this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
24 points (90.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40132 readers
548 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
24
Super Power-Efficient ITX Nas CPU/Motherboard? (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by nopersonalspace@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
45 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] nopersonalspace@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

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