Suggestions for NAS solution?

I am unable to find a 10Gb NIC with PCIe x1 form factor, one with PCIe Gen 4 would be ideal.

It could work if I got a PCI Express X1 to X16 Low Profile Slot Extension Adapter, and it would fit in a SilverStone CS351 which is the biggest chassis I would go for.

Would the NIC's connect at 10Gb but only transfer data at ~ 8Gb or would it negotiate down to 5Gb?

Would that create buffering issues connected at 10Gb but only able to transfer data at 8Gb?

Going MATX would save me £150 on the cost of the motherboard.

Regarding getting a 5350GE I can only find them used from China when I expanded my search.
 
What I find most odd about this, is you've given us no idea how the system will be used, which is arguably the most important thing. If you are wanting to save power, 10Gb NIC's will generally limit lower C-state support, if you are going ZFS, every r/w operation that isn't going to or from cache requires a full pool spun up. If your usage - that you haven't told us about - looks like static file storage such as media, and you don't need big concurrent IO numbers, then Unraid is probably the better option. Reads spin up the drive being read from, writes only spin up the parity drive and the data drive being written to, and you'd generally push them to cache till it hits the write threshold anyway. Of course, you're limited to 200MB/s on a single spindle, so multiple transfers to hit the 8Gb/s or so you'll see between 10Gb hosts, and if you need bigger IOPS, then it also supports ZFS, but i'd personally go TrueNAS if that's the plan.

Hardware wise, ITX is not your friend. Embrace function over form, MATX minimum, if you don't need 10Gb (and we live in a world where it's cheap and easy now) then stick to 1 or 2.5, also have a look at what you're going to have to spend to 'save'. A 8th gen i3 (4c) or i5 (6c) is cheap and very capable, iGPU has H265 transcoding support (inc. tone mapping) and reasonably efficient, why do you need to blow £678 on a 7600 based ITX system when your main issue is seemingly saving a few quid a month on your power bill, it doesn't add up.
 
RavenLunatic said:
I am unable to find a 10Gb NIC with PCIe x1 form factor, one with PCIe Gen 4 would be ideal.

It could work if I got a PCI Express X1 to X16 Low Profile Slot Extension Adapter, and it would fit in a SilverStone CS351 which is the biggest chassis I would go for.

Would the NIC's connect at 10Gb but only transfer data at ~ 8Gb or would it negotiate down to 5Gb?

Would that create buffering issues connected at 10Gb but only able to transfer data at 8Gb?

Going MATX would save me £150 on the cost of the motherboard.

Regarding getting a 5350GE I can only find them used from China when I expanded my search.
Click to expand...

I think it would depend on the chipset. From what I’ve experienced the handshake will be at 10gbs, but the transfer will simply tapout at the maximum bottleneck.
 
10Gb syncs at 10Gb based on the card chipset and interconnect, it’ll transfer whatever it can just as if the storage was the limiting factor.
 
Avalon said:
What I find most odd about this, is you've given us no idea how the system will be used, which is arguably the most important thing. If you are wanting to save power, 10Gb NIC's will generally limit lower C-state support, if you are going ZFS, every r/w operation that isn't going to or from cache requires a full pool spun up. If your usage - that you haven't told us about - looks like static file storage such as media, and you don't need big concurrent IO numbers, then Unraid is probably the better option. Reads spin up the drive being read from, writes only spin up the parity drive and the data drive being written to, and you'd generally push them to cache till it hits the write threshold anyway. Of course, you're limited to 200MB/s on a single spindle, so multiple transfers to hit the 8Gb/s or so you'll see between 10Gb hosts, and if you need bigger IOPS, then it also supports ZFS, but i'd personally go TrueNAS if that's the plan.

Hardware wise, ITX is not your friend. Embrace function over form, MATX minimum, if you don't need 10Gb (and we live in a world where it's cheap and easy now) then stick to 1 or 2.5, also have a look at what you're going to have to spend to 'save'. A 8th gen i3 (4c) or i5 (6c) is cheap and very capable, iGPU has H265 transcoding support (inc. tone mapping) and reasonably efficient, why do you need to blow £678 on a 7600 based ITX system when your main issue is seemingly saving a few quid a month on your power bill, it doesn't add up.
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The 7600 based ITX system was purely an exercise to show what I could put together buying from OCUK today within a £700 budget.

I am just exploring all the options available. If a self-build NAS becomes the cheapest option then I am open to it.

I want daily backups images from my PC's, a local backup copy of my Onedrive, and an offline storage of my game library's.

Sure, I could go with a 2.5Gb network interface but I already have a 10Gb home network it would be a shame not to use it.

I agree an old 8th gen intel could do the job cheaply but, current solution is an x99 i7 5930K. I want something better, smaller, easy to maintain, and if I can use less power then that's a plus.

I don't have the room for a huge ATX NAS chassis and most of the good NAS non-rack chassis are M-ITX.

Ultimately I have £1400 worth of healthy HDD's I don't mind spending £700 more to utilise them more effectively
 
You’re probably going to have to make trade off’s, and the most obvious two are saving power (ultimately money) and spending it. For a variety of reasons, x99 is not efficient by modern standards, it still has a few tricks that make it better in certain cases such as PCIE lane availability and massive RAM support for modest prices, but you tend to pay more in power. Does it make sense to spend £700 to save 30w a year? I pay 22.79p/Kw, so 1w of power per year costs me roughly £2/yr of under 17p/m, you gave us 100w as a number, let's say you can save 30w moving from what you have to 'new' and spending £700, it'll take you over 11 years to break even on that purchase at today's rates. Annoyingly, your usage case doesn't have any obvious workload that suggests you'll see a significant performance improvement over what you have now, 'better' and 'easy to maintain' aren't metrics of improvement here, the majority of maintaining it is down to the OS and BIOS updates, the former is universal, and the latter often ignored and less frequent as products age. You can get smaller, but is £700 to halve the footprint of a case going to be a massive game changer for you? Because that's about the only obvious win here.

My first bit of advice is buy a Tapo (if the UPS you likely have doesn't have similar reporting already?) or similar energy monitoring plug so you can see actual usage and run it for a week or two, this will tell you four important things: Peak draw, actual idle, cost per period of time (day/week/month), this is a numbers game and without accurate numbers, people often tend to make poor choices.

Next up, drives... specifically £1400 of drives? In my world looks like 200TB+ of HGST He drives, you have 70TB of Ironwolf's and want 30TB useable, which is easy. Self build, four data, dual parity, hot spare, 40TB, use SSD's for cache = Yay! Generally, on static files with no obvious heavy IOPS from what you describe other than initial writes, I would go UnRAID, if you like TNS better, then great, but at 5-7w per drive spun up, that's 30-42w of potential idle power right there.

Of course, if it's not about saving power (money), and you just want to throw £700 at something small/shiny, there's no shame in that, but please be honest with yourself and us.

Good luck :)
 
Shiny is always a big part in this type of hobby, but if I can half my idle power usage that’s about £100 a year saved by your calculations. My 100W figure is from an energy monitoring socket with X99 NAS PC at idle, when writing to disk it hits 175W. Unfortunately, it only has total power used and not split by weekly or monthly. Maximum power peek draw apparently is 260W

Is it wrong for me to want to use less electricity?

I am not looking for ROI, however my Drobo 5n lasted me 10 years I would expect my new one will last as long as well, so if it does pay for itself then all the better.
 
RavenLunatic said:
I have 7 healthy 10TB Ironwolf HDD NAS drives and eight 500Gb SSD’s.
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Be better off consolidating to fewer higher capacity drives. Saves on electricity, plus with less drives you could do away with the need for a HBA, to also save electricity.
(also less drives = less chance of failure)

RavenLunatic said:
I would be happy to have 30TB running five drives in a RAID6 or even better a Z2 pool
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RAID6 is a waste of time for home use especially with only 5 drives (Rebuilds take an age - and you're "wasting" 40% capacity, if you're happy wasting that level of space, you may as well go the whole hog and "waste" 50% for a 6 Disk Raid10 - at least the rebuilds will be quicker and less risky)

Z2 is probably also overrated for your use. I'm assuming you have ECC ram, your other PCs have ECC ram, and you are verifying files when they are copied to and from a Z2 share? If not then there are plenty of other places where your data could be corrupted that ZFS won't save you from (however unlikely)

UnRaid is likely the best choice for you, and for power saving as already mentioned - you could do 30TB with only 4 of the drives you already have.


What data are you even storing? How important is it?
This is a far more pressing question that would help to determine what RAID level etc you should run, rather than "I have X drives and want Y amount of space"
 
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Is 'idle' with drives spun up, or spun down? No, it's not wrong of you to want to save power, but in one breath you want to save power (and money) and in the next you don't care about how long it takes to make financial sense, that's why it's such an odd proposition, it feels like you're trying to justify something to yourself that makes no sense to anyone else reading it. I'd still buy a decent power monitor plug so you can understand what's going on properly, but if you actually want efficient, buy an N100 based ITX board with onboard 2.5/10Gb (no, I don't want to think about what's sharing PCIe lanes with what either), a Jonsbro N2/3/4, put 6 IW's in it (4+2) and some SSD cache (breakout from NVMe?) or just straight NVMe and enjoy the power savings. Personally, i'd be looking more to Alder/Raptor Lake-s stuff, but it's your call. Either way, it'd be a lot less than what you're looking at and a lot more efficient.
 
Avalon said:
Is 'idle' with drives spun up, or spun down? No, it's not wrong of you to want to save power, but in one breath you want to save power (and money) and in the next you don't care about how long it takes to make financial sense, that's why it's such an odd proposition, it feels like you're trying to justify something to yourself that makes no sense to anyone else reading it. I'd still buy a decent power monitor plug so you can understand what's going on properly, but if you actually want efficient, buy an N100 based ITX board with onboard 2.5/10Gb (no, I don't want to think about what's sharing PCIe lanes with what either), a Jonsbro N2/3/4, put 6 IW's in it (4+2) and some SSD cache (breakout from NVMe?) or just straight NVMe and enjoy the power savings. Personally, i'd be looking more to Alder/Raptor Lake-s stuff, but it's your call. Either way, it'd be a lot less than what you're looking at and a lot more efficient.
Click to expand...

You wouldn’t see much if any power savings from going to nvme. The only reason to go with an SSD is speed of transfers which is questionable as even a modest drive will tap out 10gbs multiple times over so all you’re really gaining is iops.
 
RavenLunatic said:
Shiny is always a big part in this type of hobby, but if I can half my idle power usage that’s about £100 a year saved by your calculations. My 100W figure is from an energy monitoring socket with X99 NAS PC at idle, when writing to disk it hits 175W. Unfortunately, it only has total power used and not split by weekly or monthly. Maximum power peek draw apparently is 260W

Is it wrong for me to want to use less electricity?

I am not looking for ROI, however my Drobo 5n lasted me 10 years I would expect my new one will last as long as well, so if it does pay for itself then all the better.
Click to expand...

For your use case you don’t need to spend anything like £700 TBH. The tricky part would be finding a high efficiency, low wattage PSU for sensible money.
 
jigger said:
You wouldn’t see much if any power savings from going to nvme.
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Most mid range nvme are <0.5w when idle and ~3w average use
By contrast a 10tb ironwolf is 7.7w average use, 5.5w idle and only 0.8w when spun down.

jigger said:
The tricky part would be finding a high efficiency, low wattage PSU for sensible money.
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The savings aren't worth the hassle Vs a decent 80+ Gold or Platinum of normal wattage (e.g. 550 or 650w)
 
Armageus said:
Most mid range nvme are <0.5w when idle and ~3w average use
By contrast a 10tb ironwolf is 7.7w average use, 5.5w idle and only 0.8w when spun down.


The savings aren't worth the hassle Vs a decent 80+ Gold or Platinum of normal wattage (e.g. 550 or 650w)
Click to expand...

30tb of NVMe drives will pull a ton of power.

As I said it’s tricky. I got a 400watt platinum for decent money.
 
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jigger said:
You wouldn’t see much if any power savings from going to nvme. The only reason to go with an SSD is speed of transfers which is questionable as even a modest drive will tap out 10gbs multiple times over so all you’re really gaining is iops.
Click to expand...
I think you may have misunderstood my comment, I suggestd SSD or NVMe cache, not pure NVMe storage, it doesn't fit the budget or need, but it certainly would save power, just like the op’s potential build, it doesnt make much sense to do so.
 
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Avalon said:
I think you may have misunderstood my comment, I suggestd SSD or NVMe cache, not pure NVMe storage, it doesn't fit the budget or need, but it certainly would save power, just like the op’s potential build, it doesnt make much sense to do so.
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Not from what I’ve seen. A bunch of NVMe pulls a bunch power.
 
Idle in that all the IW's are spun down so best case.

I found a great preview video of the Asustor Lockerstor Gen3 NAS

youtu.be

Asustor Lockerstor Gen3 NAS - ULTIMATE HYBRID NAS?

Asustor Lockerstor Gen 3 NAS Revealed https://nascompares.com/news/asustor-lockerstor-gen3-nas-revealed/Flashstor Gen 2 Reveal Video - https://www.youtube.co...
youtu.be youtu.be

I don’t see the problem; I need a new NAS because my current setup is a pain to maintain. I want one that is power efficient. I am not fussy whether it is a prebuilt dedicated NAS or a self-build, and I have set aside a budget I think is reasonable to complete the task.

I get the consensus here seems to be to just keep running my power hungry x99 NAS system as the ROI would take years so its not worth doing.

My reasoning for using Z2 was purely for its fault tolerance on my aging IW’s.
 
I have pulled the X99 system apart, permanently removed the 4 inaccessible HDD bays, removed 6 of the 8 sticks of RAM, swapped the Corsair TX950 Bronze for an EVGA 750GQ Gold which I already had, and I have got the system idling at 83Wh.

Power usage over the last 7 days was 14.44KWh @ £0.2182635 = £3.15. Averaging the power usage comes in at 85.95Wh

The X99 system is no longer a pain to service and I think 83W is acceptable for a 6 SATA SSD + 5 SATA HDD NAS system.

Thank you all for your responses.
 
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