Big shout out to Windows 11 and their TPM bullshit.
Was thinking that my wee “Raspberry PI home server” was starting to feel the load a bit too much, and wanted a bit of an upgrade. Local business was throwing out some cute little mini PCs since they couldn’t run Win11. Slap in a spare 16 GB memory module and a much better SSD that I had lying about, and it runs Arch (btw) like an absolute beast. Runs Forgejo, Postgres, DHCP, torrent and file server, active mobile phone backup etc. while sipping 4W of power. Perfect; much better fit than an old desktop keeping the house warm.
Have to think that if you’ve been given a work desktop machine with a ten-year old laptop CPU and 4GB of RAM to run Win10 on, then you’re probably not the most valued person at the company. Ran Ubuntu / GNOME just fine when I checked it at its original specs, tho. Shocking, the amount of e-waste that Microsoft is creating.
True for notebooks. (For years my home NAS was an old Asus EEE PC)
Desktops, on the other hand, tend to consume a lot more power (how bad it is, depends on the generation) - they’re simply not designed to be a quiet device sitting on a corner continuously running a low CPU power demanding task: stuff designed for a lot more demanding tasks will have things like much bigger power sources which are less efficient at low power demand (when something is design to put out 400W, wasting 5 or 10W is no big deal, when it’s designed to put out 15W, wasting 5 or 10W would make it horribly inefficient).
Meanwhile the typical NAS out there is running an ARM processor (which are known for their low power consumption) or at worse a low powered Intel processor such as the N100.
Mind you, the idea of running you own NAS software is great (one can do way more with that than with a proprietary NAS, since its far more flexible) as long as you put it in the right hardware for the job.
NAS, no. Server for my random docker containers or whatever project I’m screwing around with, yes.
I got an old server and it has a hardware raid card on it. I installed trueNAS on it. Shows 18tb raid right away (24tb 4tbx6). And it does not help that I’m new to this stuff.
Is hardware raid any good for truNAS? should I just get a pcie to sata and connect drives individually?
or
When I looked into this I found that, for TrueNAS, using ZFS with RAW disks is generally preferable.
I wound up writing custom firmware to my hardware RAID card so that it would be effectively “transparent” and yield direct hardware access to the disks.
TrueNAS is better when it sees raw disks and not HW raid. There are still useful parts in TrueNAS if you have a HW raid volume like file sharing, synchronization, apps (docker), etc. But the true power lies in zfs which needs raw disks.
I love my trueNAS!
It also takes space and makes lots of noise. But for sure, with couple upgrades, it will work like a charm.
Nah. I dissagree. My dedicated NAS system consumes around 40W idling and is very small sized machine. My old PC would utilize 100W idling and is ATX-sized case. Of course I can use my old PC as a NAS, but these two are different category devices.
I want to reduce wasteful power consumption.
But I also desire ECC for stability and data corruption avoidance, and hardware redundancy for failures (Which have actually happened!!)
Begrudgingly I’m using dell rack mount servers. For the most part they work really well, stupid easy to service, unified remote management, lotssss of room for memory, thick PCIe lane counts, stupid cheap 2nd hand RAM, and stable.
But they waste ~100 watts of power per device though… That stuff ads up, even if we have incredibly cheap power.
I use my old pc server as a 50w continuous heater in my lab-shed which is a small stone outbuilding. Keeps it dry in there!
If your PC has 32gb of RAM or more throw it away (in my trash bin) immediately.
nah i tried to use my old pc for a nas, but it has almost no SATA ports. (it was a prebuilt)
Is there a trustworthy brand making these? I’d be afraid to buy a no-name and run into some bizarre firmware bug that just eats all my data one day
I think startech makes similar
OK. Science time. Somewhat arbitrary values used, the point is there is a amortization calculation, you’ll need to calculate your own with accurate input values.
A PC drawing 100W 24/7 uses 877 kWh@0.15 $131.49 per year.
A NAS drawing 25W 24/7 uses 219 kWh@0.15 $32.87 per year
So, in this hypothetical case you “save” about $100/year on power costs running the NAS.
Assuming a capacity equivalent NAS might cost $1200 then you’re better off using the PC you have rather than buying a NAS for 12 years.
This ignores that the heat generated by the devices is desirable in winter so the higher heat output option has additional utility.
