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!
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If you’re really worried about power use, you could switch to an itx motherboard with an soc laptop chip in it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
itx motherboard with an soc laptop chip
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Oh yeah these are super cool. Seems like they’ve gotten pretty expensive lately though, I can’t seem to find a good deal on Aliexpress
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.
I specifically had to set things up in the BIOS so that it would never enter any efficient power/sleep states
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
It’s certainly odd that your current CPU draws so much power if it isn’t under load. I would try to investigate that further.
That said, zfs ram requirements are related to the total storage. If you don’t have hundreds of terabyte storage, 16GB ram should be sufficient.
Okay that’s good to know. Right now I’m only using ZFS for the ssds so it’s only like 2TBs, but I eventually want the ability to migrate the main array which will be more like 40TB (raw capacity, so some will be used for parity)
I’m running a mini-PC with the N100, 12GB RAM, and 2x18TB mirrored drives on ZFS and it seems to work well.
How did you attach the drives? Is this a NAS?
I have a Terramaster 4-bay DAS
How do you implement bit-rot protection?
I am running my disks as mirrors.
Honestly, when Unraid is the culprit, why not change that instead?
I would, and I plan to someday, but my whole storage system is setup on it and migrating would be an enormous pain. Also right now I rely on it’s ability to create a RAID array with differently sized drives. Next time I upgrade, I plan go get homogeneous drives, so maybe then would be the time to move away from Unraid.
Hm, you could set up a virtual machine on whatever host OS and have Unraid run in that instead.
I’ve thought about that before, I’ve used proxmox in the past and liked it. The hope I guess would be that proxmox is better able to handle the physical hardware than Unraid is, and the Unraid can blissfully mismanage it’s vCPUs all it wants! I don’t love the overhead of having a hypervisor, but maybe it would be worth it in this case.
How much effort have you actually put into trouble shooting the issue? Maybe it is just a wrongly set CPU governor (performance, instead of ondemand or something else)? Or a certain kernel flag that have to be set on boot?
I’ve done a whole bunch of things but the problem is that the issue w/ the OS locking up was intermittent, so really between every change I would have to wait and see and risk downtime.
I’m looking at the TerraMaster F4-423 which is basically an Intel NUC soldered to a SATA controller. It has 4x 3.5" SATA bays, an internal USB slot for the OS, 2x m.2 slots, HDMI output, 2x 2.5G LAN, etc. Comes with 4GB RAM, supports up to 32GB. I think it’s the smallest NAS with custom OS you can get.
Can you put Linux (God’s intended OS) on it?
Of course. The original OS, Terramaster OS (TOS), is Linux based and you can replace it with other plain Linux versions or a NAS-specific distro such as OMV or UnRAID.
Since this is basically an Intel NUC, even Windows might run on the thing.
How many HDD are you running? Set to spin down or no? Those spinning all the time add up quickly.
Sleep state and power States are different things… I’ve never heard of power profiles causing issues. I’d try keeping sleep disabled in BIOS and then look into what you need to change to allow the processor to idle/downclock. There’s no reason this shouldn’t work I’m aware of.
Could try undervolting as well.
Okay maybe I can mess with that. I think when I initially was having problems I just nuked everything I could related to power states just to get things working again. Maybe I can try turning some stuff back on.
I’m only running 3hdds at the moment, and they’re setup to spin down automatically which does save some power for sure.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PSU Power Supply Unit RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
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Lenovo thinkcentre? 🤔
I have MSI Z270-A PRO and intel G3930. With 2 SSDs it was draining 22W, but after adding toshiba 12TB HDD it went up to 35W. Before adding HDD I was testing different PSUs and some were using 35W (instead of 22W on this one). Check if your PSU is overdimensioned like 1000W or something like that (PSU is super unefficient if you use it at <10% of max power)
Note that I dont have GPU
Yeah, the power supply is absolutely too big. I think I used it for a gaming pc before this, so it’s in the ballpark of 800W. I also doubt it was a particularly efficient one to begin with, since I don’t care much if a gaming PC is effecint since I don’t keep it on.
I’ll look into getting a lower-power one for cheap and see if that helps. Thanks!
Regarding the N100 idea: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?si=UHUs6jseifBTuulZ
Look for the 4 minute mark, but the whole video is really good.
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https://piped.video/Ppo6C_JhDHM?si=UHUs6jseifBTuulZ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I just wish NewPipe would open piped.video links automatically.
Renoir and Cezanne PRO Apus can idle under 15W. I’ve built my NAS inside a Node 304 as well and use a Gigabyte A520I with a 5650G and ECC RAM because ZFS. Asus b550i works as well. As long as you activate both power savers in bios (cec/aspm/erp) your system will idle under 15W excluding other stuff. I’ve not seen under 20W with asrock boards. With a asm1166 m.2 adapter you get enough sata for the drive caddies which leaves you with 4 sata on the mainboard for cache ssds that you can mount between the caddies.
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