I have been using an old PC as NAS and running docker containers (Immich, Nextcloud, paperless-ngx etc.). I got 5 3.5" HDD disks and a Nvme. Even on idle, I am consuming 50-60w. A friend of mine is selling a Qnap NAS which is a dedicated machine and probably consumes less power, although I don’t know if it’s worth it.
This is the reason I use a NAS specific box. So much more power efficient
Most of the power draw is from the hdds. I have the same issue. If you want less power consumption. Invest in SSD or SSD and HDD hybrid where you store quick access files on SSD and rare access on hdd (then you can spin them down with timeout of , let’s say 30-60 min). This should save some energy
I have an old dell power edge that I got from work that I used as a NAS for a while, it sucked down more juice than the old PC I was using and was stupidly loud all the time. I ended up transferring everything back to my old PC and now that turd just sits there waiting for someone else to be dumb enough to buy it from me. I wouldn’t waste the money personally.
The power edge server is going to draw way more power just because it has a “powerful” cpu(s) and other power running components. The Qnap will be much quieter and consume maybe a few watts less power than your existing setup, potentially. I wouldn’t use it though because your existing setup is way more flexible on what you can do with it.
“powerful” LOL it’s a turd
but yeah my current setup also happens to play games and adding storage is much easier cuz I can just throw whatever in there instead of making sure the drive conforms to some arbitrary crap.
It’s “powerful” in the sense that it has 48 PCI lanes and can use almost 800GB of memory (ECC included). This is just way overkill on most homelabs so the extra power draw isn’t worth it.
Ah yes, in that context I would agree.
Thank you, this is what I am thinking too. I don’t wanna create e-waste, and apart from power consumption, the nas is very handy performance wise and tackles all load.
I use a 5600g on b450 ITX board and 4x 8GB Seagate drives and see about 35W idle and about 40W average. It used to be 45W because I was forced to use a GPU in addition to a 3600 to boot (even though its headless, just a bad bios setup that I can’t fix) and getting a CPU with graphics dropped my idle consumption quite a bit. I suspect the extra wattage for your machine is probably the bigger motherboard and the less efficient CPU.
It is possible to get the machine part down into single digits wattage and then about 5W a drive is the floor without spinning them down, so the minimum you could likely see with a much less powerful CPU is about 30-35W.
I’m probably in a similar boat thanks to 4x NAS drives (in 2x mirror vdevs so essentially half as power efficient too). I wonder if using an SSD or two for things like caches would help with power draw since you could defer disk usage for longer by relying on a more efficient cache.
SnapRAID is also an option. One benefit is that multiple disks don’t need to be spinning at once to access data. Downside is that your parity isn’t calculated in real time so less data redundancy.
I am already running Snapraid and machines do spindown after sometime, but it’s still around 50w.
“Old PC” meaning what, exactly? Need some specs.
In general, a Qnap or Synology box is going to be much lower wattage than a full PC.
It’s 6th gen i5 processor with gigabyte motherboard. And Qnap is ts-531x.
I switched from an I3-530, nominal TDP 73W, to an N-100, nominal TDP 7W, and power from the wall didn’t change at all. Even the i3 ran around 0.1 CPU load, except when transcoding, and I’m left with the impression that most of the power goes into HDDs, RAM, maybe fans, and PS losses. My sense is that the best way to decrease homelab power use is to minimize the number of devices. Start with your seyrver at 60W, add a WAP at 10-15W, maybe a switch at 10-15W… Not because of the CPUs, necessarily, but because every CPU every CPU comes with systems to keep the CPU going, keep the power regulated, etc.
Thank you, this is what I needed to know. I thought n100 (similar to what dedicated nas has 6-10w) would bring power down considerably, and thanks to you, I now know it’s not the case.
