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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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[–] nopersonalspace 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I specifically had to set things up in the BIOS so that it would never enter any efficient power/sleep states. It's a bug in the OS I'm using that was forcing me to do it, otherwise the whole thing would lock up on me.

That said, I have some smart-plugs that do power monitoring. I can try hooking up the nas to one of those just for kicks, it should be accurate enough for this sort of thing.

Edit: Just measured and looks like I was about right: 100W under load and around 80W idle

[–] tomten 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There is an issue with ryzen and certain PSUs that when it goes to idle it pulls so little power that the psu thinks it's off and kills the power, it can appear as a hang. there should be an option in the bios to change it to "typical power" or named something similar.

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

Oh interesting, that sound plausible. I'll check out the bios and see if I can find that setting. Thanks!

[–] tomten 2 points 10 months ago

It's called power supply idle control, worth a test.

[–] TCB13 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I specifically had to set things up in the BIOS so that it would never enter any efficient power/sleep states

This is most likely why you're running at 100W all the time. No need to further measure anything. Reset your BIOS to defaults, update the OS / use Debian and you should be good.

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

It's not that easy sadly. The entire NAS runs on Unraid and the issue is with that OS. I can't switch without totally restarting from scratch which would be a huge data migration, and a massive PITA configuration-wise.

Eventually I'd be open to switching to something like TrueNas Scale, but for now I need Unraid's unique ability to run a RAID array with differently sized drives

[–] TCB13 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Oh. This kind of issues is why I now run everything on Debian. If you're paying a license you should ask for support and bash them until they fix whatever is wrong with their kernel power management.

Even if you get a new machine you've zero guarantees there wont be any other power management or networking issues with Unraid.

[–] nopersonalspace 1 points 10 months ago

Yeah good point. I've been slowly working to move away from Unraid for those reasons, and have been having fun trying NixOS.

Anyway, I just made a post on the official support forums so hopefully I can get this looked at. Since I initially had the problems many updates have come out, so maybe it's not a thing anymore. I just can't risk testing that for myself!