I’ve got a NAS built in a Node 304 mini itx case that works great, but uses a ton of power. In Unraid (the OS for my NAS) there is some kind of issue with the Ryzen 3900x processor that I’m running that means I have to disable all sleep states - so it’s always at it’s 100W TDP. Power is super expensive where I live so I’d love to find something more power efficient.
Does it make more sense to buy a more recent(ish) 5th gen ryzen in hopes that the sleep states will work, and thus save money by keeping my existing motherboard?
Or I could go with something a bit more interesting. I’ve seen on Aliexpress motherboards with mobile CPU’s soldered which are very power efficient. For example the N100 has an insane 6W TDP and comes on special boards with lots of sata ports and 2.5G networking (link). The worry with the n100 though is that it only officially supports 16G of ram which might not be enough for zfs.
Any thoughts? Is anyone running a power-efficient build who could throw some advice my way? Thanks!
Have you measured the power consumption with a kill-a-watt (or similar)?
I have the nas connected to a UPS that reports it’s power draw and it sits at about 100W at all times. There are one or two other small devices connected to it usually, so the nas itself is probably using a hair less that that at idle, but still it’s quite high.
This seems very suspicious, get a cheap watt metter and test it with that. If it still says 100W I would say there’s something wrong in your CPU, motherboard or software. Not necessarily the CPU, can be the motherboard or simply your Linux is set to run the CPU at full clock all the time.
Btw, I have a Ryzen 5 2600 and that thing goes down to 20W or so.
I specifically had to set things up in the BIOS so that it would never enter any efficient power/sleep states. It’s a bug in the OS I’m using that was forcing me to do it, otherwise the whole thing would lock up on me.
That said, I have some smart-plugs that do power monitoring. I can try hooking up the nas to one of those just for kicks, it should be accurate enough for this sort of thing.
Edit: Just measured and looks like I was about right: 100W under load and around 80W idle
There is an issue with ryzen and certain PSUs that when it goes to idle it pulls so little power that the psu thinks it’s off and kills the power, it can appear as a hang. there should be an option in the bios to change it to “typical power” or named something similar.
Oh interesting, that sound plausible. I’ll check out the bios and see if I can find that setting. Thanks!
It’s called power supply idle control, worth a test.
This is most likely why you’re running at 100W all the time. No need to further measure anything. Reset your BIOS to defaults, update the OS / use Debian and you should be good.
It’s not that easy sadly. The entire NAS runs on Unraid and the issue is with that OS. I can’t switch without totally restarting from scratch which would be a huge data migration, and a massive PITA configuration-wise.
Eventually I’d be open to switching to something like TrueNas Scale, but for now I need Unraid’s unique ability to run a RAID array with differently sized drives
Oh. This kind of issues is why I now run everything on Debian. If you’re paying a license you should ask for support and bash them until they fix whatever is wrong with their kernel power management.
Even if you get a new machine you’ve zero guarantees there wont be any other power management or networking issues with Unraid.
Yeah good point. I’ve been slowly working to move away from Unraid for those reasons, and have been having fun trying NixOS.
Anyway, I just made a post on the official support forums so hopefully I can get this looked at. Since I initially had the problems many updates have come out, so maybe it’s not a thing anymore. I just can’t risk testing that for myself!
I’ve got a 3800x that has plenty of performance but also uses a lot of power and I’m seriously considering upgrading to a 5700G. It’s about 170 from Amazon right now.
Also, I don’t think you’re going to want your NAS to sleep/standby, that’s really not typical.
I guess that’s a good point, but then is the right move to just get the lowest power CPU possible? I really don’t need it to do all that much and rn it’s hogging power.
Maybe not the lowest power possible… I wouldn’t recommend running your NAS on a raspberry pi even though plenty of people do
Even the low powered CPU /boards will only idle low power. Embedded and ITX can idle at 6W but the HDDs will still need power, and spinning down/up HDDs reduces their total lifetime. The only real solution there is to reduce the amount you use by swapping to larger fewer models.
But these things take money and you have to balance then against the projected power savings. There’s no point in spending $500 on hardware without considering how long it will take for those $500 to be recovered from power savings. And if it takes 5 years before you start seeing a profit is it really worth it to you?
You’re right and that’s exactly my plan! I’m going to get 2 20TB drives the next time I need to upgrade, that way I can keep the number of drives low.
With my current power usage and energy prices I’m paying $280 per year for this server alone, so I’m pretty well incentivized to replace parts (particularly since I can sell the parts I’m replacing to offset even further). With my current plans I’ll see a positive ROI within a year almost guaranteed