My home rack draws around 3.5kW steady-state, but it also has more than 200 spinning disks
this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
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My server rack has
- 3x Dell R730
- 1x Dell R720
- 2x Cisco Catalyst 3750x (IP Routing license)
- 2x Netgear M4300-12x12f
- 1x Unifi USW-48-Pro
- 1x USW-Agg
- 3x Framework 11th Gen (future cluster)
- 1x Protectli FE4B
All together that draws.... 0.1 kWh.... in 0.327s.
In real time terms, measured at the UPS, I have a running stable state load of 900-1100w depending on what I have at load. I call it my computationally efficient space heater because it generates more heat than is required for my apartment in winter except for the coldest of days. It has a dedicated 120v 15A circuit
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You might have your units confused.
0.1kWh over how much time? Per day? Per hour? Per week?
Watthours refer to total power used to do something, from a starting point to an ending point. It makes no sense to say that a device needs a certain amount of Wh, unless you're talking about something like charging a battery to full.
Power being used by a device, (like a computer) is just watts.
Think of the difference between speed and distance. Watts is how fast power is being used, watt-hours is how much has been used, or will be used.
If you have a 500 watt PC, for example, it uses 500Wh, per hour. Or 12kWh in a day.
I forgive 'em cuz watt hours are a disgusting unit in general
| idea | what | unit |
|---|---|---|
| speed | change in position over time | meters per second m/s |
| acceleration | change in speed over time | meters per second, per second m/s/s=m/s² |
| force | acceleration applied to each of unit of mass | kg * m/s² |
| work | acceleration applied along a distance, which transfers energy | kg * m/s² * m = kg * m²/s² |
| power | work over time | kg * m² / s³ |
| energy expenditure | power level during units of time | (kg * m² / s³) * s = kg * m²/s² |
Work over time, × time, is just work! kWh are just joules (J) with extra steps! Screw kWh, I will die on this hill!!! Raaah
Power over time could be interpreted as power/time. Power x time isn’t power, it’s energy (=== work). But otherwise I’m with you. Joules or gtfo.
Whoops, typo! Fixed c:
Could be worse, could be BTU. And some people still use tons (of heating/cooling).
If you have a 500 watt PC, for example, it uses 500Wh, per hour. Or 12kWh in a day.
A maximum of 500 watts. Fortunately your PC doesn't actually max out your PSU or your system would crash.
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I use unraid with 5950x and it wouldn't stop crashing until I disabled c states
So that plus 18 hdds and 2 ssds it sits at 200watts 24/7
17W for an N100 system with 4 HDD's
That's pretty low with 4 HDD's. One of my servers use 30 watts. Half of that is from the 2 HDD's in it.
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Which HDDs? That’s really good.
Seagate Ironwolf "ST4000VN006"
I do have some issues with read speeds but that's probably networking related or due to using RAID5.
Running an old 7th gen Intel, It has a 2070 and a 1080 in it, six mechanical hard drives 3 SSDs. Then I have an eighth gen laptop with a 1070 TI mobile. But the laptop's a camera server so it's always running balls to the wall. Running a unified dream machine pro, 24 port poe, 16 port poe and an 8 port poe
Because of the overall workload and the age of the CPU, it burns about 360 watts continuous.
I can save a few watts by putting the discs to sleep, But I'm in the camp where the spin up and spin down of the discs cost more wear than continuous running.
Edit: cleaned up the slaughter from the dictation, after I cleaned up my physical space from Christmas festivities.
Around 18-20 Watts on idle. It can go up to about 40 W at 100% load.
I have a Intel N100, I'm really happy about performance per watt, to be honest.
Do you mean 0.1kWh per hour, so 0.1kW or 100W?
My N100 server needs about 11W.
The N100 is such a little powerhouse and I'm sad they haven't managed to produce anything better. All of the "upgrades" are either just not enough of an upgrade for the money, it just more power hungry.
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50W-ish idle? Ryzen 1700, 2 HDDs, and a GTX 750ti. My next upgrade will hopefully cut this in half.
My whole setup including 2 PIs and one fully speced out AM4 system with 100TB of drives a Intel Arc and 4x 32gb ecc ram uses between 280W - 420W I live in Germany and pay 25ct per KWh and my whole apartment uses 600w at any given time and approximately 15kwh per day 😭
9 spinning disks and a couple SSD's - Right around 190 watts, but that also includes my router and 3 PoE WiFi AP's. PoE consumption is reported as 20 watts, and the router should use about 10 watts, so I think the server is about 160 watts.
Electricity here is pretty expensive, about $.33 per kWh, so by my math I'm spending $38/month on this stuff. If I didn't have lots of digital media it'd be worth it to get a VPS probably. $38/month is still cheaper than Netflix, HBO, and all the other junk I'd have to subscribe to.
Same here. 300w with 12 disks, switches, and router. But electricity only costs $.12/kwh. I wouldn’t trust having terabytes of data in the cloud.
That's true. And the children of my family see no ads which is priceless. Yet I am looking into ways to cut costs in half by using an additional lower powered mini pc which is always on and the main computer only running in the evening - maybe.
last I checked with a kill-a-watt I was drawing an average of 2.5kWh after a week of monitoring my whole rack. that was about three years ago and the following was running in my rack.
- r610 dual 1kw PSU
- homebuilt server Gigabyte 750w PSU
- homebuilt Asus gaming rig 650w PSU
- homebuilt Asus retro(xp) gaming/testing rig 350w PSU
- HP laptop as dev env/warmsite ~ 200w PSU
- Amcrest NVR 80w (I guess?)
- HP T610 65w PSU
- Terramaster F5-422 90w PSU
- TP-Link TL-SG2424P 180w PSU
- Brocade ICX6610-48P-E dual dual 1kw PSU
- Misc routers, rpis, poe aps, modems(cable & 5G) ~ 700w combined (cameras not included, brocade powers them directly)
I also have two battery systems split between high priority and low priority infrastructure.
I was drawing an average of 2.5kWh after a week of monitoring my whole rack
That doesn't seem right; that's only ~18W. Each one of those systems alone will exceed that at idle running 24/7. I'd expect 1-2 orders of magnitude more.
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Ugh, I need to get off my ass and install a rack and some fiber drops to finalize my network buildout.
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Idle: 30 Watts
Starting all docker containers after reboot: 140 Watts
It needs around 28 kWh per month.
My 10 year old ITX NAS build with 4 HDDs used 40W at idle. Just upgraded to an Aoostart WTR Pro with the same 4 HDDs, uses 28W at idle. My power bill currently averages around US$0.13/kWh.
I think at max 200w? It runs a collection of fedi/self service stuff.
I also run a pi with a couple of apps on a pi 3 that sips power.
It's a legitimate issue because it's 50+ cents per killowat hour where I live so power is very expensive...
That seems really high, I think power where I live is about 12-14 cents per kilowatt hour. What makes it so expenses where you live?
Mostly just that they can. It's more expensive per tier actually.
https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf
Take a look, this is the old pricing. They just voted to up it again.
There's legislation that is moving along to charge people with solar because...idk.
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