Lower power CPU for Plex server

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Hi all, have you seen energy prices?!

I need to reduce my server power consumption and was thinking of swapping out my CPU/motherboard, see my specs below.
I want to downgrade, but I still need something that can transcode if needed, so I was thinking minimum 4/6 cores, a pentium or a pi isn't going to cut it.

At the moment, the drives are a cobbled together array of old 10x 2TB which is less than ideal I know.
I am currently saving to go either 6x or 8x 10TB of new, more efficient drives which should drop power as well.

But I need help with a CPU choice, because the TDP spec doesn't really mean anything and there is limited data available testing this (at least that I can find).

Happy to do a complete platform swap, I think X99 is what is killing me, and I was thinking maybe Ryzen or an i5, but nothing too pricey.



Thanks for any help, and hopefully this opens a nice discussion!

Specs:
CPU - E5-2630L v3
Motherboard - ASUS X99-A II
RAM - 4x8GB DDR4 ECC
Drives - 10x 2TB RAIDZ2 (mostly WD Red, some Seagate one Hitachi)
HBA - LSI 9205-8i
 
Ahhh… I used to really like my 2630L V3, let’s be realistic here, it isn’t exactly power hungry, I ran one for years at about 83-103w with 96GB RAM, a similar HBA, M2000 and an NVMe drive running plex and a lot of other docker stuff with cloud storage. It was a great platform.

So what exactly is your current idle power consumption?
What specific usage criteria dictated you go RZ2 and is it still a requirement?
What are you running CPU wise that dictates a Pentium (that will easily do 20+ HW transcodes … or 5x more than you can now) won’t cut it?
How fast is your connection?

The obvious change here is ditch the 2TB drives, each one will be 5-7w idle, add 50% for heavy load, that means you have 50-70w of idle power just in spinning drives, 75-105w if you actually use them in anger. Depending on why you chose RZ2, you could make some big savings just by changing your storage strategy, let alone consolidating to larger drives.

In terms of moving hardware, I tend to find the best bang for the buck is around the 8th gen, it has the same iGPU capabilities as current gen for Plex and an i3 is a 4c part, i5 6c and they’re usually cheap. If you have PlexPass, your CPU will be essentially idle in Plex usage other than audio transcodes which are pretty light (I see 1-2% usually).

My old (read circa 3 years ago) notes suggest idle power was as follows:

Old Supermicro i3 2100/16GB/2xHBA’s 57w idle

Ryzen 3600/C6H/Nvidia 210/32GB/2HBA/NVMe 55-58w (48w with 1 HBA, 42w no HBA)

6800K (x99)
53w 210/32GB/No HBA
60w 210/96GB/No HBA/NVMe
77w 210/96GB/2 HBA/NVMe
72w 210/32GB/2HBA/NVMe

Intel i5 8400
68w ITX/32GB/1HBA/NVMe

From that we can make some estimates, each stick of RAM is 16GB, so going 32>96GB only added 5w for an extra 4 sticks. Each HBA adds 6-9.5w, I can’t 100% guarantee the same two HBA’s were used in testing on all builds, but I do have the opportunity to take down a box this week if you really want some numbers on say the i3 8100 vs i5 8400 as TDP is largely meaningless.

Now those figures aren’t massaged, I haven’t disabled unrequited onboard stuff or tweaked them, obviously the Ryzen wins here, but the moment it needs to transcode, it would loose as it would do the transcoding in software, just like your 2630L, adding something like a Nvidia 960/M2000 or newer would essentially make your CPU idle during transcodes as NVEnc would do that in hardware rather than software, that has a big impact on average power consumption. If you look in my rack right now, you’ll find an i3 8100 and a Ryzen 3600 + M2000, but the power difference between each and even the x99 build they replaced isn’t as huge as you may like to think, it’ll also suck to spend decent money if the goal is to save money, only to find it’ll take years to justify.

The other viewpoint is why do you need to transcode? At home you should have clients that are easily capable of direct play with decent connectivity. I get remote users may be bandwidth or client constrained, but it may be that you don’t need to transcode as much with better curation.
 
