Currently if you pay a somewhat average rate for electricity, the math works out pretty nicely: 1W = $1/year (approx) in electricity for something running 24/7. Subtract a little if you pay to heat your home, and add a little for extra AC in the summer.
I needed to put together a NAS / file server to replace an old power-hungry one. This time I was looking to do better in terms of power usage, and hoping to spend a bit less.
I started by looking at my most recent (non-NAS) machines. The most recent machine I put together ran an i3-6300 which I wrote about at Building a low power PC on Skylake – 10 watts idle. It idled at 10 watts (spoiler) and pulled 56-58 watts running Prime95 depending on the undervolt. Both measurements taken from the wall. However, it was being used as a typical desktop machine.
My laptop with a Kaby Lake (R) manages 5-8W at idle (and that includes the screen!). While I’d obviously have a very hard time hitting that in a desktop machine with off-the-shelf components, I was hoping to build something that would at least idle in the 6-8W ballpark.
Was I successful? Let’s find out!
Hard Drives
Normally I’d start at the CPU/motherboard but this is a situation where X relies on Y which relies on Z. It’s easier to start with Z.
In How to shuck the Seagate Expansion 4TB portable (STEA4000400), and why…, I talked about 2.5″ drives pulling about 1-2 watts whereas 3.5″ drives tended to pull from 3-10 watts.
Let’s look at some data for current Seagate SMR drives.
| 2.5″ 5TB | 3.5″ 5TB | 3.5″ 8TB | |
| spinup max | 3.75w | 10-24w | 10-24w |
| write | 2.10w | ~5.5w | ~7.5w |
| read | 1.9w | ~5.5w | ~7.5w |
| idle | 1.3w | ~3.5w | ~5.0w |
| idle low power | 0.85w | ? | ? |
| standby/sleep | 0.18w | under 0.75w | under 0.75w |
The chart uses SMR variants because that’s the only place you can get high-capacity 2.5″ drives. The reality is the 3.5″ drives tend to use 3-4x more power across the board. Note that there are a number of non-SMR 3.5″ drives that do a bit better than the one in the chart (the chart shows the Seagate Archive), though they still fall into the “pulls 3x-4x more power” category.
Power consumption really starts to matter when you get multiple drives going:
- At some point, those spinning-rust hard drives become the most power hungry device in your machine.
- The annual electrical cost starts to add up when you have a lot of 3.5″ drives, and that’s before you account for extra fans and higher summer AC use.
- Finding a PSU that’s efficient at a low-power idle with drives spun down while ALSO having the capacity to spin up a bunch of 3.5″ hard drives is challenging.
Going with shucked 2.5″ drives is currently an economical long term choice when it’s viable. That said, if you’re doing frequent writes, need fast resilver/rebuild times, or need huge amounts of total storage and are limited by SATA ports, 3.5″ drives (ideally non-SMR for performance) may be the way to go.
Of course if you’re looking at small storage requirements (under 4TB for example), looking at high capacity SSDs will get you high performance with low power draw but with much higher up-front cost.
For my usage (heavy reads, fewer writes), 2.5″ SMR drives were the way to go.
4 of the 2.5″ drives means a total of less than 1 watt when spun down, approx 4-5 watts when spun up, and approx 8 watts when actively reading and writing.
PSU
One advantage the previous 10 watt Skylake machine had was that it was powered by an extremely efficient Antec pico-style PSU built into the case and powered from a 19V adapter.
On the other hand, the old power-hungry machine used a standard ATX power supply.
For this new build, I strongly considered going with a Pico PSU but eventually decided against it. Here’s why…
Pico PSU 5V Amp/Current Capability
When multiple hard drives spin up, they can pull a good bit of juice from the 5V rail. On its own not bad: 6x hard drives would generally peak at under 25 watts over the 5V rail for typical drives. Other components powered via the motherboard come into play though: For example, each device connected to a USB 3.0 port can pull up to 0.9A (or 1.5A if it’s a charging port) so ballpark 5w to 7.5W there. As for motherboard-specific components, the total power sum generally isn’t advertised.
The majority of standard ATX PSUs handle 20A on the 5V rail, bu it’s pretty tough to find a standalone Pico ATX PSU that handles much more than 6-8A. If you look at the specs of a number of Pico-style supplies you’ll find that the 12V rails have ample power, but 3.3V/5V don’t scale up as well. This makes sense, as most PicoPSUs seem to essentially pass through 12V from the adapter, so most of the current-related work they do is bucking down to 5V or 3.3V.
I did find some that were “rated” to handle the eventual power draw I predicted. However, in a number of cases the wires or pins were undersized for the amperage I’d be asking of it, and voltage drop became a concern.
If this were the only issue, I’d have direct-soldered some new wires and given it a shot. However….
Power Brick Quality and Pricing
I was mildly alarmed to see no-name power adapters “frequently bought together” on Amazon with the higher end Pico PSUs. Since the bulk of the work/protection/filtering happens in the mains adapter, it would be odd to cheap out here.
Looking on Digikey for some reasonable adapters (with high efficiency), it became clear that I could get solid adapters with detailed spec sheets, but the cost was starting to get up there.
Still, total price was competitive with ATX adapters. However…
Pico PSU Quality Concerns
I’m pretty sure I’ve bought $5 buck converters with higher component counts than some of the Pico PSUs I came across. And those buck converters didn’t have the same strict requirements that typical ATX power supplies do for ripple, transient response, overload/short-circuit protection, power sequencing, etc.
Looking again at the Antec Pico-style supply still running the Skylake machine, I realized it was substantially more complex than any of the Pico PSUs I came across, despite having a power brick to do a lot of the work.
Ultimately, this is what ended the PicoPSU search. For a basic desktop it wouldn’t be a major problem if a Pico PSU caused instability or destroyed a component. Instability causing a RAID array to be corrupted (or multiple drives destroyed) on the other hand…. kind of a big risk to take. Despite being around for a number of years, Pico PSUs are still a bit of a “wild west”, similar to the early ATX PSU days before major web publications started doing substantial testing.
