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!
If you’re really worried about power use, you could switch to an itx motherboard with an soc laptop chip in it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lenovo thinkcentre? 🤔
