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Mine is roughly 300 watts, much of which is from using an old computer as a NAS separate from my server server.
However, I put the whole thing in the basement next to my heat pump water heater which sucks the heat out of the air and puts it into my water, so I am ameliorating the expense by at least recapturing some of the *waste heat.
370W average.
3 x Lenovo x3650 M5 (Proxmox Nodes)
TP Link TL-SG3428X switch
Raspberry Pi 3B+ (physical Pi-hole server)
Generic Mini PC Intel N3150 (OpenVPN client)
Dell Optiplex (OPNSense firewall)
Is that 370watt across all of them or per fat server? I ask because three m5 sound like a lot of power drain!.
And thanks for sharing!
That's for everything listed above. This is measured straight from my UPS which everything is connected to.
AMD Ryzen 5600G
B550 Aorus Master
2x16 Ripjaw V 3200mhz
1x 14 TB Toshiba N300 for media
1x 6TB Seagate Ironwolf for backup important data
1x 500GB Samsung evo 970 as systemdrive
1x 500GB Crucial P1 as cache and download
1x 2TB Crucial P3 for docker, apps, databases, incus
Bequiet 400W
Nvidia GTX 1660 Super
Idle power 53w, totally worth it ☺️ The extra graphic card is for Immich and Ollama / overall transcoding.
I currently have probably 10% of your performance at 2x the power draw. 😭
😳😳😳
Get new hardware or you will pay it with your energy bill
Lol, I've been paying for years! (It's been about $1/day).
I'm working on it. Have a new NAS box I'm currently setting up - it's max output power is 180w, I should know later today what my idle power is like.
And then... I get to restructure all our data stores, backup processes, etc. Oh fun.
~600W. 2 machines: Dell 730 8 disks running multiple Minecraft servers. Supermicro 16 disks in raid 10 running multiple VM for various functions. All on a 6kva ups (overkill I know)
Luckily I have a large solar array.
Good timing for this thread. I just finished consolidating 2 computers worth of fun into 1 newer computer that can do it all. I sold my wife on the idea with electricity as the reasoning.
In the end, it uses 30 watts less, which is not as much as I had hoped. That's about $5 a month.
180 watts with an i5-13400, 9 spinning disks, 1 M.2 SSD, no extra GPU, 24 port switch (powers 3 AP's), modem, Mikrotik router, and a large UPS. I wonder if the UPS uses any power as a trickle charge for the batteries.
Ok, so most of you also use normal PC processors for your setups. So my power usage is not that high in comparison.
But still, a RaspberryPI would use much less and would still be performant enough.
As soon as you have a requirement for large reliable storage then you're on to at least the small desktop arena with a few HDD at which point it's more efficient to just have the small pc and ditch the RPI.
5W vs 50W is an annual difference of 400 kWh. Or 150 kG CO2e, if that's your metric. Either way, it's not a huge cost for most people capable of running a 24/7 home lab.
If you start thinking about the costs - either cash or ghg - of creating an RPi or other dedicated low power server; the energy to run HDDs, at 5-10W each, or other accessories, well, the picture gets pretty complicated. Power is one aspect, and it's really easy to measure objectively, but that also makes it easy to fetishize.
At $0.13/kwh 100 watts 24/7/365 will cost you $113.88 a year, or roughly $10 a month. Little things add up.
$10/month is one drink in the pub on one Friday night out of four. It's not even a movie ticket.
European electricity rates are closer to $0.30, and I agree that 100W 24/7 is a cost worth being aware of. I think we're seeing in this thread that it's pretty easy to find a system with standard PC parts from the past decade that idles in the 50W range, like OP, even with a couple of HDDs, and $50/year (US), even $150/year (EU), electricity cost to keep an old desktop out of a landfill maybe doesn't seem so bad.
I mean, one should think hard whether their home lab really needs a second full system running for failover, or whether they really need a separate desktop-based system just for NAS. And maybe don't convert your old gaming rig and its GPU to a home server. Or the quad-Xeon server that work is 'just giving away,' even if it would be cool to have a $50,000 computer running in the basement.
Mine is around 10W average.
It runs:
And a few other things.
Probably about a kilowatt.
~53 W
Server:
Mini PC: Beelink S12 N95
8 port unmanaged TP Link switch
I would like to expand my storage, however I don't have any available SATA ports and I believe adding an HBA would increase the idle draw about 8 W. I might just upgrade the SSDs and split the storage between the HDDs and SSDs.