Thanks for the detailed response! You raise a lot of great points that I have been pondering over...

Sorry I forgot to state, I think the last time I checked my idle consumption was 110-120W, but I might double check that tonight and might also detach my pool and unplug the drives to see how much they are contributing.
I went with RZ2 because most of the drives I have are very old and I am concerned they will die more frequently than I like. I might stick with RZ2 though out of general paranoia.
Would you recommend shifting to RZ1 and drop a drive from the array to save on power and cost instead of running RZ2?

So the reason I am transcoding frequently enough that it is an issue is that my family stream from the server and are basically not competent enough to select original quality... But also I occasionally have to transcode when I use a device that doesn't support X265 or something.
I used to have a 2 core Haswell pentium and it would frequently choke on the transcodes. But this was without iGPU HW transcoding so maybe I won't need a more powerful CPU if I can HW transcode.



So I was originally thinking that 8th gen i5 might be a good idea, HW transcoding actually hadn't occurred to me which is why I was considering Ryzen, but that is an excellent point so I am now leaning towards i3/i5 8th gen.
In your experience is HW transcoding completely sufficient so that an i3 8100 vs i5 8400 has no real performance difference for such tasks since they have the same iGPU?
Money wise, I should be able to recoup most of that cost by selling the X99 motherboard currently in the system (depending on which 1151 board I end up buying), and I have RAM that I can already use.


Thanks for all the great advice and data, this is genuinely so helpful!
 
Thanks for the detailed response! You raise a lot of great points that I have been pondering over...

Sorry I forgot to state, I think the last time I checked my idle consumption was 110-120W, but I might double check that tonight and might also detach my pool and unplug the drives to see how much they are contributing.
I went with RZ2 because most of the drives I have are very old and I am concerned they will die more frequently than I like. I might stick with RZ2 though out of general paranoia.
Would you recommend shifting to RZ1 and drop a drive from the array to save on power and cost instead of running RZ2?

So the reason I am transcoding frequently enough that it is an issue is that my family stream from the server and are basically not competent enough to select original quality... But also I occasionally have to transcode when I use a device that doesn't support X265 or something.
I used to have a 2 core Haswell pentium and it would frequently choke on the transcodes. But this was without iGPU HW transcoding so maybe I won't need a more powerful CPU if I can HW transcode.



So I was originally thinking that 8th gen i5 might be a good idea, HW transcoding actually hadn't occurred to me which is why I was considering Ryzen, but that is an excellent point so I am now leaning towards i3/i5 8th gen.
In your experience is HW transcoding completely sufficient so that an i3 8100 vs i5 8400 has no real performance difference for such tasks since they have the same iGPU?
Money wise, I should be able to recoup most of that cost by selling the X99 motherboard currently in the system (depending on which 1151 board I end up buying), and I have RAM that I can already use.


Thanks for all the great advice and data, this is genuinely so helpful!

It’s literally the same path I walked when Ryzen launched, so I have direct experience/notes, the power costs have changed drastically, so smaller differences give bigger savings now which makes it even more worthwhile. Your main savings will be in two simple areas, storage and transcoding. The price capped rate for electricity nationally is 28p (round nunber), it’s likely to go up by 1/3 later this year, that means each watt of power costs £2.45/yr now, or likely £3.27/yr by December, so, with that in mind, let’s cover the obvious: You have two main areas you can save power in, storage and CPU (transcoding).

If we start with storage, you know 2TB drives are way too small, just running one 24/7 idle is costing you £12.25-17.15 per drive, you have 10 of them... by the end of the year you're looking at £16.35-22.89 per drive... times 10. It's £230-40ish for a brand new 10TB Iron Wolf or EXOS Enterprise drive or £220 if you shuck them, if we assume that replaces 5 x 2TB drives, you're saving £91.56/yr even allowing for the cost to run the new drive, clearly that makes sense over 3 years and they're warranted.