PSU (continued) – Antec Earthwatts 380W ATX
Since a Pico PSU was out of the question, I intended to get the most efficient ATX supply I could find. Toms Hardware performs phenomenal testing on PSUs and their review of the Corsair RM650 seemed to show the best efficiency at low wattages. Unfortunately after ordering it, I found it was too long for the case (oops).
Ideally I’d have something under 200W, but since it’s almost impossible to find branded sub-300W ATX power supplies, I dug into my storage bin and pulled out some spare PSUs, tested them for no-load power draw, in addition to power with the motherboard I ended up using (which you’ll read about next).
Quick PSU Power Draw results
Off No-Load MB + BIOS Antec EarthWatts 380w Bronze 0w 3w 9w Antec Earthwatts 500w 0w 4w 10-11w Antec Earthwatts 450w Plat 0w 4w 8-9w Apevia WIN-500XSPX 4w 17-18w no test Yikes on the APEVIA! I wasn’t about to hook it up to the motherboard by the way. It actually came with a case I wrote about years ago and was never used beyond the initial picture (cables are still twist-tied together). Yes, I’m glad I never used it. Yes, it’s possible I’ll salvage the fan. Yes APEVIA, you could have lowered the weight of the all the cases you sold by omitting the PSU and just FedEx-ing all your PSUs directly to the dump.
I settled on the Antec Earthwatts 380W Bronze.
Just being powered on with no load aside from it’s own fan, the PSU used 3W off the hop. Powering the MB/CPU/RAM brought things to 9W.
Speaking of the motherboard…
Motherboard and CPU – ASRock here we come
I knee-capped myself a bit here. And by a bit, I mean a lot. Two factors pushed me towards a certain motherboard:
- I already had an extra 8GB DDR4 SO-DIMM kicking around from my laptop upgrade.
- I was looking to spend as little as possible, while still getting a current generation CPU.
If you try to find a motherboard that solves both the above problems, right now you’ll undoubtedly land on an ASROCK Jxxx ITX complete with a Goldmont Plus CPU (Celeron J4005, Celeron J4105, or Pentium Silver J5005).
Here’s what I ended up with… the ASRock J4005B-ITX motherboard:
It’s less blurry in real life.
How did this motherboard/cpu choice kneecap me?
Here are a few limitations:
- The Intel controller within Goldmont Plus processors only has support for 2 SATA ports.
- The Goldmont Plus processors only have 6 PCI Express lanes which limits the number of 3rd party SATA controllers the manufacturer (ASRock in this case) can put in.
- These ASRock boards are ITX which results in them only having 1 PCIE slot which means only 1 PCIE SATA card can be installed.
- These budget Goldmont Plus boards have no voltage/frequency tuning available, so no undervolting available. No s0ix power states available either for further power reduction (though I don’t know if this is a CPU or motherboard limitation).
Let’s stop for a moment and evaluate. I’m creating a NAS, and I already limited my ability to add hard drives. Aiming for low power and I’ve already limited my ability to tweak power settings in the BIOS… not off to a good start, are we?!
If I’d been willing to spend a bit more up front and forego the usage of my extra DDR4 SODIMM, I’d have likely considered a current generation i3 and a non-ITX motherboard that had more SATA ports with some expansion slots for extra controllers. If only willing to forgo the DDR4 SODIMM, the ASRock J4005M or J4105M micro-ATX boards would have at least given 3 PCI-Express slots.
Motherboard Woes: ASRock J4005B-ITX and J4105-ITX
I also picked up the J4105-ITX for another machine which is fairly similar. Here are some pain points I came across between the 2 boards:
- The worst Memory QVL list I’ve ever seen. Seriously, I actually searched for a lot of the modules listed and they’re not even available at retail. To make matters worse, reviews have people showing problems with memory compatibility.
- PCI-E incompatibility with a PCIE-x2 card which kicked the ethernet out (mentioned later).
- Turbo won’t work if you use Windows Server 2019 and you’ll have a lot of missing devices shown in Device Manager (neither Windows Update nor ASRock have drivers available for Win Server). Note that Win 10 is fine as it has most of the drivers via Windows Update with ASRock filling in the rest.
- Hard power-offs can cause the system to not boot unless the power is killed for a period of time.
- Swapping RAM can require the CMOS to be cleared (or numerous restart attempts).
- J4105-ITX-specific: The ASM1061 that adds an extra 2 SATA ports (for a total of 4) started dying within a year, causing Command Timeouts to any hard drive that was plugged into it. Not that the ASM1061 is a very good controller to begin with…
On the plus side, both motherboards do support 16GB of RAM despite the specs claiming a max of 8. I tried 1 x 16GB stick and 2 x 8GB sticks for dual-channel. I didn’t test 32GB, though I suspect it would work. The RAM I tested with was a Kingston HyperX 16GB stick (dual-rank DDR4-2666 though it comes up as 2400), Kingston ValueRAM 8GB stick (single-rank), and my original Micron 8GB stick (single-rank).
UPDATE: I did finally get 32GB of RAM going (2x Kingston HyperX 16GB DDR4-2666 @ 2400Mhz). As the BIOS is extremely fickle when changing RAM, the process I ended up using which worked consistently was to (a) put in the new RAM, (b) short the clear-CMOS pins for a few seconds then release, (c) power up the machine, and (d) keep hitting the delete key. After what seems like 30+ seconds the fan speed changes briefly system then hard reboots (powers off then on automatically), but this time with the screen coming on and allowing you to press DEL to enter setup.
Power Consumption – Early Idle Tests (10-12 watts)
The initial test with just a keyboard and monitor attached resulted in 9 watts at the BIOS screen.
