Building a Power Efficient Home Server! 

elmuz's Mover script: github.com/notthebee/infra/blob/29aacdb50ee28d3728b0fbcd542f2fa4d5396219/roles/filesystems/mergerfs/templates/mergerfs-uncache.j2 Hardwareluxx forum thread: www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamsten-systeme-30w-idle.1007101/ Hardwareluxx Google doc: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI Jeff Geerling's Petabyte Pi project: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BBnomwpF_uY.html LTT's SSD-only NAS: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-TWRvB8fh8T8.html 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

I genuinely find power efficiency more interesting than high performance.

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!

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

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

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

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

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!

Wow Wolfgang! This is an amazing reference guide! Thank you so much for answering tons of questions i didn't even know i had!

I really enjoyed this video. I've been considering making a small home server, and regardless if I just piece together something from spare parts or go power efficient, your video gave me great ideas.

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!

Hey Wolfgang, I have been looking for tutorial like this for a while. I love the analysis and learned a lot!

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.

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

This is SUPER helpful, thank you for all the time and energy you put into getting to where you are and then sharing it with us.

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!!!

Wonderful video! Thank you. This answers the questions I had, as well as questions I hadn't even thought of yet! I was about ready to deploy my first home server, but it idles at 72W with the two WD Blacks (don't judge, they were very cheap) only consuming 8W each. Now I know where to look in order to optimize it :)

This video is so useful i've been interested a lot by home server lately with NAS. And i've watched your previous vids about it and they were very good and this one is perfect to know more about which parts to look at. Thanks man 👍 definitely be useful in the future Edit: also great memes

So much excellent information, and just as I'm starting to spec a new home server. Thanks.

I started planning my homelab and this video is incredible.Thanks Wolfgang!

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

The best video I've seen. As a home lab builder this is gold!

Thanks for this. I will eventually make my homelab server when I settle somewhere and I always wanted to make sure that it does not consume too much power.

This is gold! Thank you for sharing your knowledge!

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

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.

Hey King. This is the first video of yours I've watched. Great considerations considering I'll be looking to build my first homelab soon. Scrolled through some of your other videos, just wanted to say your haircut in this one looks great, and thanks for sharing your knowledge. Cheers

I love it! I live in Germany myself and the high energy prices and the high power consumption of a server have always deterred me from having a server at home myself. Now I'm thinking about it after all. Thank you :)

Fujitsu sponsor this man! He's the only tech youtuber who has mentioned you this decade.

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!

Such a well put together video, super informative and well edited. Keep it going!

Thank you. You are one of the few RU-vidrs who covers this topic. 👍

What a great video! Exactly what I have been looking for! I am in Europe as well (Sweden) and the electricity prices really make you think twice before deploying anything that will draw power all the time.

This is super useful. Thanks. Power is relatively inexpensive here (USA) but my energy costs have doubled in the past year. The local power company has some power reduction program but from anecdotal reports, it has been abused by the power company. I'd like to do a local-only version that controls all systems, shuts off idle systems either on demand or via schedule,

Awesome video, man! As a beginner self-hoster from Germany I say big thank you! The part with snoring HDDs is hilarious )))

I’ve been waiting for a video like this for so long, thank you so much!

Awesome video, I'm also probably a little too obsessed with power consumption on devices on my home network. Even relatively low-power smart home devices and SBCs can result in substantial increases in utility costs when running 24/7 and in numbers (smart bulbs, plugs, displays etc.)

Great Video! As a demonstration of how much a similar rated power supply can vary, I dropped from 37w to 29w idle by swapping out a bronze corsair 450w (1YO) to a gold (older) corsair SF450 supply I had kicking about. Testing it with just one sata ssd came down to 21w at the wall - not bad for a 8 year old Supermicro X10SLL Haswell setup with IPMI / E3-1271-V3 / 32gb mem.

This is probably one of the best videos I’ve watched on RU-vid on a long time. Thank you for the huge efforts put into this, and teve detailed information

Thank you for the informative video, exactly what I needed during this odd period. What kind of hardware/software do you use to monitor your power usage?

12:05 "if your building a conventional desktop PC, you're probably not gonna let it sit at idle and let it do nothing for the whole day" stairs at RGB lights for 8 hours

I'm just starting to plan an home server for my new home where I'll move later this year and this video is very interesting, thank you very much !

