowing the circuit and being able to keep my AC and lights, laptop, and monitors on is much better.
I went in the same way, Now I found ,that Cooling is much easier and I was able to install my rack behind the glass cabinet so It looks really good. If you save on power, you can also make it looks so good and also a lot quieter .
Yesterday I watched a video, where somebody who had, two almost identical machines but one was set up as fanless and the other one with fans. The one with cooling fans was using more power. Now even though it's a low-power system and didn't have much for fans it's still used a lot more power because of the fans. This made me think if I just use a less expensive larger 3U or 4U case with a more efficient cooling fan or even no fan that might save a lot of power over the course of a year.
OH GOD! Now I'm a power saving freak like you! Seriously though, I run an R820 and it costs me more than $30 a month (almost $400 a year!) to keep it running 24/7. I don't keep it up all the time but I have other stuff I do want up 24/7, so I run all of the important stuff from a low power more modern machine. Great video!
Fantastic video, Wolfgang. I was searching for guidance on building a power efficient homeserver (since living in southern Germany...) and this helps out a lot. I was even looking into the hw forum but overlooked this thread.
elmuz's Mover script: github.com/notthebee/infra/blob/29aacdb50ee28d3728b0fbcd542f2fa4d5396219/roles/filesystems/mergerfs/templates/mergerfs-uncache.j2
Hardwareluxx forum thread: www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamsten-systeme-30w-idle.1007101/
Hardwareluxx Google doc: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI
Jeff Geerling's Petabyte Pi project: ruclips.net/video/BBnomwpF_uY/видео.html
LTT's SSD-only NAS: ruclips.net/video/TWRvB8fh8T8/видео.html
Full build:
- Supermicro SC833
- Fujitsu D3402-B11
- Intel Core i3-6100
- 32GB DDR4 2133Mhz
- 1TB Crucial P100 NVMe SSD
- 1TB SanDisk Extreme SATA SSD
- 4xWD Red Pro HDD 8TB 7200RPM
- 4xWD Red Sata SSD 2TB
- Mellanox ConnectX-3 10Gbe SFP+
- ASM1166 6xSATA Adapter
- PicoPSU 160W + Leicke 150W 12V 13A
@@techster1689 He touches on that in the video.. I think it would be great but could be costly as you'd need a laptop that has 2 nvme slots with enough lanes
Thanks for the links
Example with old China bitcoin miner is not a best one, because even old S5/S7/B8 miners is aprox 25.000 more efficient and consume 175.000x less energy comparing to even modern CPU ;-)
all the rest is good and useful.
We build and optimize server solutions for years...
Very useful info. How I solved it right now is having 3 i3 NUCs in a cluster with 1 i3 SFF Mobo with SSD storage, where I move loads to one if not needed and shut down 2 hosts.
When I plan on using it more intensively, I spin both hosts up and it will load-balance automagically.
One NUC is 15w top, 5w on no load. The TrueNAS i3 uses roughly the same.
@@MrLexhoya You know you should make a video/blog about this.. it's hard to grasp everything from 1 paragraph but it still seems quite interesting
I rarely ever engage after watching a video, but I have recently tried to do some research myself, and I had *a lot* of difficulty finding any good resources at all. This must have taken a very long time and it explains the relevant properties to look out for really well. Thank you for that!
I came here to say exactly the same thing!
Same, i dident even knew about PicoPSU´s before!
Same... 👍
As someone who is about to build my very first NAS and live in a country where our power bills literally cost an arm and a leg, this video is very helpful.
I bought my hard drives yesterday and am going o do the setup and configuration today.
Thank you for taking the time and effort to make this video.
You from Germany?
Thank you! I can now convince my dad his house won’t become a power plant when I build my homelab
Alternatively you could make it a solar power plant! But yeah this is a good bunch of arguments.
Same. My roommates won't let me run my computer because it looks scary (Dell PowerEdge case) and they think it will with absolute certainty trip the breaker.
Meanwhile they're willfully oblivious to the 1800 watts the space heater uses.
@@user2C47 My microwave combined with a coffee maker trips the breaker every second day when I inevitably forget that I can't use both at the same time.
@@VileStorms change it lol
@@potaetoupotautoe7939 Can't tear open the walls and replace the wiring in an apartment building so that it can support 20Amps.
I genuinely find power efficiency more interesting than high performance.
Then you should know, custom ASIC is 10.000++ more efficient vs multipurpose std CPU.
I'd absolutely love if there was a company that produced an appliance that is as power efficient as possible but maintains nearly the identical amount of performance to competitors or prior products. Like for example, instead of a 250W CPU we could theoretically have a 5-10W CPU with around the same performance and features will little to no noticeable difference.