In terms of storage strategy, rather than RAIDZ2 as you don't seem to need the IOPS, have you considered something like UnRAID? It's discounted till the end of the month and will allow you to pool random sized drives while keeping dual parity if you want. The other advantage is you can spin down the pool, if a client accesses a file, it only spins up the drive it's on to read it. The other benefit of this is you'll obviously have other dockers running, they can sit on a cache drive (say a reasonable size NVMe) and just move data over to the array periodically. The only drives that are spun up during write are the parity drive and the drive being written to.

Next up is transcoding. Lets agree that software transcoding as you are now is both inefficient and power hungry. Plex themselves admit the numbers below are not that accurate, but they are what they are, so we'll use them.
  • 4K HDR (50Mbps, 10-bit HEVC) file: 17000 PassMarkscore (being transcoded to 10Mbps 1080p)
  • 4K SDR (40Mbps, 8-bit HEVC) file: 12000 PassMarkscore (being transcoded to 10Mbps 1080p)
  • 1080p (10Mbps, H.264) file: 2000 PassMark score
  • 720p (4Mbps, H.264) file: 1500 PassMark score
Source: https://support.plex.tv/articles/201774043-what-kind-of-cpu-do-i-need-for-my-server/

So what you have (2630L v3) has 7K ish of CPU Mark and according to Plex is therefore capable of 3+ 1080p H264 transcodes (due to the way transcoding works, it’ll be more, but just go with it). To do 3, your CPU usage will be high, fans spinning up, power usage spiking and you have no hope of doing 4K HEVC, let alone 10bit HEVC. As I type this I have a tab open showing a Plex server doing an HEVC 10bit transcode to SD (don’t ask) and another 1080p H264 to 720p H264, the system usage is under 5% and Plex is only taking 2% of that. Hardware transcoding will literally change the way you view transcoding, and unless you are the kind of person who sits with a magnifying glass working out what gives the least edge diffusion in dark scenes or fast motion, you won't be able to notice the difference between a software transcode and a hardware transcode. To do this in Plex, you need an intel CPU with iGPU, ideally 8th gen or newer (HD630) or an Nvidia GPU with NVEnc capabilities - the consumer range is limited to 3 concurrent transcodes, you can either patch the driver or buy a Quadro which isn't limited - GPU RAM will limit your maximum number of transcodes). Generally aim for a Quadro P series or newer, Nvidia will claim Maxwell can't do HEVC, but the M2000 is a 2nd gen Maxwell (like the 960) and can. A GPU will add about 11w idle from memory and it's not loading the GPU up like gaming or mining, the NVEnc hardware is separate. The P600/620 are reasonably inexpensive (£60-70 used), the P1000 is likely a better bet (85-110 used) and the P2000 tends to be silly money - they just don't make sense compared to iGPU unless it's something like Ryzen or a Xeon w/o iGPU.

As you're looking to reduce power, the technically best option is a modern 8th gen CPU w/iGPU, it literally can't be beaten at this stage in terms of efficiency. I grabbed an i3-8100 and MATX ASROCK board for all of £40 earlier this year, I had planned on swapping the i3 out for the i5 8400 I have as 4c to 6c with a higher clock rate sounds like a worthwhile jump, as you say, same iGPU, same transcoding performance. Reality is I put that little i3 into service on the 22nd of March this year, it's never felt limited or been a bottleneck and I work my servers HARD. The i5 is literally sat doing nothing, and I have been in adding and upgrading hardware at several points, but it's just not been something I felt I have needed to do. My i3 NUC on the other hand (2c) did feel like a compromise by comparison, in all honesty i'd happily have an 8100 again, but if the money is right the 8400 is going to be more capable.

The elephant(s) in the room here are as follows:

1) GSuite Business is £15/m ish and gives unlimited* storage when using team drives and mounting them via rclone (*technically each team drive is limited to 400,000 files/folders), you also need a domain and you are limited by your internet connection (especially upload).
2) Moving your services to a VPS or dedicated server with symmetrical gigabit or faster can actually be cheaper than powering hardware locally, combine this with 1) and your perspective on the world and how storage can be managed changes quite quickly.

