Reduce home server power usage - thoughts/suggestions

R.C.Anderson

R.C.Anderson

R.C.Anderson

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Recently I've been looking at how much power my home server uses, and with the cost of electricity continually climbing, I'm trying to work out if I can do anything to save some power, without too much of a sacrifice in capability.

My current setup:
HP Z6 G4 workstation with Xenon Gold 6142, 48GB DDR4 ECC RAM
GPU: GT710 (used so I don't have to run headless)
HBA: 9206-16E, with a Adaptec 82885T SAS expander in an external case & a seperate PSU.
NIC: 82599ES SFP+
Drives: 7xHDDs (8-16TB, combination of SATA & SAS), 3xNVMe (2x1TB in RAID1 to run Dockers, VMs etc from , 1x2TB as a general use cache)
OS: Unraid

My current usage for this is 170-250W normally (higher if it's under heavy usage, but normally it's under light load.
I already spin down my HDDs, which saves a bit.
I've considered replacing the machine with a lower power desktop machine, but my biggest issue is the PCI-E slots, as when I've looked before, to get the required slots I'd need to either stick with server, workstation, or high end desktop gear, which remains fairly expensive & doesn't give much of a power saving.

I'm open to any ideas, from changing a few settings I might have missed, through to a complete HW replacement, although if there are expenses incurred, I'd want a reasonable payback period (probably ~2 years max). Has anyone done similar & got any suggestions?
 
Dedicated NAS appliance and TinyMicroMini PC would be my recommendation.

I run a 9U rack with 10Gbe at less than your machine. :D

2 switches, all SSD NAS. 2x Lenovo M920Q, UDM Pro SE running 4 cameras and 3 UAPs and various small devices like Hue Bridge etc.
 
A thought...
Aoostar WTR Max would probably fit your bill. Has disk space, has plenty of CPU grunt for apps and VM's. The only place I think it trips over is I don't think it supports SAS drives. Granted there's probably some move arounds needed for some of your media and/or the chance of killing some SAS in favour of HDD but it would highly likely reduce the power bill.
 
I don’t know if you have it doing stuff 24/7 but I have my server power down overnight when it’s not needed.
Using a windows app called smart power to set a schedule, with some exceptions - if our main PCs are still on it won’t shut off etc.
I imagine Unraid must have similar capability?
 
How many PCI-E slots do you need.

I've bought the parts to update my Unraid from E5-2xxx 64GB Nvidia P1000 11 drives (60W idle @ spindown) to Intel B760 motherboard + 14th Gen CPU + 32GB DDR4 ... power TBC

The B760 has 3 x NVME + IGPU for transcode. Only 4 SATA but can throw your HBA in the x16 and you NIC only needs a x2 which mostly ATX have a X4 and a couple of X1.

If you can I'd dump the HBA, a for a single ASM1166 and look for a board with onboard 2.5Gbit
 
Unless you are selling stuff to fund the replacement the cost of a more efficient machine will far exceed the savings most likely even over a few years.

There are tweaks you can do to the OS power plan which can be significant but may also be less than ideal compromise between power use and performance.
 
randal said:
Dedicated NAS appliance and TinyMicroMini PC would be my recommendation.

I run a 9U rack with 10Gbe at less than your machine. :D

2 switches, all SSD NAS. 2x Lenovo M920Q, UDM Pro SE running 4 cameras and 3 UAPs and various small devices like Hue Bridge etc.
Click to expand...
This is excluding my networking gear... (that's another 100W ish, as it's a UDM-SE, US48-500 & USW-Aggregation).

I keep thinking there must be a better way to do this, but just not really spent any time on it. A NAS + mini PC is what I've been thinking, just whenever I've looked at it, it looks like it'll cost a lot & the payback period isn't worth it. e.g. I'll need new drives, as most can only run RAID with drives of the same size (one of the things I love about unraid), then there's the machine costs.
 
Steveocee said:
A thought...
Aoostar WTR Max would probably fit your bill. Has disk space, has plenty of CPU grunt for apps and VM's. The only place I think it trips over is I don't think it supports SAS drives. Granted there's probably some move arounds needed for some of your media and/or the chance of killing some SAS in favour of HDD but it would highly likely reduce the power bill.
Click to expand...
That's definitly an interesting product. I've just had a look at it. SAS drives probably would be the biggest problem, along with the eye watering cost. ~$1000 (and I'm guessing there'll be import duty & VAT on top of this) for the base model (as I'd need the RAM as it needs SODIMM). It seems like a lot of outlay for what it is.
 
hawker1986 said:
I don’t know if you have it doing stuff 24/7 but I have my server power down overnight when it’s not needed.
Using a windows app called smart power to set a schedule, with some exceptions - if our main PCs are still on it won’t shut off etc.
I imagine Unraid must have similar capability?
Click to expand...
Not quite 24/7, but not far off. Amongst other things, it's a media server, which I have shared with a couple of friends, and it runs home assistant. Both those need to be available & running 24/7 basically, although maybe I need to think about usage schedules & if I moved HA onto a lower power device (like a raspPi), would this mean I could turn the rest off occasionally?
SoundsGood said:
This article is aimed at Proxmox but may apply to Unraid too: https://blog.nashcom.de/nashcomblog.nsf/dx/proxmox-energy-savings-options-for-home-labs.htm. I found the best results from limiting CPU frequency during the night (max_perf_pct).
Click to expand...
Cheers, I'll take a read through & see if there's anything that I think will help. My biggest problem, is overnight I'm not actually too fussed by the energy usage, as my electricity rate is so much lower.
 