We need more efficient appliances with the same amount of computing horsepower instead of strongarm components that will blow a fuse if you even look at it wrong.
@@FatherlyFox that's exist and possible with cutting some useless functions and focusing on task goals. Like I mentioned upper fpga do their job already. Or limited arm/rockchip/realtek boards.
Same
@@FatherlyFox Apple has already sort of done it but without the modularity. I have heard Qualcomm has a project to produce something similar but we'd need something that had feature parity from a gaming and business pov I feel before that would really be viable.
In the last 5 months I go on and off research on my little free time to get to a power efficient nas conclusion and my mind is dizzy from so much confusion and too much knowledge… I almost gave up till I found this video. You have no idea how much of a help is this.
Thank you for all the really hard work you did on this and for all the information provided! Amazing! Just amazing!
This is an underrated video. Your research into this subject was well done and extremely helpful. Thank you.
As the 1 person who finds this useful :) thank you! In Australia, we are dying for better power efficiencies!
Trust me there's more people looking at their homelab wattage, you're not alone! :P
You're not alone at all and it's not just Australia
Yeah our power costs in Australia compared to the rest of the world. Fortunately we have great solar plans so we only really need to be worried about power usage at night
@@thecookeman Where I am we don't really.. so even with my off grid system I try to keep everything as low as possible because my panels + batteries don't last all night sadly
@@thecookeman how much per kw? i pay about 1 usd/kw
Hi, in Ukraine before the Russian attack on the energy infrastructure the price for electricity was very low, but now, we must save energy and all your manual staring very actually. So thanks!
This actually is exactly the video I needed, thanks a bunch Wolfgang! I would have never found that spreadsheet otherwise!
Thank you for introducing me to powertop. Absolutely spot on, I used to run my home PC (gaming spec) and a Xeon based NAS with 10 spinners and they added 1/3 to my energy bill (not all wasted though, they do heat my small office). However, with the recent energy price increases, looking around for savings, they were the first to go, much to the displeasure of my wife, losing Plex.
I've recently set up a mini PC with external USB 5 bay chassis with SSDs and am running Proxmox for a power consumption that's a fraction of previous. I'll revisit my NAS but the old ebay 10gig rack switch had to go, that was 50W+ sitting idle all day. It's crazy how all this adds up to a base vampire load.
I can comfortably afford the cost of energy, just refuse to subsidise the inept, criminally corrupt UK energy market.
13:52 Note that larger capacity drives generally have faster read/write, my 16TB EXOS 7200RPM drives have something like 250MB/s over SATA, if you are targeting power efficiency over IOPS you could get fewer larger drives, the up side is added room for expansion later.
The downside is that re-building/resilvering an array can be harrowing if you dont have on-site redundancy, as re-building a 16TB drive can take days, and puts a lot of load on the remaining drives that were bought around the same time and have been in use for just as long as the drive that just failed
If you dont have on-site redundancy, get more more smaller drives in software raid6/ ZFS-Z6 equivalent.
With on site redundancy, i still recommend raid 6(lose any 2 drives without losing data) but you dont need as many drives to get the same usable storage, meaning lower power consumption.
When buying drives i reccomend staggering their purchase and deployment.
If you're moving from an old file server to a new one, i reccomend keeping the old file server up and running as redundancy, and after things are moved to the new server, wait a few months, then replace the drives in the old server with enough drives to give you redundancy for your main server. This waiting period also applies to if you are building 2 new servers. The reason i suggest spreading the ordering/deployment of the drives is that if they are all deployed at the same time, and one of them fails, that means they may all be close to failure, and re-building the array on the new machine might be enough to take down multiple drives, leaving you with only your backup server, and if they were purchased at the same time, and put through the same wear as the primary server, re-building the primary server may also render the secndary server's pool degraded.
I recently just moved to Europe and boy oh boy do I need this video. Thank you so much, Wolfgang for all the work you put into finding all this information out
Energy prices in the USA are skyrocketing. Electric and I just got my gas bill. Up about 50% over last year. Same usage.
I'm one person. I found this helpful. Your work was not in vain my friend.
Your work is definitely not in vain. I've been influenced by a lot of North American tech content that hasn't been focused on energy consumption and now my wallet reaps the energy bill consequences ;) thank you very much for sharing your own sound!
really out here acting like rampant consumerism is a "north american" thing...
I'm sorry to hear you see it that way. I was referring to the difference in energy prizes at that moment in time. Of course 'consumerism' occurs in many places outside of the north American continent as well, but I was not saying or implying that in any way, anyhow.
I am *so* grateful for you to covering this topic and in such detail: I was coming round to the view that I was the only person in the world that cared about idle power consumption.... THANK YOU!!!