Just a wild idea, and I'm not an Apple user myself. But have you considered an M1 Mac Mini? That thing sips power.

You’d think that was a good idea as a Plex server, I mean the M1 is a revelation of performance and efficiency… it turns out it’s really, really not (I say this as a man with two mini’s and an obscene number of iOS devices in the household, so I really wish I could recommend the mini). It’s just not well enough supported at this stage to do the job reliably and without issue. If you want efficient, a Dell OptiPlex 3060 or HP 290 G2 etc. is £100+ and a much, much better choice.
 
I have a 3200G, on an Asrock X570 board, with 32GB 3200 RAM, 2 x 16tb HDD, 2 x 8tb HDD, a 4tb HDD, a SATA SSD for O/S.
It is used as a plex server native OS is win 10 pro, and runs a number of VM's like pi hole etc.

My power usage is recorded using a kasa smart plug. And I average 58watts over the past 30 days. My O/S up time is 51 days, so it has not been off once.

There has been aprox 60 movies watched via my plex server in the last 30 days, both internally and externally.

 
I use an i5 6500T in a lenovo m700 tiny and a USB3 HDD caddy which can hold 5x 3.5" hard drives.
Idle wattage is almost nothing. With a couple of streams going it still sips at the power (hw transcodes). The only caveat being that my HDDs take a few seconds to spin up.
I have not had the meter on it recently but iirc it was mid 30s with a couple of streams going.
I have tested 12 streams (1080p to 720p transcodes) and cpu was still peaking at only 80%. So its definitely capable :) (Didnt measure power draw here either... But its not going to be excessive given the lower TDP chip).
Energy usage was a big thing for me and this was the best I came up with on a budget.
 
I have a 3200G, on an Asrock X570 board, with 32GB 3200 RAM, 2 x 16tb HDD, 2 x 8tb HDD, a 4tb HDD, a SATA SSD for O/S.
It is used as a plex server native OS is win 10 pro, and runs a number of VM's like pi hole etc.

My power usage is recorded using a kasa smart plug. And I average 58watts over the past 30 days. My O/S up time is 51 days, so it has not been off once.

There has been aprox 60 movies watched via my plex server in the last 30 days, both internally and externally.
I seem to remember someone running a DeskMini with 4350G + NVMe and 16GB being in the 6-9w idle range depending on OS, the important bit here is AMD HW acceleration sucks, so what happens to that power consumption when you do software transcoding?
 
A Synology

Op has a 10 bay set-up now with double parity, the bare minimum that would provide dual parity in this scenario is a 4 bay, finding one with a CPU and iGPU adds at least a zero to a cheap board/CPU upgrade and is a much, much weaker CPU, to get a decent CPU (no iGPU) and 8 bay you need to look at something like a DS1821+ and you're now north of £900 with no obvious benefit other than possibly DSM.
 
OP has also stressed energy prices. In the long run may be much cheaper to do it the NAS way as you get hardware decoding with it. Not only that but OP also stated they wish to consolidate their drives down to less/bigger drives. Therefore reducing the need for such a large bay amount.
 
It’s literally the same path I walked when Ryzen launched, so I have direct experience/notes, the power costs have changed drastically, so smaller differences give bigger savings now which makes it even more worthwhile. Your main savings will be in two simple areas, storage and transcoding. The price capped rate for electricity nationally is 28p (round nunber), it’s likely to go up by 1/3 later this year, that means each watt of power costs £2.45/yr now, or likely £3.27/yr by December, so, with that in mind, let’s cover the obvious: You have two main areas you can save power in, storage and CPU (transcoding).

If we start with storage, you know 2TB drives are way too small, just running one 24/7 idle is costing you £12.25-17.15 per drive, you have 10 of them... by the end of the year you're looking at £16.35-22.89 per drive... times 10. It's £230-40ish for a brand new 10TB Iron Wolf or EXOS Enterprise drive or £220 if you shuck them, if we assume that replaces 5 x 2TB drives, you're saving £91.56/yr even allowing for the cost to run the new drive, clearly that makes sense over 3 years and they're warranted.