What is the actual cost, is it actually significant.

Sometimes people spend more money trying to save electricity than they actually spend on electricity.

How do you have so many drives in that Chassis. I've a Z4 G4 headless as an encoding machine/media backup and it's only got 2x hard drive bays. Did you put a rack in the 5.25 bays? I've an optical in one of mine.
 
decto said:
How many PCI-E slots do you need.

I've bought the parts to update my Unraid from E5-2xxx 64GB Nvidia P1000 11 drives (60W idle @ spindown) to Intel B760 motherboard + 14th Gen CPU + 32GB DDR4 ... power TBC

The B760 has 3 x NVME + IGPU for transcode. Only 4 SATA but can throw your HBA in the x16 and you NIC only needs a x2 which mostly ATX have a X4 and a couple of X1.

If you can I'd dump the HBA, a for a single ASM1166 and look for a board with onboard 2.5Gbit
Click to expand...
Number of PCI-E slots is hard to say, as it largely depends on what the machine has by default/how I can achieve my needs, e.g. if the machine has 2.5Gb+ onboard NIC, I don't need a slot for the NIC.

I'll have a look at the B760 line, see how it would fit my needs.
 
Armageus said:
Might be worth checking how much a lower TDP CPU is (some are silly cheap) - if you don't need all those cores, there are 85w and 105w parts rather than your 150w part.

List of Intel Xeon processors (Skylake-based) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

List of Intel Xeon processors (Cascade Lake-based) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...
That's a good shout that I hadn't thought of. I'll have a look at other CPUs with lower TDP, as I don't need the full performance my current CPU offers.
 
OspreyO said:
What is the actual cost, is it actually significant.

Sometimes people spend more money trying to save electricity than they actually spend on electricity.

How do you have so many drives in that Chassis. I've a Z4 G4 headless as an encoding machine/media backup and it's only got 2x hard drive bays. Did you put a rack in the 5.25 bays? I've an optical in one of mine.
Click to expand...
I only have the 2 onboard NVMe drives in the Z6G4 chassis, all the mechanical drives are in an external case, connected through the HBA & expander card.

Actual cost (very roughly): 200W @28p/kwh for 19 hours & 6.5p/kwh for 5 hours a day = £1.13/day = a little over £400/year, but obviously not all this will be saved with any solution.
 
Not sure what options your BIOS has, but if you haven't already, then disable any onboard devices you don't need e.g. Parallel and Serial Ports, onboard SATA controllers, onboard LAN if using PCIE card etc.

Whilst it won't make a big difference, disabling some of these things do make a difference.

Again depending on how much RAM you actually need, removing sticks of RAM (or e.g. consolidating 2x 8gb sticks to a 16gb stick) will likely save 3-4 watts per stick for ECC RAM.
 
R.C.Anderson said:
That's a good shout that I hadn't thought of. I'll have a look at other CPUs with lower TDP, as I don't need the full performance my current CPU offers.
Click to expand...
The two Lenovos I'm running have i7-8700T and i7-7700T chips in them, clustered in Proxmox.

I have two Docker VMs each with multiple containers, and then a Plex VM, Home Assistant etc. There's also a TrueNAS Scale instance on of them that I use as a backup for critical data to onboard NVME. I've modded one of the Lenovos to have a 10Gbe NIC, the other has a 2.5Gbe NIC. They have point to point connections to the NAS for a dedicated storage network.

Going off topic there, but my point was those chips are sub 50W each and provide ample horsepower for the cluster allowing for multiple streams (thanks Intel QuickSync) and file operations when downloading multiple... Linux ISOs.
 
randal said:
The two Lenovos I'm running have i7-8700T and i7-7700T chips in them, clustered in Proxmox.

I have two Docker VMs each with multiple containers, and then a Plex VM, Home Assistant etc. There's also a TrueNAS Scale instance on of them that I use as a backup for critical data to onboard NVME. I've modded one of the Lenovos to have a 10Gbe NIC, the other has a 2.5Gbe NIC. They have point to point connections to the NAS for a dedicated storage network.

Going off topic there, but my point was those chips are sub 50W each and provide ample horsepower for the cluster allowing for multiple streams (thanks Intel QuickSync) and file operations when downloading multiple... Linux ISOs.
Click to expand...
Yea, processing power, I really don't need much, it's more that there are other bits that I've done/added in the past that have limited my choice of mobo/CPU, which are all higher power.
 
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