Look for 5W idle consumption boards + CPU combos which go down to package C6+ state. HardwareLuxx has a spreadsheet with various builds focusing on low power. Sell half your disks, go mirror or Raidz1. Invest the difference in off-site vps and or backup.
Storage on any SBC is a big pain and you will hit the sata connector / IO limits very soon.
The small NUC form factors are also fine, but if your problem is power you can go very low with a good approach and the right parts. And you’ll make up for any new investments within the first year.
Thanks! I need to look more into what the power implications of 8 drives is - they never spin down, so I assume they are a non-trivial portion of my power consumption.
That said, I’ve been considering upgrading to something recent and low power anyways. It would be a good opportunity to sneak in some useful features too,
Maybe the possibility of transcoding a video stream
USB3 (not a huge deal)
Non VGA display (useful, for when connection issues arise)
Audio jack (I could use navidrome jukebox mode!)
Which the old hardware wouldn’t support without adapters, cards, etc.
Oh okay that’s a lot of power. For reference, I just set up an old Haswell PC as a NAS, idling at 25W (can’t get to low Package C states) and usually at 28-30 running light workloads on an SSD pool.
My plan was to add a 5 disk cage and at least 3 HDDs, with Raidz2 and 5 disks being the mid term goal. Absolutely unnecessary and a huge waste. I settled on less but larger disks, and in mirror I can get 12-18 TB usable space for under 500€. Less noise and power draw too.
Look for 5W idle consumption boards + CPU combos which go down to package C6+ state. HardwareLuxx has a spreadsheet with various builds focusing on low power. Sell half your disks, go mirror or Raidz1. Invest the difference in off-site vps and or backup. Storage on any SBC is a big pain and you will hit the sata connector / IO limits very soon.
The small NUC form factors are also fine, but if your problem is power you can go very low with a good approach and the right parts. And you’ll make up for any new investments within the first year.
Thanks! I need to look more into what the power implications of 8 drives is - they never spin down, so I assume they are a non-trivial portion of my power consumption.
That said, I’ve been considering upgrading to something recent and low power anyways. It would be a good opportunity to sneak in some useful features too,
Which the old hardware wouldn’t support without adapters, cards, etc.
Responding to myself…
Datasheet reports 7.05 idle watts (~11w at active random read) so depending on what it considers idle, it’d be 8*7.05|11= 56.4:88W
Server clocks in at ~102W. Halving the drives would reduce the power by 27 : 43%
And in theory other components (motherboard, CPU…) must be using anywhere from (102-88) :(102-56.4)= 14 : 45.6 W.
Oh okay that’s a lot of power. For reference, I just set up an old Haswell PC as a NAS, idling at 25W (can’t get to low Package C states) and usually at 28-30 running light workloads on an SSD pool. My plan was to add a 5 disk cage and at least 3 HDDs, with Raidz2 and 5 disks being the mid term goal. Absolutely unnecessary and a huge waste. I settled on less but larger disks, and in mirror I can get 12-18 TB usable space for under 500€. Less noise and power draw too.