7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel 12th/13th gen

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 &#x2F; NAS builders.<p>For me personally I found my ideal price-performance config to be the following hardware:<p><pre><code> 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 </code></pre> 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.<p>It may be hard to get, but I paid €380,00 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:<p><pre><code> Boards: GIGABYTE C246N-WU2 (ITX), Gigabyte C246-WU4 (mATX), Fujitsu D3517-B (mATX), Fujitsu D3644 (mATX) Power: Corsair RM550x (2021 Version) </code></pre> 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&#x27;m validating that atm.<p>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.<p>Hope I could help :-)<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;z8nt3A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;z8nt3A</a>

Great hardware but when the software is a job to administer I have a hard time justifying builds like these.<p>My Synology NAS for example has 8 GB RAM and a J4150 processor. Runs about 15 containers, Wireguard and on top DSM (which is Synology&#x27;s OS). Usually idles around 1-3%.<p>Software makes all the difference - DSM has been by far the biggest benefit and surprise to me and I would be deprived of time with anything else. I&#x27;m running TrueNas as a second backup server but it no way compares to DSM. Sometimes I don&#x27;t want to trawl through logs and trial and error just to get a basic CRON setup to backup a file off another server, there&#x27;s countless examples where DSM has just worked.<p>I really think Synology is missing a trick here, they clearly have software that is miles ahead of everything else and customizable should you need to. They should be more like Microsoft of the NAS world, making DSM run on non Synology platforms, or at least making it easier to do yourself. It&#x27;s a great OS and it sells itself and can easily be a way to up sell stuff like Active backup for business.

Author seems to have built 5 systems from 2016 to 2023, or around every other year.<p>Some parts (e.g., RAM) are re-used across multiple builds<p>It&#x27;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?<p>The motherboard + CPU is USD 322 right now on pcpartpicker. At USD 0.25&#x2F;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.

7950X3D, X670E Taichi, 96GB 6400MHz CL32, 2x4TB Lexar, 4x18TB Seagate Exos X18, RX570 8G, Proxmox.<p>Idle no VM ~60-70W.<p>Idle TrueNAS VM drives spinning ~90-100W.<p>Idle TrueNAS &amp; Fedora Desktop with GPU passthrough ~150W<p>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.<p>I was expecting around 50-100W for Proxmox+TrueNAS. I did not consider the power draw of the RAM when I went for 96GB.

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&#x27;t as great at 91%.<p>APM is disabled on all HDDs because it just leads to delay and wear for mythological power savings that isn&#x27;t going to happen in this setup. Note that SMART rarely&#x2F;never predicts failures, but one of the strongest signals of drive failures is slightly elevated temperatures (usually as a result of bearing wear).<p>This creates enough waste heat such that one room never needs heating, but cooling isn&#x27;t strictly needed either because there&#x27;s no point to reducing datacenter ambient below 27 C.

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?

Good read.<p>Tried something similar in the past:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vermaden.wordpress.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;silent-fanless-freebsd-server-redundant-backup&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vermaden.wordpress.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;silent-fanless-fre...</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vermaden.wordpress.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;silent-fanless-dell-wyse-3030-lt-freebsd-server&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vermaden.wordpress.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;silent-fanless-del...</a>

Great work, for lots of storage.<p>If you can fit your storage on an SSD (or RAID-mirrored pair), and don&#x27;t need much compute, you can do a low-power server (like to run little services for yourself) using an SBC like a RasPi, or something like a NUC.<p>Personally, I currently have a couple 1U Atom servers that run fanless except for the Noctua fans that I swapped into the PSUs. Advantages over RasPi include SATA and ECC RAM, and were also easier to buy over Covid. (I also have a 4U GPU server, which is currently off when not in use, because I haven&#x27;t invested in figuring out how to low-power idle it like the article writer has.)

Why not the N100?<p>Even an N305 fits the purpose, the N100 would be even less <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MiniPCs&#x2F;comments&#x2F;12fv7fh&#x2F;beelink_eq12_notes_is_the_ultraefficient_6w_tdp&#x2F;kdtw9to&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MiniPCs&#x2F;comments&#x2F;12fv7fh&#x2F;beelink_eq...</a>

Is there not an element of penny-wise, pound-foolish here where you end up optimizing the cpu&#x2F;mono side of things but then run 6+ drives vs fewer larger ones?

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 &quot;sync&quot; button on front panel does that), it doesn&#x27;t after a accidental loss of power or power outage <i>even if the connected PC is set up to boot automatically</i>, which to me is quite bad, therefore having recently moved to a place where power outages aren&#x27;t uncommon and can last longer than a normal UPS could handle, I&#x27;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&#x27;ll have to think about it, but the problem can indeed be solved.