Greetings @Wolfgang, I just have to say that I'm amazed with all your videos. I love your detailed explanations and depth of knowledge. Thanks for sharing it with the world and please keep up the great work!
01:47 One more practical reason, possibly more important than all the other reasons, is that if you have (you should) a UPS connected then it'll greatly extend the system uptime during a power outage when it's more efficient.
Some really good points made here. Followed some of your advice & adjusted my spindown times similar to what you suggested. It's not a huge difference in terms of waiting for the drive to spin back up. 17:05 That did kill me! LoL Something about that noise, gets me every time Ha ha
built a power effecient nearly passively cooled nas/homeserver/media pc several years ago, still using it to this day, it has been running roughly 7 years now 24/7. idle consumption ranging between 10-20 watts and under max load/boot its roughly 60 watts. still proud of it. but yes power-save cpu states are mandatory and so is using a ssd for OS/boot disk. and then there is choosing the right OS for the build.
The Infrared @ 0:11 is my Hometown. Funny!
Modern systems can boot in a few seconds, so for a home with a small number of users you might be able to power off the server when it has been idle for an extended period. A low power home automation system can monitor the people and client devices in the home to sense when to turn the server on.
This is super useful. Thanks. Power is relatively inexpensive here (USA) but my energy costs have doubled in the past year. The local power company has some power reduction program but from anecdotal reports, it has been abused by the power company. I'd like to do a local-only version that controls all systems, shuts off idle systems either on demand or via schedule,
Ich finde es so geil, dass das einfach einer der deutschesten Themen ist. Leute aus den USA so: Power zum günstigsten Preis
Während wir Deutschen das beste aus allen drei wollen: Power für einen günstigen Preis und günstigem Stromverbrauch. Ich selber hab zwar ne 12 kw/h Solaranlage mit 14 kw/h Speicher, jedoch achte ich auch sehr darauf nicht zu viel zu brauchen
I really enjoyed this video. I've been considering making a small home server, and regardless if I just piece together something from spare parts or go power efficient, your video gave me great ideas.
I only just came across this video today but what a find! I love this and have really learned to appreciate power efficiency etc. Over time, I have replaced all my lights at home with low-power alternatives, etc. Most of my PCs are now mini PCs, etc. Not sure what the power costs here, (Melbourne, Australia), I think the average is 30c per kWh, minus our solar panel rate, which, I think, is around 6c per kWh, although I don't think it's exactly cheap, still, why waste it if you don't have to. Thanks very much for this video, really learned a lot from it!
Improvements in power efficiency are really more impressive than improvements in speed over the history of computing, IMO. E.g. the ARM9 (2008) was almost 300,000 times faster than the Manchester Baby (1948), but consumed almost 200,000 times *less* power. That's an improvement in energy per instruction of 50 *billion* times. Mind-blowing.
Power efficiency is MUST, your work serves a lot of people & insights & learnings help.
Love the video. Been seriously looking at replacing my old server with a lot newer for thw power efficiency. This was definitely helpful
also ich bin sehr beeindruckt, was du alles herausgesucht hast und hier in einem kurzen Video aufbereitet. Hervorragend genau solche Informationen habe ich dringend gesucht. Außerdem ist dein Englisch hervorragend.
Wow Wolfgang! This is an amazing reference guide! Thank you so much for answering tons of questions i didn't even know i had!
Finally, a reasonable video that does not focus on cheap old crap to make the build looks cheap.
Thank you
The best video I've seen. As a home lab builder this is gold!
From Puerto Rico, I find this very useful! We have crazy expensive electricity that goes out on the daily in many areas, so we have to rely on UPSs, solar and batteries, or a generator. So either we will pay too much or our backup power source runs out quicker. Thanks!
Awesome video, I'm also probably a little too obsessed with power consumption on devices on my home network. Even relatively low-power smart home devices and SBCs can result in substantial increases in utility costs when running 24/7 and in numbers (smart bulbs, plugs, displays etc.)
All this stuff adds up, as I am finding. My electric bill in the USA has gone up by 25% in just one year, same usage.
It looks like some people struck a nerve hearing you talk about saving power. Thank you for helping us mate.
Wonderful video! Thank you. This answers the questions I had, as well as questions I hadn't even thought of yet!
I was about ready to deploy my first home server, but it idles at 72W with the two WD Blacks (don't judge, they were very cheap) only consuming 8W each. Now I know where to look in order to optimize it :)
One thing I do for saving power with my NAS is having it turn itself off when I don't need it. I don't use it in the morning and during the night so I have it turn itself off during that time. I used an old 50 Euro office pc I bought on ebay, put a few used WD Red drives in there, put Ubuntu server on it and my power consumption is still under 25 Watts at idle (IIRC). It's not a super fast machine but it's plenty fast for Samba and Jellyfin.
