Low idle power ex-office PC recommendations for server?

Pulseammo

Pulseammo

Pulseammo

Associate
Joined
10 Jan 2006
Posts
1,387
Location
Scotland
I'm looking to get a cheap PC to use as a server to do NAS (3 bay would be ideal) and docker (for VaultWarden and Immich).

Does anyone have any recommendations on an ex-office PC that can just be bought second hand around £100 and has low idle power consumption (hoping for 15w - 20w without spinning drives here).

I'm looking at an HP Prodesk 400 G5 i5 8500 in the tower version (MT, not micro or SFF). Anyone got one and know its idle power and how easy it is to shoehorn a third drive into it (I'm pretty sure it has the headers, but not the cage)?

I've thought about a thin client but they wont fill the 3 bay NAS needs.
 
I had (a while ago!) the SFF version for a few months running UnRAID, with a four port NIC (which prevented the CPU from going into full idle C10 state) and a single 2.5" HDD, it was in the high single digit range. It completely empty (no disks or NIC) it was 5W or so.

If the Tower version hardware is the same should be looking at the same numbers, but you have to make sure the OS your running on it has all the power saving stuff turned on, as that made ~5W of difference for me, i.e. 15W to 10W.
 
Last edited:
i might suggest a

Dell Optiplex 7010 SFF​

its old but has enough space you can get some storage in if your good with that. depends also on the type of storage your planning to use.

HP Proliant N54L comes to mind though
 
FreeStream said:
From what I recall the HP data sheets also show some detailed figures.

See: https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c06339658.pdf
Click to expand...

Thank you, that data sheet is excellent! I saw a couple for Fujitsu Esprimo machines and tried to look for the dell and hp ones but clearly I didn't look hard enough!

FreeStream said:
Not sure why the tower uses 5W more than the SFF..!
Click to expand...

Maybe a different PSU? The extra fans perhaps?

Still looks good clocking in around 15w idle.
 
I have a HP ProDesk 400 G7, has 10th gen i5, two SSDs and NVME and idles around 10W. Think it has 3 SATA ports (one is for the DVD) but limited power, so you'd need an adapter. Alternatively can add a M2 to PCIe to get a 4th in that way.
 
I have a Dell 7060 MT which is similar with an 8700T CPU, 32GB DDR4, 16TB 3.5" HD, 1TB 980 Evo m.2, 2 x m.2 250GB on a PCI card, 2TB 2.5" laptop drive for backups. This runs a DC, fileserver, Home Assistant and a workstation VM for remote access - currently idling at 16W.

Looking at the OP post date, which did you end up going for?
 
Last edited:
Rabtech said:
Looking at the OP post date, which did you end up going for?
Click to expand...

I'm finally getting the ball rolling on this, bought an HP 290 G2 with an i5 8500 which I'm still waiting to be delivered so hopefully it turns out good.

The spec sheet shows similar power draw to the HP Prodesk 400 G4, I went with the 290 because it was just what was available really. The 290 chassis actually looks like it will have space on the floor in front of the PSU to fit a drive cage I'm hoping.

My plans are to run proxmox and buy a 4 port NIC (currently looking at HP 331T) to virtualise my router (OpenWrt or perhaps pfsense).

I'll get a 4TB drive plus my current 1TB drive and a 250gb SSD (for cache) to put under truenas scale.

The rest will be docker for Immich and VaultWarden. Might do home assistant too since I'll likely buy a smart plug to monitor the power consumption.
 
Righty, the HP 290 G2 arrived. Im pretty impressed so far. It's still small even though it's the micro tower version, and nice and light weight (which will help to put it in the attic). Drives attach to a side panel and it takes 2x 3.5" drives stock which is absolutely ideal for my initial needs. The 8gb ram was in 1 stick, I've added 16gb to that for 24gb total without issue. The 256gb ssd was a wd sn520, so that's also ideal for proxmox. Just waiting on my 4tb drive and 4 port nic to arrive and hopefully have some fun with it this weekend.

Not got a power monitoring plug to know its draw yet, think I may try to find one that works with home assistant (suggestions welcome?).

Thanks to everyone who chimed in with hardware recommendations :).
 
So just to update the thread a little. I'm setting up this little server and everything seems to be going fine so far.

I did have an interesting issue though - when I had my HP 331T 4 port network adapter installed the system could not see its DIMM1 ram slot. At first I thought I had done something when I repasted the CPU (maybe different heatsink pressure tweaked the pins or something and I lost a channel), but after some faffing about I realised it was the network card causing it.

After some google I came across this guide: https://yannickdekoeijer.blogspot.com/2012/04/modding-dell-perc-6-sas-raidcontroller.html?m=1 which worked for me, basically I applied some kapton tape over pins 5 & 6 of the network adapter to disable SMBUS.

Someone else had the same issue with this PC but a different network card: https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/official-hp-290-p0043w-owners-thread/2829/142

I think it's the peripheral that's at fault though not the motherboard.

Other than that I've got proxmox installed and I'm setting up truenas, got the onboard sata controller passed through without issue (in fact all the IOMMU groups seem very good on this so far).

It's a nice little hobby. I'll report back again when I finally have some power monitoring stats. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom