this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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Super Power-Efficient ITX Nas CPU/Motherboard? (self.selfhosted)
submitted 10 months ago by nopersonalspace to c/selfhosted
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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!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I've got a 3800x that has plenty of performance but also uses a lot of power and I'm seriously considering upgrading to a 5700G. It's about 170 from Amazon right now.

Also, I don't think you're going to want your NAS to sleep/standby, that's really not typical.

[–] nopersonalspace 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I guess that's a good point, but then is the right move to just get the lowest power CPU possible? I really don't need it to do all that much and rn it's hogging power.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Maybe not the lowest power possible... I wouldn't recommend running your NAS on a raspberry pi even though plenty of people do

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Even the low powered CPU /boards will only idle low power. Embedded and ITX can idle at 6W but the HDDs will still need power, and spinning down/up HDDs reduces their total lifetime. The only real solution there is to reduce the amount you use by swapping to larger fewer models.

But these things take money and you have to balance then against the projected power savings. There's no point in spending $500 on hardware without considering how long it will take for those $500 to be recovered from power savings. And if it takes 5 years before you start seeing a profit is it really worth it to you?

[–] nopersonalspace 1 points 10 months ago

You're right and that's exactly my plan! I'm going to get 2 20TB drives the next time I need to upgrade, that way I can keep the number of drives low.

With my current power usage and energy prices I'm paying $280 per year for this server alone, so I'm pretty well incentivized to replace parts (particularly since I can sell the parts I'm replacing to offset even further). With my current plans I'll see a positive ROI within a year almost guaranteed