Hey Wolfgang, I have been looking for tutorial like this for a while. I love the analysis and learned a lot!
Nicely done. Here in the US we have relatively cheap power in most places (around $0.10 per Kwh which works out to about $1 per year per watt) but you still get a lot of people running 24/7 servers based on old “boat anchor” servers or their old gaming PC, etc. Many have no idea they’re needlessly spending hundreds of dollars a year to power these hungry servers. I really like the Asrock J5040-ITX for server builds. It’s a fanless CPU and efficient motherboard. The J5040 has excellent performance per watt compared to the earlier generations like the N3xxx series, J1800, etc. The German “database” on low power builds is interesting. I’ve not seen anything like it in English just occasional discussions on Reddit and DIY server forums.
12:05 "if your building a conventional desktop PC, you're probably not gonna let it sit at idle and let it do nothing for the whole day"
stairs at RGB lights for 8 hours
Component selection is important. 8 years ago I built my 3-node ESXi cluster and DIY SAN with a total consumption of 120W for all four servers *and* my network stack. It can be done! Modern hardware packs even more compute into fewer watts.
What a great video! Exactly what I have been looking for! I am in Europe as well (Sweden) and the electricity prices really make you think twice before deploying anything that will draw power all the time.
Its worth noting that you can also use LVM caching to accomplish something similar and frequently used files will remain available from your cache drive(s) automatically, without moving files around with a script.
This video is so useful i've been interested a lot by home server lately with NAS. And i've watched your previous vids about it and they were very good and this one is perfect to know more about which parts to look at. Thanks man 👍 definitely be useful in the future
Edit: also great memes
Wolfgang this is the first video of yours I have seen but I am glad to see someone talking about power. I am in the UK and like you it is expensive and I found it confusing how nobody seemed concerned about the costs. I currently use a laptop as my home server, I will purchase a nas for storage to get me off the cloud and properly setup. I think this with the laptop is just about perfect. Low power, and a laptop is powerful enough to transcode 4k on the fly as well with the Intel graphics. Used laptops have some great features and often just don't cost that much at all and are plentiful. In the UK if you buy from cex used, everything has a 2 year warranty as well. Win.
I'd go quite a bit further - start by first looking at this from a data-use viewpoint. I have been doing this type of thing for about 15 years as I was running in Australia where power was 3x the price of Canada. Eventually I realised that the best approach was a super-low always-on solution and then block archiving to a "usually off" system (not in standby but powered off). You can use WoL to wake the archival server and in the end I've found that the archival servers (I use N36L's) are on perhaps once a month for dumping or retrieval. I run a Pi 4b with a 2.5" drive via USB3 - does all I need to for "active use" material, downloading (e.g. aria2 downloading service provider), etc. It also lets me archive in a disciplined manner, albeit in a time consuming one.
I'm not sure of your use case scenario here (sounds like you've got a lot of video footage for editing, etc.) so that may not work the same way but for most people I think it's crucial to think from the information management perspective first - how am I going to use this thing, is an all-in-one system better or is it better to split the systems up, etc.
The other big advantage of splitting is that you can bring in a lot more horsepower when you really need it and quite cheaply. I don't need that much but I have an ESXi Xeon e3 (ancient system) that I fire up when doing tests, etc. and I even have a half-missing thinkpad which I built from parts (it has no screen, keyboard, etc) but I wake it and use its old i5 to chomp on archives at a whim. You can script the wake and sleep cycles with the job you're running, the thing is completely powered off or in total standby almost all of the time each month.
Thanks Wolfgang's. I have a different reason for wanting a power efficient server. We in South Africa have load-shedding. Where the power goes out 2 to 4 times a day for 2 Hours each. So I run battery backup's to keep the power on my server going. So I try keep the wattage down so the battery's last longer.
Great Video! As a demonstration of how much a similar rated power supply can vary, I dropped from 37w to 29w idle by swapping out a bronze corsair 450w (1YO) to a gold (older) corsair SF450 supply I had kicking about. Testing it with just one sata ssd came down to 21w at the wall - not bad for a 8 year old Supermicro X10SLL Haswell setup with IPMI / E3-1271-V3 / 32gb mem.
Thanks Wolfgang, I now have a Pico ATX using the same hardware & some power saving advice from yours truly & gone from a system idling around 52kw to 17kw!
Meant watts lol
Hey. What is the software/hardware you use to measure power consumption?
Awesome video, man! As a beginner self-hoster from Germany I say big thank you! The part with snoring HDDs is hilarious )))
The thing I’m most interested in, after idle power draw is the ssd cache tier. I hope you spend a lot of time in various ways to configure it adequately for like truenas and a few others if you could. Logistically I hope the ssd cache is transparent, where the nas shares always present the ssd first and then falls back to hdd. There’s also the annoyance of windows explorer wanting to generate previews or access key frames of video, which in my experience cause random spin ups of my nas drives.