Everyone&#x27;s needs are different, but over time with the loss of a couple of disks, I started to hate running RAID5 or 6 with HDDs. It became an exercise in how fast could I replace a disk before the next one died and would the rebuild actually work or not - although, it always did. Also, the hot-swap case&#x2F;cage I had with all the SATA connectors and power connectors seemed kinda flaky - it was very cheap.<p>So a couple years ago, I downsized to a single 2TB SSD in a smallish ATX case - and another in a completely different machine that gets rsync&#x27;d every 4 hours. My nas is now just my last desktop&#x27;s hardware with two SSDs - one boot, one larger storage running plex, smbd, backups of misc stuff on cron, duplicity backup to the cloud, etc on Ubuntu. If I didn&#x27;t have this extra hardware, I&#x27;d probably just run two medium powered NUCs with a nvme boot disk and a bigger SSD for storage.<p>It&#x27;s all very very simple and I have it setup so I can run some LXC containers should I want to do some dev work there, but I usually have other hardware for that anyway.

Sort of not surprising how variant divergent chipsets go with power states, and other things.<p>How does he get raidz2 to spin down without busting the raidset? Putting drives into sleep states isn&#x27;t usually good for in-CPU zfs is it? Is the l2arc doing heavy lifting here?<p>Good comments about ECC memory in the feedback discussion too.

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&#x27;t find an answer in TFA.

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&#x2F;13th gen for file transfers?

My simple home server setup that runs on almost no electricity is a M2 Mac Mini plugged into a multi-bay drive enclosure. I’ve got like 12TB of storage on it, and it consumes almost no power. It’s also got enough umph to run Plex, gitea, and some personal web services without breaking a sweat. Also, if you’re horrible on time, they’re on sale for $400 all the time and are so easy to setup. Apple even has a remote login tool now, so you can access it headless from a laptop too.

7 watts idle is unimpressive <i>out of context</i><p>If you have a NAS that is idle most of the time, and want to minimise power consumption, how about an embedded-cpu based WoL generator? Sniff packets destined for the fileserver, which is otherwise in deep sleep, and automagically wake it up when relevant traffic is detected, with the relevant WoL packet. You&#x27;d get say &lt;300mA consumption at 3v3, and full performance on wake. It would be transparent to the machines attempting to access the server. If idle power measurement is your criteria, this might be a way forwards?

How viable would it be to run a home server in a VM on your main PC that is occasionally also used for high performance activities like gaming. I do have 12 cores and 64GB Ram and I would not mind parting with 4C&#x2F;16GB and maybe the onboard GPU (video decoding) but I dont know how the rest of the system might be influenced if there is heavy IO or other stuff.

I have a 4 Cores Intel i3 13100 and I can&#x27;t reach these low numbers.<p>The machine idle with just 1 nvme is 16 watts. I managed to go to 12 watts with the powersaver mode in tuned but I have random ssh freezes and I didn&#x27;t find any relevant doc to solve the problem.<p>But as soon as the machine is in light use, just a network transfer for example the power usage go through the roof: 30 watts.<p>Now I have loaded it with 2 internal 3.5 hard drives, I have a VM with Docker running, a torrent client and Syncthing (so nothing terribly intensive). The thing never goes below 40 watts and is currently at 60 (I&#x27;m copying data onto the drives).<p>I would never have bought a desktop class CPU if it wasn&#x27;t for these articles that promise unreachable low power draw.

I have a 5-node ceph cluster built out of Fujitsu desktops that I got for 50 euro a piece.<p>4 nodes have 8gb ram and one has 16gb.<p>CPU in each is i5-6500.<p>Each has an NVMe that is split for OS and journal and a spinning HDD.<p>The cluster idles at 75W and full load about 120W. That is intense ceph traffic not other workloads.

As exciting as it is to design a low power system, it&#x27;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.<p>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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;t have this problem, and gives better-than-gigabit performance, sometimes.

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).<p>My NAS is powered down most of the time for this reason, only booted (IPMI) remotely when needed.<p>Although the actual idle power consumption in the article seems to be a tad higher than 7 watts, it&#x27;s so much lower, it&#x27;s not such a big deal to run it 24&#x2F;7 and enjoy the convenience.<p>Loved the write-up!

amusing to read this very detailed article and not have any idea what OP actually does with 72TB of online storage<p>1gbe seems a bit anemic for a NAS

I feel like I see a good number of nas builds go by, but rarely are they anywhere as technical. Nice.

I had the same issue of picking a motherboard with limited SATA ports and then having to deal with extra expansion cards.<p>4 is not enough for homelab type servers.

Very cool write up. Good timing too as I find myself attempting to reduce the power consumption of my homelab.

What would be the cheapest and lowest power option to get 100G networking (50-100G actual performance is good enough) and at least one 8 lane PCI-e GPU?<p>Plus at least 2x M.2.

Crucial Force GT supposed to say Corsair