Once adding an SSD and booting into an OS, both Windows and Ubuntu would idle around 10-12 watts (though Ubuntu needed “powertop” tuning to get there).
It’s worth noting that in Ubuntu, power consumption was in that 10-12 watt range regardless of whether the Desktop or Server (cli-only) edition was used. Some GNOME stuff in the background would cause the CPU to bounce out of certain idle states, but if you’re trying to decide between Desktop and Server it’s really not going to make much difference in terms of power consumption. If you have a monitor hooked up you may as well use Desktop as it’s quick/easy to get it to turn off the screen after X minutes whereas the Server edition seems to simply leave it on all the time by default: fine if it’s headless but unfortunate if you have a monitor attached and forget to shut it off manually (using consoleblank in grub can help here).
Power Consumption – Pre-Tuning Idle AND Heavy Network/Disk Activity (4 HDD) (13-14 watts / 22 watts)
I installed a 4-port Marvel 88SE9215 SATA controller card in the PCIE slot.
I also tried an 8-port SATA controller card: the SA3008 which uses an ASM1806 PCIE bridge to drive 4x ASM1061 SATA controllers (incidentally, the ASRock J4105 uses the ASM1061 for 2 of the 4 ports it provides on the motherboard). The tiny bit of literature on the SA3008 out there suggests that it uses a 2x PCIE interface (despite being a 4x-sized card) and this motherboard supports 2x PCIE.
Unfortunately, the SA3008 card interfered with the Realtek network controller which wouldn’t come up. The card also pulled +4 watts compared to the Marvel-based card, really got warm even when inactive, and didn’t have any TIM between the controllers and the heatsink.
Update: I did later install an 8-port Marvel/JMicron 1x card which has worked quite well (written about here), though the power results below reflect the Marvel 4-port card.
Next, I set up a BTRFS RAID5 array with zstd:9 compression enabled across 4x Seagate SMR drives (4-5TB each).
Idle with this setup (drives not spun down) I was looking at 13-14 watts.
I ran an rsync from the old server to the new one. rsync and sshd had the CPU pegged and total consumption at the wall came to 25 watts. Note that rsync was operating between 6-32MB/s as it went through the files despite a gigabit connection, gravitating towards the low end as time went on. I eventually disabled mitigations and mounted the BTRFS array with nobarrier and speeds went up to a consistent 30+MB/s. Most of the CPU usage can be attributed to ZSTD compression being forced at a fairly high level.
If you’re doing substantial rsyncs onto a compressed BTRFS file system and are thinking about using these Jxxx-ITX boards, you may want to consider opting for a 4-core variant if you need a higher copy speed.
Power Consumption – Post Tuning Idle
As I alluded to above, I had done some tweaking. Here are the major bits:
- PowerTOP in Linux (auto-tune at start).
- Hard drives spun down after 30 mins.
- Replaced PSU fan with a Noctua fan.
- 1 case fan with the speed just above stall.
With the hard drives spun down, I was looking at a consistent 9 watts idle from the wall.
Highlights: The strengths of this setup
9 watts at spun-down idle (where it sits most of the time) is fairly reasonable considering there’s 1 SSD + 4 hard drives at my disposal with 16-20TB total capacity (12-15TB via RAID-5). Keeping in mind it’s being driven by an ATX PSU, this isn’t really a bad showing all things considered. For comparison, I took a look at a few Synology NAS devices and with the exception of a couple models, they all idle at a higher power draw.
If capacity were to become a major issue in the future, using 3.5″ drives instead could be done at the expense of about +15 watts idle, though if in a situation where they could be aggressively kept in sleep/standby I suspect the increase would only be 1-3 watts which is still less than the 8-port controller that I tried had used.
Sitting in open air (19 C), the CPU heatsink was at about 32 C during the rsync and touching each chip on the motherboard after power-down, none were detectably warm. The hottest component was the heatsink on the Marvell SATA controller card which sat at about 38 C.
The low power clearly translated to low heat, which meant I was able to get by with just 1 case fan at an extremely low setting: to be honest I probably could have relied on the PSU fan alone.
Limitations: The weak points of this setup
Unfortunately, the system as it stands will hold a max of 6 drives: 1 OS drive and 5x storage drives. Realistically, 4x storage drives becomes the day-to-day max because it’s worth having 1 spare port ready for hard drive upgrades/replacements. Other controller cards are possibilities down the road but options are really limited when the only expansion slot operates at a max PCIE rate of 2x.
The CPU being maxed during the file transfer is another drawback. This 2 core Celeron is worked pretty hard, and while it may be able to handle some other tasks in the future (ie Plex transcoding via Intel Quicksync), any time it’s asked to do 2 things at once I suspect it’ll slow to a crawl.
Switching from the J4005B to the J4105 would add 2 SATA ports which brings max drives from 6 to 8, and would double the core count: I’d expect slightly higher power usage but didn’t repeat all my tests with that configuration.
Doing it all over again: What I’d do differently
On one hand, I’m pleased that I managed to get below 10 watts: I’ve got a system that’ll likely serve files and do other tasks for years to come, all inside a nice low power envelope.
On the other hand, I’m really left to wonder if I might have managed to get there anyway with an undervolted i3 or Pentium Gold on a 300-series motherboard with the multiplier capped. Keep in mind that my previous Skylake build was idling at 10W – while it didn’t have 4x spun down drives or a full ATX PSU to contend with, it’s within the realm of possibility that improvements in Kaby Lake and beyond may be enough to offset those.
In any case, were I to go at this again, I suspect I’d go with a Micro-ATX board with 6 SATA ports and just tinker as much as possible to get the power consumption down. Obviously the cost would be a bit higher (and I wouldn’t have been able to use my spare DDR4-SODIMM), but future expansion would be substantially easier.
Update: Going Newer – Comet Lake at 11 Watts!