I'm wondering if it would be better with two NVMe arrays instead of just one "cache" array. With true tiering you would write anything to the cache array - the data would be moved. But for things such as logs, containers, VMs, etc, they should probably stay on a none-cache NVMe array, then use another NVMe array for caching only (read/write). This would require a minimum of 4 NVMe SSDs. Maybe something for Wolfgang to look into when he gets his new SSDs...?
I'm using an old silent tower server for testing TrueNAS Scale to see if I can get rid of my 8 bay Synology NAS, and replace it with a 2-4U rack solution. But finding silent rack servers (might need two; one server and one jbos rack case) aren't that easy (in Norway). I would love for my disks to be able to spin down though as 9x% of the disk usage is new data (last month).
Dave's Garage has a good video on caching
There's a lot of lording around by some people that like to be like "electricity costs nothing" I'm glad their lack of empathy does not deter good creators like you to make content that matter. Thank you
Edit: I'm SURPRISED that those fujitsu boards are so efficient.. This link (german board) is amazing.
As someone who has stuck with a terribly aged Dlink NAS and still working on putting together an efficient Homelab server for years I'm floored at the amount of info in there.
So far I was not even thinking about the difference between ITX and mATX.. I had all the setups using full ATX (vs DC like mini pcs/laptops) categorised in my mind as ultra bad in idle (30W+) and seeing a board at 5W is CRAZY.. even the mini pcs I got with like 8100T are at 7W idle lol
I'm going to dive in there like crazy
Fujitsu sponsor this man! He's the only tech youtuber who has mentioned you this decade.
Kudos for the correction! Also thanks for teaching me about the idle consumption - didn't realize that was so importnat and that TDP correlates poorly with it.
Great video wolfgang, I live in Denmark and have been struggling for years to get information just like this. The hardware information in this video is extremely useful, and I'd love to see an OS/software setup equivalent. I run Proxmox on my homeserver, and the PM community isn't very interested in the subject of low power servers. Also, any experience with spinning down ZFS arrays? Taking inspiration from this video I've started collecting parts to try another ultra-low power build (my current idles at 40watts), but it would be great learning from those who have already tried this.
> any experience with spinning down ZFS arrays
Personal experience, I have an iMac running 24/7 with a Firewire-800 ZFS drive as my daily driver, it stores the movies I want to watch short-term. Long-term storage is a ZFS tower with 2 pools, 6x4TB for Blurays and 4x6TB for DVDs. If you're not currently using a pool, you can ' zpool export ' it and run ' hdparm -y ' on the drives that make up that pool. This pretty much guarantees those drives won't spin up again until you re-import the pool, as nothing will be trying to send I/O to them. But to save maximum money, I only turn the tower on during the weekend - when electricity is cheaper - and copy short-term movies over to my iMac.
@@kingneutron1Exporting a pool as archiving?
if you are worried about power consumption a laptop isnt a terrible choice.
ive currently got my laptop "server" sitting in the room at idle sipping between 4.5 and 6.1 watts. (i think the "big" gap there is the external hard drive)
it wont be as performant as something with a bit more effort put into it like what is in this video, but it will do filesharing and allow you to do stuff like turning on devices remotely via wake on lan using a remote desktop app such as parsec or chrome remote access.
im also using it to sync a password database between my phone and pc so that i can self host my own "cloud" password manager.
ive even run a few game servers like factorio, stationeers, rimworld open world (not the same colony multiplayer mod) and minecraft, though the lack of ram ended up killing that one within 3 weeks.
its not a perfect solution, but its been very fun to mess with and is working pretty well for an old laptop from around 2016 and with minimal effort put into power savings.
Power efficiency in consumer computer systems has improved by leaps and bounds in the 25 years I've been using them. I'm super impressed when I see desktop systems that can hit an idle point at or under 10 watts. I found my recent gaming boards though to not be as efficient, idling around 20 watts. What were you using to monitor power usage over time?
Living in a big city in the US. I don’t have huge concerns with power. But it’s really fun to optimize it all! If it saves me money on running costs then that’s a plus to me!
Nice video, thanks for sharing! What's that dashboard you have with your smart home equipment and media on 6:12? Looks so clean!
Thanks, again!
Here's that single user. Job done. But seriously, there is not a lot of info out there for building a server that is quiet and not a complete overkill or a raspberry pi. Kudos!
Great vid, just a side note. Being a "T" series CPU sometimes affects more than just TDP. For example, the i5 3470 is a 4core, 4thread part but the i5 3470T is actually a 2 core, 4 thread chip.