In terms of storage strategy, rather than RAIDZ2 as you don't seem to need the IOPS, have you considered something like UnRAID? It's discounted till the end of the month and will allow you to pool random sized drives while keeping dual parity if you want. The other advantage is you can spin down the pool, if a client accesses a file, it only spins up the drive it's on to read it. The other benefit of this is you'll obviously have other dockers running, they can sit on a cache drive (say a reasonable size NVMe) and just move data over to the array periodically. The only drives that are spun up during write are the parity drive and the drive being written to.

Next up is transcoding. Lets agree that software transcoding as you are now is both inefficient and power hungry. Plex themselves admit the numbers below are not that accurate, but they are what they are, so we'll use them.
  • 4K HDR (50Mbps, 10-bit HEVC) file: 17000 PassMarkscore (being transcoded to 10Mbps 1080p)
  • 4K SDR (40Mbps, 8-bit HEVC) file: 12000 PassMarkscore (being transcoded to 10Mbps 1080p)
  • 1080p (10Mbps, H.264) file: 2000 PassMark score
  • 720p (4Mbps, H.264) file: 1500 PassMark score
Source: https://support.plex.tv/articles/201774043-what-kind-of-cpu-do-i-need-for-my-server/

So what you have (2630L v3) has 7K ish of CPU Mark and according to Plex is therefore capable of 3+ 1080p H264 transcodes (due to the way transcoding works, it’ll be more, but just go with it). To do 3, your CPU usage will be high, fans spinning up, power usage spiking and you have no hope of doing 4K HEVC, let alone 10bit HEVC. As I type this I have a tab open showing a Plex server doing an HEVC 10bit transcode to SD (don’t ask) and another 1080p H264 to 720p H264, the system usage is under 5% and Plex is only taking 2% of that. Hardware transcoding will literally change the way you view transcoding, and unless you are the kind of person who sits with a magnifying glass working out what gives the least edge diffusion in dark scenes or fast motion, you won't be able to notice the difference between a software transcode and a hardware transcode. To do this in Plex, you need an intel CPU with iGPU, ideally 8th gen or newer (HD630) or an Nvidia GPU with NVEnc capabilities - the consumer range is limited to 3 concurrent transcodes, you can either patch the driver or buy a Quadro which isn't limited - GPU RAM will limit your maximum number of transcodes). Generally aim for a Quadro P series or newer, Nvidia will claim Maxwell can't do HEVC, but the M2000 is a 2nd gen Maxwell (like the 960) and can. A GPU will add about 11w idle from memory and it's not loading the GPU up like gaming or mining, the NVEnc hardware is separate. The P600/620 are reasonably inexpensive (£60-70 used), the P1000 is likely a better bet (85-110 used) and the P2000 tends to be silly money - they just don't make sense compared to iGPU unless it's something like Ryzen or a Xeon w/o iGPU.

As you're looking to reduce power, the technically best option is a modern 8th gen CPU w/iGPU, it literally can't be beaten at this stage in terms of efficiency. I grabbed an i3-8100 and MATX ASROCK board for all of £40 earlier this year, I had planned on swapping the i3 out for the i5 8400 I have as 4c to 6c with a higher clock rate sounds like a worthwhile jump, as you say, same iGPU, same transcoding performance. Reality is I put that little i3 into service on the 22nd of March this year, it's never felt limited or been a bottleneck and I work my servers HARD. The i5 is literally sat doing nothing, and I have been in adding and upgrading hardware at several points, but it's just not been something I felt I have needed to do. My i3 NUC on the other hand (2c) did feel like a compromise by comparison, in all honesty i'd happily have an 8100 again, but if the money is right the 8400 is going to be more capable.

The elephant(s) in the room here are as follows:

1) GSuite Business is £15/m ish and gives unlimited* storage when using team drives and mounting them via rclone (*technically each team drive is limited to 400,000 files/folders), you also need a domain and you are limited by your internet connection (especially upload).
2) Moving your services to a VPS or dedicated server with symmetrical gigabit or faster can actually be cheaper than powering hardware locally, combine this with 1) and your perspective on the world and how storage can be managed changes quite quickly.