I’ll keep this short. By chance, I was doing some testing of one of my newer systems: an Intel i3-10320 on a Gigabyte H470M DS3H motherboard, running on a Corsair SF 450W Platinum power supply (my new favorite PSU for low power, though I had to extend the 24-pin cable to reach most motherboards). At idle with 2x16GB sticks of standard DDR4 and a couple NVMe drives, it pulls 11 watts, both in Windows and Ubuntu Desktop. The only out-of-the-ordinary trick here was forcing on all the C-states in the BIOS and choosing C10 as the desired C-state.
Update 2: Newer Still – 7 watt to 16 watt range on Alder Lake!
A full write-up for this one can be found at 7 watts idle on Intel 12th/13th gen: the foundation for building a low power server/NAS. Lots of details within, but as a teaser, when this Alder Lake 6-core 64GB DDR4-3200 system was in a similar 4×2.5″ SATA HDD configuration, it pulled 10 watts at idle with drives in standby (the 16 watt value is for 3xNVMe + 5×2.5″ SATA HDD + 6×3.5″ SATA HDD idle with drives in standby). It took a lot of work to get there, but may be worth a look if you’re hoping for a newer system.
Just wanted to say that your work regarding 32-bit EFI/64-bit CPU Macbooks was a lifesaver. Just wanted to say thanks and you should make a YouTube video on how to do it correctly, because there are a lot of videos on how to do it wrong.
Thanks, Jaron
very nice article !
If you went for a i3 and a non-ITX motherboard, how much more power it should require compared to the atom build ?
From your experience, what idle power can a cpu like Pentium Gold G5400(T) with a mATX motherboard reach (just cpu/ram running idle) ?
Thanks
Valerio
so basically, just use lower wattage and small components, low power psu, small motherboard, etc.. every build i saw with i3 and such, does not go lower than 30w idle :( I'll try to see how efficient my spare enermax Eco80+ is, if it's not enough i'll try a different one, maybe a pico psu, it's hard to find this kind of real world tests online :D
I have a homebuilt NAS
- Intel i3 8100T (4-core, 3,1GHz) with Arctic Cooler Alpine Pro
- Asrock Micro ATX motherboard (don't know the exact type anymore)
- 16GB RAM (2 bars DDR4)
- 2x 3.5 inch WD RED 4TB
- 2x 256GB 2.5 inch SSDs
- 1x 120 case fan
- Pico PSU 90W power supply
At "idle" I average 25W-27W (all 4 disks are running permanently, there is no sleep, and there are 4 Docker containers and a Win10 virtual machine running).
The system has infinitely more steam compared to the SOCs above (switched from the J4005 to the current system, difference like night and day).
Without disks I measured at some point, it was idle I think around 14Watts.
(I feel grateful google's 1st result was your page for search term "lowest power consumption pc as nas")
So I ended up using a Qnap TS-253Be (non-e also similar) with linux and a single 14TB 3.5" Seagate Ironwolf (thinking about a lower-rpm WD red and move this to the backup server)
My config:
- J3455 CPU + 2x8GB RAM (came with 1x2GB)
- 1x14TB 3.5" Seagate Iron
- 4xPCIe slot with 2x M.2 NVME adapter (Qnap PCIe 2.0, 4xPCIe to 2 4xPCIE)
- 512GB Samsung 970 PRO (for torrents)
- 128GB Samsung SM951 (for OS)
But I lack ECC RAM and questionable PSU (although it's the original "certified" by Qnap)
Notes:
- BIOS boots only from internal flash or SATA drives (no boot from PCIe slots, so I have to load kernel from internal flash)
- this model has 4GB internal flash (older Intel NASes had only 512MB)
Don't know about Windows (maybe install on a SATA SSD and then transfer OS to NVME with boot partition on internal flash)
I assume the 4-bay version to be as low-power as this and have 4x3.5" + 2xM.2. I think Qnap even has a 10G+2xM.2 PCIe adapter.
Albeit my use case intends on combining NAS, Home Server box in 1 I also am after the holy grail of low power consumption.
My current aging NAS (Dlink ugh) caps at 11MB/s writes which sucks when transferring drone videos.
I also want a space for docker images and some VMs for services like homeautomation.
Anyhow electricity being expensive here I NEED the low power goodness for 24/7 runtime..
What were the synology NAS that you looked at and what were their idle power consumption btw?
Have you considered the Asrock A300 (with ryzen, etc) might be overkill for a NAS though :)
Anyway thank you and look forward to more write ups or better youtube videos in that niche
My leading candidate is the GigaIPC mITX-1605A -- basically it runs a Ryzen Mobile processor at 17 TDP max (another 7 TDP max for graphics onboard for a total of 25W). This is as powerful on passmark as my 1 year old i7 laptop. Draw back is it doesn't have 6 SATA like I need but it does have a mini PCIe slot that I plan to add a SATA controller into though. It isn't a cheap board but after my last very low power, very low cost board has run for 10 years paying a bit more for longevity I think is worth it this time around. As my server isn't on all the time only when needed a higher draw is a good trade off for very low sleep mode.
There is more information on my research / ideas on my blog which is techdabble dot wordpress dot com if you are interested.
Here is a test: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/synology-ds220j-2-bay-nas/12.html
If your primary concern is power consumption, the Synology NASes will have you covered. There are many other reasons to build custom, but power consumption isn't really one IMO.
But my main NAS has a low power consumption as well. The Gigabyte C246N-WU2 (CEC 2019 enabled, ErP enabled) with an i3-8100 consumes only 6.65 W incl SATA SSD, 16GB RAM and 1G LAN connection. Now the final NAS with Unraid installed consumes 23,60W with 8 (!) 12TB HGST 3.5 inch HDDs in standby and a 10G network adapter (this consumes alone 6W). Sadly there is no adapter that adds the SATA DevSleep ability (uses the 3.3V pins to send HDD in a state that consumes only 5mW). This is something used in enterprise storages and notebooks.