Huh, TIL
Love those who say power efficiency is a waste of time to save such a little bit. First multiply that by billions of systems across the globe, then you see a far greater picture of the over all need for power efficiency. The impact against the environment is huge with even a slight change to power draw...as an over all picture. And in society, it is about working together to make sure we all have a good environment to live in. If you aren't going to work together, there is no need for society at all. We came together to help educate our young, build a better tomorrow, etc. If you can lower the power use from your systems, it is a honorable thing to do for society, the planet, and for the human race. Love videos like this that help us to think of better ways to save energy use.
Power efficiency was always my concern when I started learning selfhosting, since I would be running the hardware 24/7. That's why I've been sticking with a raspberry pi and an old x240 thinkpad. Now I've gained more knowledge on how to upgrade my hardware while still keeping the power cost down.
Just curious, are Pico ATX reliable on a 24/7 usage?
They should, as long as you stay within reasonable loads as to not overheat and fry the little thing
Thank you. Even if I didn't care about electricity bills, which I do (power here is extremely expensive as well) you're helping us to build a more power EFFICIENT system, and I love efficiency, either power or anything else. Thank you.
Love your home server videos - currently I'm using a Raspberry Pi with an external SSD as my "home server', but I'm excited to go through your videos again when the time finally comes to upgrade to something beefier :-)
One question - would you say your current build when idle is quiet enough to have in a Wohnheim?
Yes! I can barely hear it unless all four hard drives are being hammered by a bunch of random reads/writes
@@WolfgangsChannel Awesome, thanks!
This is a excellent and important video. It is a shame more are not covering this subject. Whilst I realise it is country dependent based on energy prices, the days of picking up some cheap second hand server off ebay to make a homemade 27/4 NAS are long gone. Any savings would be quickly lost due to power usage.
Thank you for the informative video, exactly what I needed during this odd period. What kind of hardware/software do you use to monitor your power usage?
If you need a server that will host few apps for your local home lab, I will always recommend buy used Dell Wyse 5070 with J5005 CPU and 8GB ddr4 and some m2 SSD.
It has 4 cores, idles at ~4,7W with max 10W. Much better alternative than RPI4, perfect for Home Assistant or just docker host. For home NAS, you'd need to look for something with SATA ports.
Really interesting! I wanted to make a video about this but concerning gaming desktop PCs, for example a PC with a 12900K and a 3090Ti vs a PC with the most power-efficient parts without sacrificing too much performance. Do you think it's worth chasing as a topic, or is the cost negligible at that point?
Definitely! LTT made a video about it 3 years ago, and personally I would love to see an updated version ruclips.net/video/-d8gcfbjoZM/видео.html
Another thumbs up here! LTT also did an ultra-low power build under the guise of the 'Prepper' PC recently that touched on that, but a more detailed take would be interesting. Just having similar concepts doesn't necessarily make it copying or unoriginal as its all in your execution and take on the idea.
There's definitely a lot of room for exploring low-power and efficient gaming... Even just taking a quick example of Xbox Series S vs top tier dedicated graphics as a comparison; the Series S pulls about 70-75w in use but maxed out 3090Ti rig is probably 10x that!
Not even half way through your video, but I must say: Thank you. I'm living in Germany and, yes, not only the (higher and higher) energy bill is something I consider but also the environment. I'm searching since month to get the most performant vs. energy saving ratio server for home labs. Thanks for your video. Keep up the good work and don't get to much into that stupid haters.
Have you considered looking into MSI's ECO motherboard lineup? It has plenty of features for low-power use, like disabling parts of the motherboard, optimization for S and T Intel CPUs, etc.
The second generation motherboard supports up to 2400MHz DDR4 and 7th-gen Intel CPUs.
I don't see anyone else discussing the lineup much, but I feel you might find it fascinating.
Hooo this one is useful to know. I've never thought of power efficiency for home server before this, all the tutorial I've seen is only "build your own server" or "cheap server for your home" but never mentioned power consumption. Good to know :D
Nice video and information! I think it would also be interesting with a video about what can be done if you want a desktop PC that could both do crazy high performance and have low idle power consumption as well. Like a Ryzen 7900x with a 10-20W idle, for example. (Perhaps a hotkey in windows to enable/disable cores, motherboard features, graphics card performance, etc, to manually help it go to lower power would be necessary?).
Check the settings under "Energy" in Windows Settings. There is quite a lot you can configure.
Also, modern graphics card power down while under low load automatically (they reduce clock frequency of GPU and RAM quite significantly, for example).
CPUs themselves go into lower power states in milliseconds.
This is such an interesting take - I haven't heard this angle covered nearly enough. Thank you!