This ignores that the heat generated by the devices is desirable in winter so the higher heat output option has additional utility.
But the heat is a negative in the summer. So local climate might tip the scales one way or the other.
In the fall/winter in northern areas it’s free! (Money that would already be spent on heating).
Summer is a negative though, as air conditioning needs to keep up. But the additional cost is ~1/3rd the heat output for most ACs (100w of heat require < 30w of refrigeration losses to move)
I bought a two bay Synology for $270, and a 20TB hdd for $260. I did this for multiple reasons. The HDD was on sale so I bought it and kept buying things. Also I couldn’t be buggered to learn everything necessary to set up a homemade NAS. Also also i didn’t have an old PC. My current PC is a Ship of Theseus that I originally bought in 2006.
You’re not wrong about an equivalent NAS to my current pc specs/capacity being more expensive. And yes i did spend $500+ on my NAS And yet I also saved several days worth of study, research, and trial and error by not building my own.
That being said, reducing e-waste by converting old PCs into Jellyfin/Plex streaming machines, NAS devices, or personal servers is a really good idea
Assuming a capacity equivalent NAS might cost $1200
Either you already have drives and could use them in a new NAS or you would have to buy them regardless and shouldn’t include them in the NAS price.
8 drives could go into most computers I think. Even 6 drive NAS can be quite expensive.
That’s not a NAS, that’s a whole-ass PC, though with only 8gb RAM. And way overpriced for the spec.
In the UK the calculus is quite different, as it’s £0.25/kWh or over double the cost.
Also, an empty Synology 4-bay NAS can be gotten for like £200 second hand. Good enough if you only need file hosting. Mine draws about 10W compared to an old Optiplex that draws around 60W.
With that math using the NAS saves you 1.25 pence per hour. Therefore the NAS pays for itself in around about 2 years.
my gaming pc runs at like 50w idle and only draws a ton of power if its being used for something. It would be more accurate to consider a PC to be 1.75x more power than a NAS but then account for the cost of buying a NAS. I’d say NAS would probably take 2-4 years to pay off depending on regional power prices.
… 100W? Isn’t that like a rally bygone era? CPUs of the past decade can idle at next to nothing (like, there isn’t much difference between an idling i7/i9 and a Pentium from the same era/family).
Or are we taking about arm? (Sry, I don’t know much about them.)
All devices on the computer consume power.
The CPU being the largest in this context. Older processors usually don’t have as aggressive throttling as modern ones for low power scenarios.
Similarly, the “power per watt” of newer processors is incredibly high in comparison, meaning they can operate at much lower power levels while running the same workload.
I think we need to qualify “idling”, my NAS runs bittorrent with thousands of torrents, so it’s never really “idle”, it just isn’t always doing intensive processing such as transcoding.
I got a Kill-A-Watt similar device. I have measured my old PC at around 110W. PC specs: i5-6600, 16gb DDR4 ram, 1060 3gb, 1x2TB hdd, 1x250gb sata ssd, 1x1tb m2 ssd.
And as usual everyone is saying NAS, but talking about servers with a built in NAS.
I’m not saying you can’t run your services on the same machine as your NAS, I’m just confused why every time there’s a conversation about NASs it’s always about what software it can run.
The way I see it, a box of drives still needs something to connect it to your network.
And that something that can only do a basic connection costs only a little less than something that can run a bunch of other stuff too.
You can see why it all gets bundled together.
At this point you’re just fighting semantics. Even a commercial NAS is reliant on the software too, like with Synology. They run the disk management but also can run Docker and VMs with their built-in hypervisor.
My main application server is a middling office desktop computer from 2011. Runs dozens of services without a sweat.
Highly doubt it’s worth it in the long run due to electricity costs alone
Depends.
Toss the GPU/wifi, disable audio, throttle the processor a ton, and set the OS to power saving, and old PCs can be shockingly efficient.
And heat your room in the winter!
Add spring + autumn if you live up north.
You can slow the RAM down too. You don’t need XMP enabled if you’re just using the PC as a NAS. It can be quite power hungry.
Eh, older RAM doesn’t use much. If it runs close to stock voltage, maybe just set it at stock voltage and bump the speed down a notch, then you get a nice task energy gain from the performance boost.