@Danny
"the 2-bay 220j will do 5.5W"
It seems you did not read the test setup. They used super small SSDs for this test and these consume nearly nothing. This is good to compare different NAS models, but has nothing to do with the consumption in the real world - as long you do not install SSDs as well ;)
I've been happy with it thus far. All the ports work (I tested with 8 drives), but I didn't test every port combination when using less than 8 drives. Details in the write-up.
I've gone down mini-itx path with soc for my silent server, so am trying to decide between the built in 4xSATA (J4105) or 2xSATA(J4105B). Either way I need the PCIE card that adds more SATA ports (I've already ordered, due to the long lead time, the one you recommended on your other page: PCE8SAT-M01)
You said that your J4105 had issues with the ASM1061 chip serving 2 of the 4 SATAs on your other page. I was thinking that having 4xSATA ports built-in would be an advantage as you wouldn't have to put as many drives on the PCIE card (and therefore theoretically each HDD could run at a higher data transfer rate), but your experience with the ASM1061 chip is causing me some hesitation. Do you think J4105B is the safer bet?
Second question: The J4105B has a 16x mechanical PCIE slot, however when reading the Asrock website I understood that it only had two lanes. Did you give any thought to going with a 2-lane PCIE 2.0 card (instead of the 1x PCE8SATA-M01), to get even more bandwidth to share among additional hdds?
I'm probably going to run a single SSD for the OS and 6 hdds.
With that said, my ASM1061 did fail. There are a ton of these chips out there and they certainly don't all fail. But I don't know what the overall failure rate is. I'm not a huge fan of the ASM1061 in general... IIRC if adding a port multiplier it lacks FBS and it also doesn't support the lowest link state power management level which is a bit of an irritant. Going off of memory here, but I seem to recall power consumption being a bit higher than the common cheap 4-port Marvel controller (a controller I actually prefer).
Putting all that aside, assuming my failure is closer to a 1-off than it is the-tip-of-the-iceberg, you certainly do get 2 high speed ports.
To the 2x card question, I did try what purported to be a 2x card (the ASM-based SA3008 - listed as 4x slot and 2x interface/bandwidth) and it prevented the ethernet from coming up. Specs for these things are... sparse so it's always possible it's really a 4x interface. Or maybe something else about that card just doesn't play nice with my motherboard. Or maybe my card was just wonky. You could always try a 2x card out though: I took a quick peak on AliExpress just now and there seem to be some 8-port cards that list "Marvell 88SE9705" which I'm assuming is supposed to be 88SM9705 (5 port port multiplier, presumably feeding off of an x2 controller like the 88SE9235). The big reasons I haven't bothered to try it are that:
- The few I came across just now were over $50USD.
- The https://mattgadient.com/8-port-sata-on-a-pcie-1x-lane-looking-at-the-pce8sat-m01-expansion-card/ 1x 8-port SATA controller I wrote about here has been working well for me (which currently seems to be in the $20-30USD range).
Essentially, I've just accepted that I'll have up to 8 drives sharing a 1x interface. Since my OS drive gets very little reads/writes it's on the 8-port to free up another Intel port for a drive that can make better use of the bandwidth. Throughput's fine for my current usage, but if I ended up needing more I'm probably at the point where the most sensible course of action would be to use a mATX board with more ports and PCI-E slots.On a side note, I've got an 8 year lead-acid battery background and hadn't ever heard about reviving sulphated batteries using the method you discussed. You seem to have a broad knowledge across quite a few subjects. All the best.
One generic comment about the article is that on my HP ProDesk 400 i5-6500 server, in BIOS the consumption is +20W (which goes after boot), idk why, maybe the HP BIOS is complete crap as it looks. It has an ASPM option but regardless of enabled or disabled, linux kernel disables it with:
> ACPI FADT declares the system doesn't support PCIe ASPM, so disable it
wrt undervolting, there are some tools in linux to undervolt similar to how there are tools for windows. See `intel-undervolt` and `linux-intel-undervolt` tools. Former allows to change TDP and temperature limits too.
Also one can edit in sysfs the CPU scaling governor and ASPM policy (/sys/module/pcie_aspm/parameters/policy). `pcie_aspm.policy=powersupersave` kernel cmd option. For the scaling governor see intel_pstate module documentation.
But I saw reported no effect on idle consumption of either of those as well I didn't see such in my limited testing.
P.S. Just FYI, using BeQuiet System Power 7 300W. It has standby/turned on without load both: 1.2W-1.5W, BIOS: 34W, Booted with SATA 6TB 5400rpm 3.5" drive: 16.5W. Can't make drive spin down though due to constant access. Hopefully once I set a primary drive NVME, that will be fixed.
Your experience interests me a lot because I'm also working on the design of a NAS whose #1 goal is the lowest possible power consumption.
And just like you the CM Asrock J seemed to me to be a good possibility but they don't seem to support RAID.
What I don't understand is that in your article you seem to set up a RAID 5 with this type of card. Something must have escaped me... Could you enlighten me?
Yours sincerely,
Let me ask your opinion, if you have some time to give me, about my low conso server project.
Currently I have an i3-8100T, an Asrock Z370M-ITX/ac motherboard, 3 SSDs (2 in software RAID and one SSD in backup) and a Be Qiet 80+Gold 400W power supply. The basic console under Debian is 22-23W. I have the impression that the SSDs don't really consume anything because the power consumption is about 18-19W.
Reading your comments I understand that you have been able to reduce the conso of this type of processor (i3) to around 10W. Could you point me in this direction because I never have o/c or underclocked components.
I also have the possibility to get an Asrock J5005-ITX. Do you think it might be interesting to replace my current hardware with this card ?
Thanks again !