You’d think that was a good idea as a Plex server, I mean the M1 is a revelation of performance and efficiency… it turns out it’s really, really not (I say this as a man with two mini’s and an obscene number of iOS devices in the household, so I really wish I could recommend the mini). It’s just not well enough supported at this stage to do the job reliably and without issue. If you want efficient, a Dell OptiPlex 3060 or HP 290 G2 etc. is £100+ and a much, much better choice.
So Ironwolf/Exos drives are my intended drive to swap to, but I will also be expanding to get more storage space so there will still be 6/8 drives.

I have debated unraid, but I am happy with my current setup using TrueNas. Maybe one day in the future, but not right now.

So I have been thinking, and I transcode quite regularly so switching platform to 8th gen Intel might be a significant power save just on transcoding. And then whatever idle power savings between the two platforms is just on top of that.
I think I am going to go with an i3 8100 and wait for a good deal on a motherboard for it, if I see in some work loads I need more CPU power I can always upgrade to an i5, but it doesn't seem likely.

Also nope to all cloud server options, not placing my data non-local and streaming it, that is not practical for me in many ways before even getting to my trust issues with this.

One downside I have realised is I currently have one 8 port HBA and I then use 2 onboard ports for my other 2 drives. However, I also have a 6 port 2.5" hotswap bay which I use for my OS and for cache/scratch storage. My board has 10 onboard SATA ports, but most 8th gen boards have 4-6 ports. So when I reduce my drives to 8, then there would be enough ports, but until I get new drives (which might take a while because of cost) I would need to get a 2 port expansion card (I might have one somewhere...). Some boards have 8 ports, but they tend to be quite expensive so it's not worth it.
 
OP has also stressed energy prices. In the long run may be much cheaper to do it the NAS way as you get hardware decoding with it. Not only that but OP also stated they wish to consolidate their drives down to less/bigger drives. Therefore reducing the need for such a large bay amount.

So many things are wrong with that statement that it makes the Mac mini you suggested look like a good shout.

Op clearly stated the plan was 6-8 10TB drives in the future, the DS1821+ is the most affordable 8 bay Synology NAS with Ryzen v1500b 4c CPU with a CPU Mark of just under 4.2K - the i3 8100 is just under 6.2K - and you get 4GB RAM for £920, it sucks for transcoding as it can’t do it in hardware, it will struggle to do more than two concurrent transcodes and it simply can’t do 4K and will struggle with a single 1080p HEVC and no chance on HDR, CPU will be tapped out regularly though. It’s literally an awful suggestion.

PlexPass lifetime £94.99
10TB Segate EXOS shucked £218
Used i3-8100 £45 (eBay BIN)
Used motherboard for above £30 (eBay BIN)

Op has RAM already and is happy with current OS, so realistically they could buy all of the above for £169.99 today leaving £750.01 which at todays rates covers power for the next 5-6 years, alternatively that buys 3 x 10TB drives and enough left over to run the whole lot for at least 6 months.

So please can you explain how your suggestion could be ‘much cheaper’ and why buying a product that - once you upgrade the RAM - is almost a grand and can’t transcode much at all is a better option, because I really can’t see any basis for suggesting something like that and I refuse to believe anyone who would choose to comment on this subject would be that poorly informed.
 
A Synology
Just to add to the synology debate that is going, as well as being extremely pricey to a point that it defeats the purpose of trying to save money because it would take a lifetime of energy savings to earn that back, it is also not very powerful and impossible to customise. I like having my home built server as I can do what I want with both the hardware and the software, I don't like spending lots of money on something that takes away things I can do. They are a simplified solution that are easy to setup and use, but that isn't something I really care about. I like the difficulty haha.
 
So Ironwolf/Exos drives are my intended drive to swap to, but I will also be expanding to get more storage space so there will still be 6/8 drives.