I think everybody running an home lab will find parts or the whole information of this video useful, thanks a lot! 😉

Great video wolfgang, I live in Denmark and have been struggling for years to get information just like this. The hardware information in this video is extremely useful, and I'd love to see an OS/software setup equivalent. I run Proxmox on my homeserver, and the PM community isn't very interested in the subject of low power servers. Also, any experience with spinning down ZFS arrays? Taking inspiration from this video I've started collecting parts to try another ultra-low power build (my current idles at 40watts), but it would be great learning from those who have already tried this.

Power efficiency in consumer computer systems has improved by leaps and bounds in the 25 years I've been using them. I'm super impressed when I see desktop systems that can hit an idle point at or under 10 watts. I found my recent gaming boards though to not be as efficient, idling around 20 watts. What were you using to monitor power usage over time?

This is the most interesting YT video I've seen this week. Before watching this video I did't even cared about how power efficient my server is. Now I'm very interested to build one just for fun :-) Awesome work sir!

Fantastic video, Wolfgang. I was searching for guidance on building a power efficient homeserver (since living in southern Germany...) and this helps out a lot. I was even looking into the hw forum but overlooked this thread.

Nice video, thanks for sharing! What's that dashboard you have with your smart home equipment and media on 6:12? Looks so clean! Thanks, again!

Great vid, just a side note. Being a "T" series CPU sometimes affects more than just TDP. For example, the i5 3470 is a 4core, 4thread part but the i5 3470T is actually a 2 core, 4 thread chip.

Thank you for your effort in teaching & sharing your knowledge !!!

Thank you. Even if I didn't care about electricity bills, which I do (power here is extremely expensive as well) you're helping us to build a more power EFFICIENT system, and I love efficiency, either power or anything else. Thank you.

Hey. What is the software/hardware you use to measure power consumption?

The thing I’m most interested in, after idle power draw is the ssd cache tier. I hope you spend a lot of time in various ways to configure it adequately for like truenas and a few others if you could. Logistically I hope the ssd cache is transparent, where the nas shares always present the ssd first and then falls back to hdd. There’s also the annoyance of windows explorer wanting to generate previews or access key frames of video, which in my experience cause random spin ups of my nas drives.

Power efficiency and consumption are super exciting topics! ... i mean at least to me! Awesome interesting video! Exactly what I was looking for.

I'm discovering this channel by this video and I'm kinda blown by the quality oh what I just saw. Great covering of this subject, well done.

Love your home server videos - currently I'm using a Raspberry Pi with an external SSD as my "home server', but I'm excited to go through your videos again when the time finally comes to upgrade to something beefier :-) One question - would you say your current build when idle is quiet enough to have in a Wohnheim?

I'd go quite a bit further - start by first looking at this from a data-use viewpoint. I have been doing this type of thing for about 15 years as I was running in Australia where power was 3x the price of Canada. Eventually I realised that the best approach was a super-low always-on solution and then block archiving to a "usually off" system (not in standby but powered off). You can use WoL to wake the archival server and in the end I've found that the archival servers (I use N36L's) are on perhaps once a month for dumping or retrieval. I run a Pi 4b with a 2.5" drive via USB3 - does all I need to for "active use" material, downloading (e.g. aria2 downloading service provider), etc. It also lets me archive in a disciplined manner, albeit in a time consuming one. I'm not sure of your use case scenario here (sounds like you've got a lot of video footage for editing, etc.) so that may not work the same way but for most people I think it's crucial to think from the information management perspective first - how am I going to use this thing, is an all-in-one system better or is it better to split the systems up, etc. The other big advantage of splitting is that you can bring in a lot more horsepower when you really need it and quite cheaply. I don't need that much but I have an ESXi Xeon e3 (ancient system) that I fire up when doing tests, etc. and I even have a half-missing thinkpad which I built from parts (it has no screen, keyboard, etc) but I wake it and use its old i5 to chomp on archives at a whim. You can script the wake and sleep cycles with the job you're running, the thing is completely powered off or in total standby almost all of the time each month.

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.

Thank you very much for this video, this is exactly what I was looking for some time in the past!

Power efficiency was always my concern when I started learning selfhosting, since I would be running the hardware 24/7. That's why I've been sticking with a raspberry pi and an old x240 thinkpad. Now I've gained more knowledge on how to upgrade my hardware while still keeping the power cost down. Just curious, are Pico ATX reliable on a 24/7 usage?

Nice video and information! I think it would also be interesting with a video about what can be done if you want a desktop PC that could both do crazy high performance and have low idle power consumption as well. Like a Ryzen 7900x with a 10-20W idle, for example. (Perhaps a hotkey in windows to enable/disable cores, motherboard features, graphics card performance, etc, to manually help it go to lower power would be necessary?).