Undervolting did not impact the idle power consumption for my processor (it was 10W whether undervolted or not). Intel's improvements to idle power consumption over the years has really been amazing. Undervolting only affected the power consumption under load, so if your computer is usually idle I don't think I'd go to the effort of undervolting if you're unfamiliar with it. A bad crash at the wrong time can cause data loss, so usually I tinker with undervolting and stress testing immediately after purchase and then do a wipe/reinstall once everything is stable.
Keep in mind your motherboard has 2xLAN and Wifi as well as a more capable Z370 chipset (mine had the H110 which is a very low-end chipset). Those could easily pull a little extra power.
If you're intent on reducing the power consumption as much as possible, you may want to try disabling one of the LAN ports and the Wifi in the BIOS (assuming you only need 1 LAN port), along with anything else you don't use. Setting the CPU fan in the BIOS to as low a speed as you can manage without causing overheating can be worth looking into as well since fans can easily sneak a few watts of power if they're running at high speeds. As far as SSDs go, some actually do use a little more power than others - usually it's small enough to not matter, but when you're into the under-20W range it can certainly be measurable. I usually see what Anandtech or Toms measured for power consumption of current SSDs before I buy - otherwise I tend to go for Samsung in a low power build since they are usually consistently low. Really though the only way to know for sure what each of your components are using is to test everything individually.
As for the J5005-ITX, it will almost certainly use less power than your current motherboard/CPU, but obviously you have the cost of DDR4 SODIMM modules, and whether it's worth the extra cost it to shave off perhaps 5-10W is something you'd have to decide for yourself. I'm also not excited about the ASMedia SATA ports (2 out of the 4 ports) that the ASRock Jxxxx-series motherboards all seem to use. Aside from that though, they're nice efficient little motherboards.
I have just tested the power supply at no load (i.e. by starting it by shunting 2 pins of the ATX plug): it seems to consume 8W (measurement made with a wattmeter connected to the plug) ... I find this quite consequent !
If the power supply consumes 8W on the 18-20W total it would make a consumption of the CM+CPU+RAM around 10-12W. The Asrock J4005B-ITX board of your article seems to have a consumption of about 6-7W is it right ?
Concerning the settings of the motherboard I will need wifi and a LAN port. I don't think it's possible to switch off the power of one of the LAN ports.
I didn't quite understand the meaning of one of your remarks which seems to be important "but it is obvious that you have the cost of the DDR4 SODIMM modules, and you will have to decide yourself if it is worth paying the extra 5 to 10 W that it will cost you to shave it".
Thank you!
I only mentioned the DDR4 SODIMM because it's another expense to consider unless you have DDR4 SODIMM memory sitting around. Buying a new motherboard + RAM to perhaps save 5-10W is a tough trade-off because in most countries it would take 20+ years before the electricity savings was enough to pay for the new motherboard and RAM. Of course, there can be other reasons that make it worth doing (low heat, silent operation, building a new computer anyway, running a long time on an uninterruptible power supply, great for limited off-grid power, etc) - long term cost savings just isn't one of them.
i've been considering a 4*5TB 2.5' system myself for a while now.
https://www.kontron.com/products/boards-and-standard-form-factors/motherboards/uatx/
3644-B with a i3 8300 (TDP is higher than the 8100-T but according to this community https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_messages/1673583 it is a good setup)
Thanks for giving the insights about btrfs with your setup.
Kr,
Stront
Very nice report
I have a question which laptop model do
you used that consumed less than 10 watts with screen
MFG Mike
How will Intel Xeon behave?
The Ryzan V2000 series chips are snazzy too, but are v pricey as well. See the iBase MI989F-2718
Not to mention the V3000 series was just officially released..
I think Elkhart Lake is the most interesting platform at the moment. Low wattage, beefy performance and some voodoo called In-band ECC that seems to enable single bit ECC with regular RAM. Limited to 32GB of said RAM so not ideal but interesting at the price point. Currently seeking something like below with 4 sata ports
See the iBase IB836FE-6425E
I was also reading about building a NAS using Rasberry Pi. Although in that scenario you're limited to 2xSATA ports. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Additionally, my research went into other SoC boards that are industrial grade such as the ASRock IMB (impossible to find where to buy them), however, they do comprise wider arrays of SATA ports, with M2 and 10g NICs (this latter scenario would serve to do content storage and creation over LAN), however, as mentioned before cannot find anything but specs on the manufacturer's websites but nothing wholesale, including former generations.
I would love to hear your thoughts!
As for the IMB you mentioned, at the time I think I looked through nearly every small server board out there including those models. Price and availability were always the killers, especially when seeking newer generation stuff. I took a quick look at NewEgg just now and availability seems to be even worse than it was before - I didn't check eBay or AliExpress though.
How could I figure out what other motherboard/CPU combo would work for the low idle power consumtion? I can find a few cheap I5 CPU's from the 10th gen, and plenty of micro-ATX or mini-ITX motherboards, but can't find any info on how much idle power they would use.
For the motherboards with an integrated CPU, I'd expect the ASRock J5040 to be nearly identical to the motherboards above, although availability and price of that model still aren't superb.
For a separate CPU, 6th gen to 10th gen should all be somewhat similar. In my Radeon "gas guzzling" write-up at https://mattgadient.com/curbing-the-gas-guzzler-tendencies-of-amd-radeon-with-multi-monitor/ I mentioned that an Intel i3-10320 on a cheap Gigabyte H470M DS3H pulled 11 watts and that's not bad for a 4-core CPU. If you don't need much compute or iGPU power at all, I'd expect current 2-core Pentium Gold and Celeron offerings to have slightly lower power consumption than current 4-core i3 CPUs. Whatever you do, avoid the latest 12th-Gen stuff that has "efficiency cores" because they are NOT particularly power efficient (they are "space efficient")... from what I've seen, those CPUs use an extra bit of power even if the "efficiency cores" are disabled and it takes a bit of research to determine whether or not your non-E-Core CPU is actually an E-Core chip where Intel disabled the E-Cores.