I have debated unraid, but I am happy with my current setup using TrueNas. Maybe one day in the future, but not right now.

So I have been thinking, and I transcode quite regularly so switching platform to 8th gen Intel might be a significant power save just on transcoding. And then whatever idle power savings between the two platforms is just on top of that.
I think I am going to go with an i3 8100 and wait for a good deal on a motherboard for it, if I see in some work loads I need more CPU power I can always upgrade to an i5, but it doesn't seem likely.

Also nope to all cloud server options, not placing my data non-local and streaming it, that is not practical for me in many ways before even getting to my trust issues with this.

One downside I have realised is I currently have one 8 port HBA and I then use 2 onboard ports for my other 2 drives. However, I also have a 6 port 2.5" hotswap bay which I use for my OS and for cache/scratch storage. My board has 10 onboard SATA ports, but most 8th gen boards have 4-6 ports. So when I reduce my drives to 8, then there would be enough ports, but until I get new drives (which might take a while because of cost) I would need to get a 2 port expansion card (I might have one somewhere...). Some boards have 8 ports, but they tend to be quite expensive so it's not worth it.

TrueNAS is great, if your usage fits the requirements and you understand the expansion limitations, for write once, read often (WORO) workloads it’s not really ideal, just as UnRAID isn’t ideal if you need high IOPS on the array and can’t work round it. Cloud storage options are a personal choice, but it’s worth mentioning and rclone supports encryption and with fast broadband it’s ideal for static storage. I’ve been using it like this for getting on for 5 years now.

Port wise just use another HBA - if you look at my power numbers I have two for similar reasons, works fine. If those 2.5” drives are flash based, make sure you use the onboard ports for them as they will support TRIM and the HBA’s don’t always.
 
TrueNAS is great, if your usage fits the requirements and you understand the expansion limitations, for write once, read often (WORO) workloads it’s not really ideal, just as UnRAID isn’t ideal if you need high IOPS on the array and can’t work round it. Cloud storage options are a personal choice, but it’s worth mentioning and rclone supports encryption and with fast broadband it’s ideal for static storage. I’ve been using it like this for getting on for 5 years now.

Port wise just use another HBA - if you look at my power numbers I have two for similar reasons, works fine. If those 2.5” drives are flash based, make sure you use the onboard ports for them as they will support TRIM and the HBA’s don’t always.
Yeah I was very reluctant to switch to TrueNas a while back, but after doing so have been very happy with it. For sure, cloud storage definitely is a viable option for many scenarios, but even if I wanted to I think I would be very limited by my upload speed as well. Maybe one day.

That's a very good point, the drives are flash so I would need to ensure TRIM is supported, so yeah probably best to only use the onboard ports. I'll keep an eye out for 8 port boards, but 6 ports will at least serve my hotswap bay in the long run.
 
I have debated unraid, but I am happy with my current setup using TrueNas. Maybe one day in the future, but not right now.

If power saving is your goal, UnRAID is definitely worth looking into as Avalon says for the ability to spin down drives. I have 8 drives in my system and for most of the day they are all spun down drawing very little power. It's only in the evenings when I'm watching something or copying to the array do one or two actually spin up for a few hours.
 
If power saving is your goal, UnRAID is definitely worth looking into as Avalon says for the ability to spin down drives. I have 8 drives in my system and for most of the day they are all spun down drawing very little power. It's only in the evenings when I'm watching something or copying to the array do one or two actually spin up for a few hours.
This is interesting, but aren't there concerns about wear to the drive? If the drives have to regularly spin up and down again, the wear is greater than if they stay spinning?

But I suppose it depends how long they have to idle before they spin down and how frequently that occurs in an average day?
 
I only carry out write operations to the array early in the morning, the rest of the day they're done to the cache and I only tend to watch things from my server in the evenings. This means that some days a lot of the drives aren't spun up at all and at the most it would be one or to spin ups in a day on a few of the drives.

Touch wood, I've had no issues with drives failing, I've just retired a drive that was over 10 years old because I wanted more space and my next oldest drives are just over 8 years old.
 
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