There was a post a while back of someone trying to eek every single watt out of their computer. Disabling XMP and running the ram at the slowest speed possible saved like 3 watts I think. An impressive savings, but at the cost of HORRIBLE CPU performance. But you do actually need at least a little bit of grunt for a nas.
At work we have some of those atom based NASes and the combination of lack of CPU, and horrendous single channel ram speeds makes them absolutely crawl. One HDD on its own performs the same as this raid 10 array.
Yeah.
In general, ‘big’ CPUs have an advantage because they can run at much, much lower clockspeeds than atoms, yet still be way faster. There are a few exceptions, like Ryzen 3000+ (excluding APUs), which idle notoriously hot thanks to the multi-die setup.
Peripherals and IO will do that. Cores pulling 5-6W while IO die pulls 6-10W
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-5700x/18.html
Same with auto overclocking mobos.
My ASRock sets VSoC to a silly high coltage with EXPO. Set that back down (and fiddle with some other settings/disable the IGP if you can), and it does help a ton.
…But I think AMD’s MCM chips just do idle hotter. My older 4800HS uses dramatically less, even with the IGP on.
So I did this, using a Ryzen 3600, with some light tweaking the base system burns about 40-50W idle. The drives add a lot, 5-10W each, but they would go into any NAS system, so that’s irrelevant. I had to add a GPU because the MB I had wouldn’t POST without one, so that increases the power draw a little, but it’s also necessary for proper Jellyfin transcoding. I recently swapped the GPU for an Intel ARC A310.
By comparison, the previous system I used for this had a low-power, fanless intel celeron, with a single drive and two SSDs it drew about 30W.
Literally did this migration this weekend. Still need to install the A310 drivers and I don’t run Jellyfin (streaming handled client side with minidlna or SMB) but how do you find it?
Ok, im glad im not the only one that wants a responsive machine for video streaming.
I ran a pi400 with plex for a while. I dont care to save 20W while I wait for the machine to respond after every little scrub of the timeline. I want to have a better experience than Netflix. Thats the point.
Eh, TBH I’d like to consume less power, but I mean, a 30-40W difference isn’t going to ruin me or the planet, I’ve got a rather efficient home all in all.
I have a 3600 in a NAS and it idles at 25w. My mobo luckily runs fine without a GPU. I pulled it out after the initial install.
A desktop running a low usage wouldn’t consume much more than a NAS, as long as you drop the video card (which wouldn’t be running anyways).
Take only that extra and you probably have a few years usage before additional electricty costs overrun NAS cost. Where I live that’s around 5 years for an estimated extra 10W.
as long as you drop the video card
As I wrote below, some motherboards won’t POST without a GPU.
Take only that extra and you probably have a few years usage before additional electricty costs overrun NAS cost. Where I live that’s around 5 years for an estimated extra 10W.
Yeah, and what’s more, if one of those appliance-like NASes breaks down, how do you fix it? With a normal PC you just swap out the defective part.
Most modern boards will. Also there’s integrated graphics on basically every single current CPU. Only AMD on AM4 held out on having iGPUs for so damn long.
I’m still running a 480 that doubles as a space heater (I’m not even joking; I increase the load based on ambient temps during winter)
A 486, eh?
I am assuming that’s a GTX 480 and not an RX 480; if so - kudos for not having that thing melt the solder off the heatsink by now! 😅
The GTX 480 is efficient by modern standards. If Nvidia could make a cooler that could handle 600 watts in 2010 you can bet your sweet ass that GPU would have used a lot more power.
Well that and if 1000 watt power supplies were common back then.
I have an old Intel 1440 desktop that runs 24/7 hooked up to a UPS along with a Beelink miniPC, my router, and a POE switch and the UPS is reporting a combined 100w.
If they’re gonna buy a nas anyway, how many years to break even?
I started my media server in 2020 with an e-wasted i7 3770 dell tower I snagged out of the ewaste pile. Ran jellyfin, audiobookbay, navidrome, calibre-web and an arr stack with about a dozen users like a champ. Old hardware rules if you don’t use windows
I used to have a 5700G system that I had to switch out to a 14600k system due to quciksync pass through.
I got my 14600K down to 55w from 75w with everything else being equal. Insane how efficient some setups can be.
My 16tb Pi sips at 13w max or 8w idle. But no encoding or enough storage for normal work. So it’s warm storage