If you're in the EU, there is a great way to save a lot of money in the future : stop voting for political parties that are against nuclear energy.
where to put the nuclear waste? is america offering a suitable depot that can provide 50000 years of safety? the price for that energy is paid by our children’s children and so forth when something goes wrong
@@pflegefachkraft7595 Nuclear waste production has been reduced significantly at every generation, it's not the 1950s anymore. The fourth generation that's only a couple of years away will be another huge leap in that department, with recycling and transmutation of waste.
It's a long topic to present in a comment on youtube, but in short we produce a lot more energy, way more efficiently, with a lot less combustible and a lot less waste, and the waste left will have way shorter half-life.
Not to mention the moment when we begin making fusion reactors in the future. Not "if", when. That's the ultimate win : free energy forever.
If you want to know more about waste management, don't look at the USA, they suck at it. Look at the french.
In any case, for our children, we must help the planet with the CO2 problem while not sending them back to the stone age and also giving them the tools to one day conquer fusion... and then space.
For that, the only solution is nuclear energy.
@@billmurray7676 i don’t see the correlation between supporting nuclear power and fusion reactors. The nuclear waste that already leaks out in abandoned salt-mines provisionally is just waiting to become a problem and to my knowledge france just about recycles 40% - and while recycling you get plutonium which is the stuff for atom bombs… the whole matter about nuclear just doesn’t leave a good gut feeling…
@@pflegefachkraft7595 It's fine, you're just uneducated on the subject, like most people. Also, I don't know where you are, but some countries (like Germany for example) also suffers from heavy anti-nuclear propaganda, in part from anti-technology extremist groups who dream about the stoneage and the other part is probably russian propaganda if you're in Europe.
Anyway, I suggest you do your own research.
It's really important for people to know the truth on this subject because nuclear energy is the only way forward.
@@billmurray7676 likewise. i’m happy we are not in the same continent
Regarding the start / stop argument and the 300k value found in the forums: All WD Ultrastar are made for "only" 50k start / stop circles. This is stated in their >300 pages huge "user manual" pdf, which can be easily found online. I never seen a higher value. But finally in 10 years you still would have 14 spins per day, which should be still hard to reach.
I recently build myself a little Homeserver with an i3 4130 for the occasional transcoding needs. That thing runs idle on 7.3 Watts and with storage for movies on about 14.5 watts. Absolutely loving it. The system cost me around 50 bucks in total. The drives I'm using are worth 4 times the system 😂. If i ever need more CPU horsepower, I could chug in my old 4690k. Really nice to have that as an option
Power efficiency == higher performance. Also superior design. Even when power is cheap(er), I always am power consumption conscious. Because excessive heat in the Summer only compounds inefficiency in need to cool the environment with A/C. Here, we spend in excess of $600.00/month in electricity to cool some homes in the middle of Summer in the desert. So, this is a great video. Low noise, low power consumption, is as worthy a pursuit as overclocking. After all, it's trying to get the most bang our of your buck! Replacing an older Samsung cold cathode tube monitor with a modern LED lit Asus, dropped power from 160W to 11W! 80Plus PSUs are a must and no one should still run legacy PSUs that were 50-60% efficient. My daily drivers have been converted to business laptops in docking stations to become desktop replacements. The drop in power consumption is significant. As well as noise. These systems I leave running 24/7. Always accessing something, or providing media server duty. I will have to review your build in detail, as its power requirements are impressive!
Thanks for your amazing videos. I bought a Fujitsu D3401-H mobo, an i3-6100 and a Pico Psu with 3 sata connectors (no splitter needed), all together with less than 70 euros and now the system idles at 10 Watts (used to be 27). Something prevents the system from going lower than C3, but I don't think I want to remove any hardware. The only problem is that with the Fujitsu Mobo, I can't manually control the fans, or maybe I am blind. :)
While watching your video I remembered I had an old Fujitsu, I checked it and it is CELSIUS W550 POWERn model with a D3417 motherboard, Intel xeon E3-1245, everything for a NAS. Thank you !!
I retired my relatively power hungry esxi hosted home server (dell 1u chassis) for a combo Raspberry PI (router/firewall with docker home automation server... less than 4 watts) and Synology diskstation (15-40 watts depending on what it's doing but generally less than 20 watts). Amazing how when you're paying the electric bill yourself you start thinking of power efficiency as pretty important.
I recently grabbed an old HP ZBook 15 G3 as a home server. The laptop was so cosmetically damaged that it was hardly worth anything. But:
4x DDR4 SODIMM slots with ECC support
2x M.2 SSD slots
1x 2,5" HDD/SSD slot
2x thunderbolt ports
Intel networking
Battery serves as UPS
Quadcore Xeon CPU which idles at ~5W but can really throw punches at ~45W load
Idle, the server uses about 10-15W. Under load (and I need to add some more storage) it's about 40-50W.