For a separate motherboard, this is unfortunately a little more tricky because they all use different components and I don't think the manufacturers care too much about something like the efficiency of the MOSFETs they use. Thus, motherboard selection is perhaps the biggest gamble. When trying to build a low-power system I try to find as bare-bones a motherboard as I can because they tend to have fewer components in total. A side benefit is they tend to be cheaper.
Another option if you only need perhaps 1-3 drives total (NVMe + SATA) would be a Mini PC / NUC. Many budget models can be found on AliExpress (possibly eBay also) by searching for "mini pc" or "soft router" - ServeTheHome has actually been testing a lot of these on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/@ServeTheHomeVideo/videos ). In terms of what you get for the price, a number of them can be really hard to beat. Apparently they often come with inefficient power adapters, so personally I'd factor in the potential cost of getting a quality adapter from DigiKey. Note that to find a model with 2xNVMe and 1xSATA I had to search AliExpress for "soft router 2*nvme".
Hopefully something in there is useful. Good luck!
I have found a good deal on a I5 10500, but the motherboard keeps giving me trouble. There are a few boards with a H410 chipset, but they don't have NVME or 6 sata ports. The hard part for me is that I am trying to get my current Unraid server to use less power.
The server consists of the following parts:
- Ryzen 1600
- A320M gaming motherboard
- GTX 1050Ti for Plex transcoding
- LSI9211-8i and an expander card.
- 860W platinum PSU from Ionic.
Just these parts alone pull about 85 watts at idle. Taking away the SAS card and expander have it drop down, but I am not sure by how much.
There are also 12 drives in the system. When these are all spun up, the system draws about 160 watts.
My main challenge is finding a way to have that many drives run on a low power system. I am now toying with the idea to just go for the I5 10500 and a H410 motherboard and have the drives connected via USB. I know it's not ideal, but honestly, I have never had issues with USB drives randomly dissconecting and I think Unraid will handle the odd failure. If I connect 4 drives to the SATA ports, that leaves just 8 drives for USB connection.
The old one is mentioned above and used about 85W idle with all the disks spun down.
I replaced this system with an I5-10500 and a Asus prime H410M-A motherboard. Also removed 1 of the 2 RAM sticks
Then I did some testing;
The CPU, motherboard 1 RAM stick uses 16W with a 350W gold PSU from Seasonic and 18W with the 860W platinum PSU from Fractal design that I used before. I decided to keep using the Fractal since it has the power and connectors to run all the drives.
Adding the LSI9211-8i adds about 6W with no disks connected. The system with the LSI9211-8i and a SAS expander card runs at 47W idle. Nice! Already almost 40W saved.
I then did some cable work and removed the SAS expander. The LSI9211-8i now controls 8 drives, and the other 3 (I removed 1 from the array) are connected to my motherboard SATA. There are also 6 fans running at low speed. This setup uses 34/35W with all disks spun down, and 90W with all running. The CPU can draw over 100W so I did see some spikes to over 200W.
I am happy with this setup since I went down from 85W to 35W, and still have room for 12 HDD's (or 11 and a NVME). The only thing that I am not happy about, is that my motherboard and CPU combo seems to draw 6W more than the Comet lake build that Matt build. I even use a stick of RAM less, so I wonder why it is using that much more power. It would be nice if I could figure that out, and get the system to run under 30W. The system runs Unraid and is meant for mass storage, Plex and maybe a few game servers.
Even if you do need on the fly decode/encode, integrated GPUs and even dedicated encode chips built in the CPU are usually enough to handle the task, although for a smaller number of users.
What a fantastic wealth of information your site provides.
I wanted to piggy back off this comment because you mentioned Intel's 12th gen, and after reading your update about achieving a low idle power system with an i3-10320, I started looking at the i3-12100. (At first I was solely looking for chips with very low TDP's, not realizing that efficiency and power draw is a lot more nuanced than just TDP).
My understanding is that only one of the i5 chips in Intel's 12th gen features e cores. None of the i3's do. Would the i3-12100 be a worthy chip to consider over the 10320 that you found success with? It's on a 10 nm process instead of 14 so I assume the chip should be more efficient?
As you mention, the micro mini machines are also potentially interesting. On the pro side, they seem to be cost effective and utilize efficient chips like the Celeron n5105. One would also imagine that you can also have a much more efficient power supply as opposed to trying to use an ATX power supply that will likely suffer in the low wattage world we want our system's to idle in.
The cons are lack of SATA expansion, which is ultimately the "problem" I ran into when initially contemplating something like a raspberry pi4 (and I'm not even sure if that's powerful enough of a chip anyway).
So other than contemplating the purchase of an i3-12100 and purchasing a board with multiple SATA ports, my other thought was a ryzen 5 5600g. I've read though that Intel's chips are much better at transcoding with their quicksync technology. Do you have any advice regarding an AMD platform or is that a no no?
Lastly, my current server is running an i5-750 (my old gaming system). My desire to replace it is two fold, at a 95 TDP and being a very old chip, I can only assume this system consumes a lot of power even at idle (I don't have something to measure power draw at the wall). In reading your website and a bunch of other sources, I became aware of Intel quick sync and how my chip does not have it... Which I assume just be the reason I sometimes experience lousy playback of some media (depending on how it was encoded). I run a pi 3 with Kodi/emby as my front end, and even forcing a transcode playback doesn't always fix stuttering issues on some media playback.
Last option is a Dell optiplex 7010 that I recently salvaged from work. It's running an i3-2400. The motherboard unfortunately only has 3 SATA ports (which is fine as a stop gap solution, I currently only have 2x 3.5 inch HDD and 1 SSD boot drive... But after reading up on the benefits of 2.5 inch HDD's I want to pull the trigger on 2x Seagate 5tb one touch drives and incorporate those into my system). I also have no idea how efficient those dell psu's are.