I recently build myself a little Homeserver with an i3 4130 for the occasional transcoding needs. That thing runs idle on 7.3 Watts and with storage for movies on about 14.5 watts. Absolutely loving it. The system cost me around 50 bucks in total. The drives I'm using are worth 4 times the system 😂. If i ever need more CPU horsepower, I could chug in my old 4690k. Really nice to have that as an option

This is such an interesting take - I haven't heard this angle covered nearly enough. Thank you!

Really interesting! I wanted to make a video about this but concerning gaming desktop PCs, for example a PC with a 12900K and a 3090Ti vs a PC with the most power-efficient parts without sacrificing too much performance. Do you think it's worth chasing as a topic, or is the cost negligible at that point?

Have you considered looking into MSI's ECO motherboard lineup? It has plenty of features for low-power use, like disabling parts of the motherboard, optimization for S and T Intel CPUs, etc. The second generation motherboard supports up to 2400MHz DDR4 and 7th-gen Intel CPUs. I don't see anyone else discussing the lineup much, but I feel you might find it fascinating.

Very good video, thanks for showcasing powertop! Didn't knew that tool!

this is one of the most informative home lab videos I watched ever .. really thank you for this great video

Excellent server information video on server power consumption & optimal hardware, thank you.

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.

That's impressive efficiency. Well done!

Extremely useful for off grid use cases, much appreciated!

Nice to see a video in this topic. Because of the raising electricity prices I decided to replace my "big" media server (i3-4330) with a NUC with an Intel Processor J3455 + an external 3.5" HDD only to find out I have a lot to learn in this topic (and TDP means nothing in this case )as both machines draw about 20w in idle. It would be nice to see more videos on how to make hardware more efficient in the future.

Good, exactly the ethos and type of video I was looking for. I hate wasting power and money, but like the idea of this setup. So really nice option and glad it worked out so well

great tech tips! filled with tons of great and useful information. i will DEFINETLY use at least one of these tips when making my home server soon :)

Great video on an important topic, and really interesting to see all the ways that power draw can be inexplicably high, or surprisingly low! But it was the "eat your cake & have it too" reference that brought me here to comment, thank you, Son Of The Unabomber! 😂

Thank you for this well researched information. Just what I was looking for.

built a power effecient nearly passively cooled nas/homeserver/media pc several years ago, still using it to this day, it has been running roughly 7 years now 24/7. idle consumption ranging between 10-20 watts and under max load/boot its roughly 60 watts. still proud of it. but yes power-save cpu states are mandatory and so is using a ssd for OS/boot disk. and then there is choosing the right OS for the build.

This is what I was looking for in my enterprise to build a NAS, thank you very much

So much valuable information! Thank you very much!

This was exactly what I was looking for, thank you.

This is just awesome. I haven’t seen anyone cover this so well outside of non-english language forums 😅

Wow, neat tricks to evaluate power efficiency! I'll take it as a personal challenge to optimize as much as possible now

Right on time! Thank you!

Thanks, @WolfgangsChannel for the detailed background study. As I am looking forward to building my own Home lab NAS server, the information that you have given here is really useful, especially for the people who are living in the EU and I am definitely one of those who got benefited from your valuable information. Viele Grüße aus NRW 😊.

Wow, that idle power use is killer. Thanks

This is great for saving costs on my utility bill. Thanks Wolfgang...good job!

You're such an intelligent and generous person for sharing it!

Very cool project! Hope to build one like this within the next few months.

I'm part of the very tiny overlap between people who care for the planet but also want a home server so this is incredibly useful

Another great video. Every time I see a vid from you in feed, I know it's gonna be a good one :)

The best video ever made for the PC world on power consumption efficiency. Thank you very much...

Good job. Useful and educational. Thanks

Great video. I need a low noise and low heat server due to space and sound limitations and there isn’t a lot of great information online about this. Thanks for making this

This video is Gold! Thank you!

Hooo this one is useful to know. I've never thought of power efficiency for home server before this, all the tutorial I've seen is only "build your own server" or "cheap server for your home" but never mentioned power consumption. Good to know :D

Awesome video, very informative and lots of great ideas there. Thank you.

Thanks for this! Learned heaps about powertop and c-states!

We need more people to focus on this, thank you for making this video.

Very good video. I have two Dell PE2950G3 with 6 drives spinning all the time. I bought that because was cheap and have raid controller, what I like a lot. But the power consuption are verry big, about 500 kW/h per month. So, now is time to change, and your video giveme some inspiration. Thankyou.

Thanks for this, power efficiency is a favorite topic of mine!