Thank you.
You are one of the few RUclipsrs who covers this topic. 👍
The last mechanical hard drives I owned used 14 watts a piece. I had 10 of them in my video editing workstation in 2008 and it pulled a lot of power. I've since switched to all solid state drives which use about a quarter of a watt each so that was my biggest savings and energy my editing workstation uses 62 Watts at idle. Now I also bought a small fanless mini computer for my web server that uses between 10 and 15 watts and that's on 24/7. It also uses two solid state drives.
Very much agree with your philosophy here.
my plex server is built from an Asrock j5005 ITX (with processor soldered on) board with 16gb so-dimm ddr4 ram, 256 samsung 960 evo (c:drive) a Crucial mx500 500gb swap drive, a 16tb WD spindle drive, and an older 8tb Seagate drive, powered by a 120 watt pico-pcu from an old 12v laptop pcu.
At rest it consumes around 16 watt, measured at the wall, and when "serving" 18-20 watt.
When i surf the web and do daily (though simple) things it pulls 18-24 watt.
It's not for heavy tasks at all, but for what it is for, it is fine.
and it's sooo frugal.
This is probably one of the best videos I’ve watched on RUclips on a long time.
Thank you for the huge efforts put into this, and teve detailed information
I think is a very helpfull video. Im building my home server here in Brasil, where is hot most of the year and electricity isn't cheap. Thanks!
I find this Video very useful and helpful. I'm in the US and in this town and state the power cost is $0.14Kwh. So keeping my power bill down is what I have to do but Running over 200 servers for customers is hard to keep power cost down. So I balance it out between cost of the server and power bill.
Why not put solar panels on the roof of your data center?
The information in this video is helpful, even for a person like me, who lives in a state with Grand Coulee Dam, and cheap electricity.
This is informative. Currently have a small homelab using an old laptop with an i3-4000m and a mini pc with i3-4160T.
Power is pretty expensive in the UK, I run a blade system with 16 Blade Server each with Dual E5649 (Westmere EP) Based processors and two EMC SAN arrays and that is my home lab, running over 100 VM's. This solution provides a maximum of 2TB of usable ram in my current setup and approximately 110 TB of storage (Not including NAS drives that are used for general stuff storage). Now clearly for my use case this type of low power approach just would not cut it in terms of my demand for low latency and low CPU ready running my vSphere environment, if all you need is a low density server for a couple of VM's here or some low powered bulk storage there this solution will work great but it is not the kind of solution that will replace the large scale lab for anyone that has a need to do high levels of virtualised compute. Very informative. well researched and detailed video and might well come in handy to build things for friends but I can't see this type of solution replacing my setup any time soon.
I have looked at the WD lineup and while they have interesting colors (green for "light computing", blue for "capacity for creators", black for "tuned for gaming" and red for "performance of NAS systems"), there are other colors that people don't usually get in contact with. They also have gold for "reliable performance for enterprise applications" and purple for "high-capacity for 24/7 use". I have invested into a few WD purple drives for my server and I am quite happy with their performance. I also put WD purple SD cards into one of my surveilance cameras and until now, that one has outlasted all the other SD cards that I have.
IN my case I live in an apartment and electricity is included in the rent but with a single circuit for all devices in my living room. that includes the air conditioning. If I run a traditional server and the AC at the same time, I blow the circuit. Part of the issue I believe is the breakers are from the 1 70's and worn and need to be replaced as well. So, If I can get a server that runs on twenty-three watts my chance of blowing the circuit and being able to keep my AC and lights, laptop, and monitors on is much better.
I went in the same way, Now I found ,that Cooling is much easier and I was able to install my rack behind the glass cabinet so It looks really good.
If you save on power, you can also make it looks so good and also a lot quieter .
Yesterday I watched a video, where somebody who had, two almost identical machines but one was set up as fanless and the other one with fans. The one with cooling fans was using more power.
Now even though it's a low-power system and didn't have much for fans it's still used a lot more power because of the fans. This made me think if I just use a less expensive larger 3U or 4U case with a more efficient cooling fan or even no fan that might save a lot of power over the course of a year.
Industrial/server fans running at high speed can draw a lot of power.
OH GOD! Now I'm a power saving freak like you! Seriously though, I run an R820 and it costs me more than $30 a month (almost $400 a year!) to keep it running 24/7. I don't keep it up all the time but I have other stuff I do want up 24/7, so I run all of the important stuff from a low power more modern machine. Great video!
Fantastic video, Wolfgang. I was searching for guidance on building a power efficient homeserver (since living in southern Germany...) and this helps out a lot. I was even looking into the hw forum but overlooked this thread.
This is just awesome. I haven’t seen anyone cover this so well outside of non-english language forums 😅