One long-shot option for the mini-PC's that have a true NVMe slot is using an NVMe-to-5x-SATA adapter (search "jmb585 nvme" on amazon/ebay/aliexpress). Big down sides are a few reviews with catastrophic failures, 5 SATA drives total, and you would still have to figure out not only how you want to supply power to all the drives, but also where to put them.
I'd personally avoid going the Ryzen route if idle power consumption is the focus. On the other hand if you're actually hammering the CPU, Ryzen starts to make a lot of sense.
For the Optiplex 7010, you could always add a PCIE SATA controller card to get more ports (I went over a 2-3w version at https://mattgadient.com/8-port-sata-on-a-pcie-1x-lane-looking-at-the-pce8sat-m01-expansion-card/ ), but the i3-2400 still an older CPU and I wouldn't be surprised if modern Ryzen were more power efficient - it wasn't until Skylake that Intel really got the idle power consumption down to impressive levels.
Thank you for your prompt reply!
I've been looking through your site and found a lot of interesting things you've written about, like the tomato seedlings or the low cost Canadian cell phone carriers (My wife is on a Koodo $15 a month unlimited text and we purchase minutes every other year or so, the Public Mobile pricing you outlined probably makes more sense in terms of cost effectiveness...We'll probably swap over once she burns through the rest of her minutes. In my case I have a really weird configuration through Fido with a plan meant for tablets, it's $10 a month for 4 GB of data (no talk/text possible), and I do pretty much everything through VOIP. With things like facebook messenger, whats app etc. being so prevalent it works quite well on that end, and the data for randomly perusing the internet, reddit, and google maps is great. I ported my number over to a service based out of Montreal called voip.ms and set up my android phone as a soft phone, and they have a testing app as well. I'm not sure if I haven't configured it properly on my new phone but it's not the best, my phone doesn't always ring and sometimes people have trouble reaching me. The service costs me something like ~2 USD a month.)
Back on topic to the server...
Long story short, after considering buying something newer, I started scouring through Kijiji/Facebook marketplace/Hardware Canucks to see if I couldn't find a decently priced used system. I think I got pretty lucky and picked up an i5-8600k, Gigabyte Z370 Auros gaming 5, and 16 gb of ram for $220. I don't think I'll be able to achieve idle temps as low as you, but I figure I should get way lower than my current system and have a much better experience now that my system has intel quick sync.
I assume my board will consume more juice because of the beefier VRM's, but I had hoped I could disable a lot of other stuff in the BIOS. But it's got 6x sata ports and 3 m.2 slots, 2 of which aren't shared with the SATA ports I think. I'm a mega noob when it comes to that so I'm still looking into trying to optimize all of that. I've enabled all of the C states, but I'm not sure that I can force the system in a certain C state in the BIOS. Also, I unfortunately didn't see a way to turn off the wifi card in the BIOS. Cot confused at the cpu voltage tweaks too so I haven't touched anything these yet. I think there are some software optimizations I can do, so I'm reading about that now in regards to linux powertop and things with respect to open media vault.
Even if say my system consumes 20w instead of 10w idle, being in Quebec and with the exceedingly low rates for electricity, it really doesn't matter too much I guess.
Something I thought would be of interest to you (assuming you haven't already seen it), is a German community spreadsheet with what a bunch of people have achieved in terms of low idle power and information regarding their hardware setup. Here is the link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15G7w031s83aox_4D_OpcnhGsXPzq77CMsjPYYzl4VsQ/edit#gid=0
Could give you some ideas maybe, and just cool to see what others have achieved!
I want to retire my Z440 NAS, which has 28 HDDs and 6SSDs managed idle power is at 35-65Watt, a Pcie x8 space is still free for 40GBE. The Z240 has 20W but without drives and no 40GBE.
The problem I have besides I would like a Nas with ecc ram which consumes 7-10 watt in operation since I would like to run this 24/7 with 4-8 drives.
Your idea to go with the A620 chipset certainly seems like a good idea when it comes to lowering power consumption. The A620 is rated at 4.5 watts from what I can tell (B650/670 come in at 7 watts and 14 watts). The biggest risk I see here is that some A620 boards struggle with CPUs with higher TDPs so you may have to spend some time clamping down limits in the BIOS if you run into instability.
On the Intel side, something like the W680 chipset supports ECC but unfortunately none of Intel's best known 12 and 13th-gen idle power-misers (12100-12400 and probably at least i3-13100) claim to support ECC on Intel ARK. And looking to earlier generations is painful because Intel removed ECC support from desktop 10th and 11th gen CPUs as I recall.
With that said, low power + ECC isn't something I have experience with - the last time I investigated it, it seemed I was either giving up low power, getting an old generation, or spending far more money that I'd planned. It's possible that home server/NAS/unraid forums out there may have good solutions found which combine ECC and ~10 watts power, so it could be worth looking through those a bit. Good luck!
I get 6-8 watts using an ASRock J5040-ITX in idle with 4 connected SATA devices (in spin down mode).
ASRock J5040-ITX
Crucial 1x 32 GiB CT32G4SFD832A
1x 120mm fan
PicoPSU-120 + LEICKE 90 W
1x 2,5 SATA SSD (boot device)
3x 3,5 SATA HDD
OS: Windows 10 in both Balanced and Power saver mode, High performance mode not tested.
Idle: OS fully booted, some applications are running (browser, email, etc.) but no visible activity anywhere.
Lowest CPU C-state: C6
I'm completely satisfied with these power consumption stats. I still trying to figure out, what's the ASMedia ASM1061 idle and operating power consumption.
I also purchased an M.2 SATA Adapter providing an JMB582 chipset for additional 2 SATA ports. Additional power consumption should be at 1.3 watts (both idle and operating) for this card. With 6 SATA ports in total and the low power consumption this setup was a steal.