Building a Power Efficient Home Server!

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Delavoh – Always With Me
When Mountains Move – Alone Atlast
Steve Beddall – Cuts so Deep
Kitrano – Slow Evening
Meod – Crispy Cone
Vladislav Kurnikov – A New Time
Yestalgia – Coffee Shop
Jalowo – Luminism (ft. Yonderling)

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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:16 Why care about power efficiency?
02:26 Platform (Motherboard & CPU)
05:34 Ultra small-form-factor PCs
06:18 miniITX Motherboards
07:41 Efficient mATX and ATX motherboards
09:22 Package C-States
10:34 Devices that prevent low C-States
11:43 Power supply
13:37 Storage
13:58 Sponsored segment
14:40 Storage (cont.)
15:27 To spindown or not to spindown?
17:30 Tiered caching
19:25 Outro

[WolfgangsChannel]

Full build:
- Supermicro SC833
- Fujitsu D3402-B11
- Intel Core i3-6100
- 32GB DDR4 2133Mhz
- 1TB Crucial P100 NVMe SSD
- 1TB SanDisk Extreme SATA SSD
- 4xWD Red Pro HDD 8TB 7200RPM
- 4xWD Red Sata SSD 2TB
- Mellanox ConnectX-3 10Gbe SFP+
- ASM1166 6xSATA Adapter
- PicoPSU 160W + Leicke 150W 12V 13A

[burnzy]

I genuinely find power efficiency more interesting than high performance.

[alexgrig]

I rarely ever engage after watching a video, but I have recently tried to do some research myself, and I had *a lot* of difficulty finding any good resources at all. This must have taken a very long time and it explains the relevant properties to look out for really well. Thank you for that!

[CyberBlaed]

As the 1 person who finds this useful :) thank you! In Australia, we are dying for better power efficiencies!

[owieOne]

Thank you! I can now convince my dad his house won’t become a power plant when I build my homelab

[auto]

This is an underrated video. Your research into this subject was well done and extremely helpful. Thank you.

[pokemanic]

This actually is exactly the video I needed, thanks a bunch Wolfgang! I would have never found that spreadsheet otherwise!

[dunumanz]

As someone who is about to build my very first NAS and live in a country where our power bills literally cost an arm and a leg, this video is very helpful.
I bought my hard drives yesterday and am going o do the setup and configuration today.
Thank you for taking the time and effort to make this video.

[denverag]

13:52 Note that larger capacity drives generally have faster read/write, my 16TB EXOS 7200RPM drives have something like 250MB/s over SATA, if you are targeting power efficiency over IOPS you could get fewer larger drives, the up side is added room for expansion later.
The downside is that re-building/resilvering an array can be harrowing if you dont have on-site redundancy, as re-building a 16TB drive can take days, and puts a lot of load on the remaining drives that were bought around the same time and have been in use for just as long as the drive that just failed

If you dont have on-site redundancy, get more more smaller drives in software raid6/ ZFS-Z6 equivalent.
With on site redundancy, i still recommend raid 6(lose any 2 drives without losing data) but you dont need as many drives to get the same usable storage, meaning lower power consumption.

When buying drives i reccomend staggering their purchase and deployment.

If you're moving from an old file server to a new one, i reccomend keeping the old file server up and running as redundancy, and after things are moved to the new server, wait a few months, then replace the drives in the old server with enough drives to give you redundancy for your main server. This waiting period also applies to if you are building 2 new servers. The reason i suggest spreading the ordering/deployment of the drives is that if they are all deployed at the same time, and one of them fails, that means they may all be close to failure, and re-building the array on the new machine might be enough to take down multiple drives, leaving you with only your backup server, and if they were purchased at the same time, and put through the same wear as the primary server, re-building the primary server may also render the secndary server's pool degraded.

[Sygmond]

In the last 5 months I go on and off research on my little free time to get to a power efficient nas conclusion and my mind is dizzy from so much confusion and too much knowledge… I almost gave up till I found this video. You have no idea how much of a help is this.

Thank you for all the really hard work you did on this and for all the information provided! Amazing! Just amazing!

[KratosIsSick]

Power efficiency is MUST, your work serves a lot of people & insights & learnings help.

[tubefulable]

Your work is definitely not in vain. I've been influenced by a lot of North American tech content that hasn't been focused on energy consumption and now my wallet reaps the energy bill consequences ;) thank you very much for sharing your own sound!

[PhillyPose]

Love the video. Been seriously looking at replacing my old server with a lot newer for thw power efficiency. This was definitely helpful

[nunoalexandre]

Greetings @Wolfgang, I just have to say that I'm amazed with all your videos. I love your detailed explanations and depth of knowledge. Thanks for sharing it with the world and please keep up the great work!

[djtaylorutube]

Thank you for introducing me to powertop. Absolutely spot on, I used to run my home PC (gaming spec) and a Xeon based NAS with 10 spinners and they added 1/3 to my energy bill (not all wasted though, they do heat my small office). However, with the recent energy price increases, looking around for savings, they were the first to go, much to the displeasure of my wife, losing Plex.
I've recently set up a mini PC with external USB 5 bay chassis with SSDs and am running Proxmox for a power consumption that's a fraction of previous. I'll revisit my NAS but the old ebay 10gig rack switch had to go, that was 50W+ sitting idle all day. It's crazy how all this adds up to a base vampire load.
I can comfortably afford the cost of energy, just refuse to subsidise the inept, criminally corrupt UK energy market.

[jusw]

I am *so* grateful for you to covering this topic and in such detail: I was coming round to the view that I was the only person in the world that cared about idle power consumption.... THANK YOU!!!

[MrMoxes]

Some really good points made here. Followed some of your advice & adjusted my spindown times similar to what you suggested. It's not a huge difference in terms of waiting for the drive to spin back up. 17:05 That did kill me! LoL Something about that noise, gets me every time Ha ha

[theinternationalotaku]

I recently just moved to Europe and boy oh boy do I need this video. Thank you so much, Wolfgang for all the work you put into finding all this information out

[_winston_smith_]

Modern systems can boot in a few seconds, so for a home with a small number of users you might be able to power off the server when it has been idle for an extended period. A low power home automation system can monitor the people and client devices in the home to sense when to turn the server on.

[lukystreik]

also ich bin sehr beeindruckt, was du alles herausgesucht hast und hier in einem kurzen Video aufbereitet. Hervorragend genau solche Informationen habe ich dringend gesucht. Außerdem ist dein Englisch hervorragend.