My current setup uses ~180W, which is a lot, but WAY better than my previous one, which was ~600W. Power is cheap where I live, so I'm not too worried about it.
180W homelab:
600W homelab:
About 500W. 1 self build server 1 Dell R510 and one dell R710. This also includes a bit of network gear like a 48 port switch.
1.21 giggawats
What do you get when you cross Family guy with BTTF?
1.21 giggetywatts!
6w or so in idle, 50w under load with HDDs and RPi combined
Depends where you draw the line of the home lab. I'm drawing 160W at the moment, but that includes a dedicated CCTV PC (running Proxmox in a cluster) and POE switch. The CCTV I don't consider part of the home lab really, the alternative would be an off the shelf box and no one would consider that.
The 160W also includes a 24 port switch (I'm only using 8) and the FTTP power, plus the rake from the UPS. So probably total the actual homelab server would be about 80-100, I guess. But even then it runs my router using opnsense, so I don't have a separate router box to power. It also serves as my "cloud" storage, so I'm not saving watts, but I'm saving the cost there.
I could get the power down quite a bit by changing the 6 HDD for 2 mirrored HDD, but the cost of large enough disks means it'd be years before it paid for itself, so I'm sticking with 6 small disks for now.
I've thought about trimming things down and going lower powered, but it all comes back to storage and needing the large storage online all the time.
Plus I consider a 100W a big saving when before I ran a dual Xeon Dell R710 which used around 225W under the same workload.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| AP | WiFi Access Point |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| NVMe | Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage |
| PSU | Power Supply Unit |
| PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| PoE | Power over Ethernet |
| RPi | Raspberry Pi brand of SBC |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
16 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #545 for this sub, first seen 26th Feb 2024, 15:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
~25W which consists of:
I've been thinking about upgrading because the CPU isn't that fast, the RAM ain't that much and I want to add a few more HDD's. I've seen a pretty interesting Lenovo P520 with 64GB RAM a CPU that's 3x times as fast and room for 6 HDD's for €350, but the power consumption I can see online (80W) isn't that appealing with European electricity prices.
I use an Intel SBC with 10W TDP CPU in it. With a HDD and after PSU inefficiency, it draws about 10-20W depending on the load.
120w continuous. Working on bringing it down, because that's $1/day.
I'd rather spend that money on new hardware every year.
0.12kWh / h normally (120W). I'm also running 6 HDDs in raid10 so the spin down time is not optimal.
That’s energy, not power. If that’s the energy consumption per hour, then that’s 120W, which is high but not outrageous with a full size computer with 6 disks.
Correct. I assumed a normalized kWh rating would be better than any instantaneous measurement I had on hand.
Average load for me is about 750W. I run my desktop from one of the UPS units in my rack, so when that's on it sits around 1.1kW.
The 750W load is across 4 rack servers(1 is the NAS with 12 disks) and 3 switches.
~120W with an old server motherboard and 6 spinning drives (42TB of storage overall).
Currently running Nextcloud, Home Assistant, Gitea, Matrix, Jellyfin, Lemmy, Mastodon, Vaultwarden, and a bunch of other smaller stuff alongside storing a few months worth of surveillance footage, so ~$12/month in power certainly ain't a bad deal versus paying for hosted versions of even a fraction of those services.
I have looked at the ROI for getting more efficient kit and ended up discovering that going for something like a low-idle-power-draw system like a NUC or thin client and a disk enclosure has a return period on the order of multiple years.
Based on that information, I've instead put that money towards lower hanging fruit in the form of upgrading older inefficient appliances and adding multi-zone temperature control for power savings.
The energy savings I've been able to make based on long-term energy use data collected via Home Assistant has more than offset all of the electricity I've ever used to power the system itself.
Don’t have anything spectacular performance wise but my late 2012 i7 Mac Mini Server is reporting ~14w (with my services running and downloads happening) and I saw bursts up to 30w. Not too bad for 12yo Mac running Homebridge, 2 Navidrome instances, Jellyfin, nginx, Transmission, and SMB (looking into Nextcloud to replace that).
35W
DIY PC with 2 SSD and 1 HDD (it used to be 22W with 3 SSDs and no HDD)
Hosting arr stack, nextcloud, immich and many more (~40 services in total)
No idea!
Going from publicly-available info though:
Rpi4B - 6.4W max (more like 5 in real world usage)
Cpu case fan - 1.4W
2x SSD - ~6W each
13.8 to ~18 depending on what the SSDs are pulling i guess. I use it as an *arr seedbox and plex server (up to 1080p h264 works flawlessly!) as well as nextcloud