I have been using an old PC as NAS and running docker containers (Immich, Nextcloud, paperless-ngx etc.). I got 5 3.5" HDD disks and a Nvme. Even on idle, I am consuming 50-60w. A friend of mine is selling a Qnap NAS which is a dedicated machine and probably consumes less power, although I don’t know if it’s worth it.
Old PCs often have that problem. My “NAS” is more a full on proxmox server with an AM5 CPU, 64GB ECC and yet it halved my power consumption compared to its predecessors.
Easiest way is to use a tasmota based power plug. They need to calibrated once,but then are pretty reliable and can be found for 15 bucks.
Nous A1T (or similar nous,but watch out for the T at the end, Z is zigbee) is popular in central europe. They are well built and cheap as fuck. But again,they need to be calibrated once which you need a steady user (e.g an old incandescent light bulb ) and a multimeter for… It’s easy and only needs to be done once.
Another option are the Inter-Tech PDUs, they costs around a 100 Bucks, are fully IP, can switch channels but only measure the consumption of the whole strip. If you have a more advanced USV they often have a total power consumption measurement.
If you want to go all in you need to look for “switched and metered” PDUs, but they are fucking expensive. The Cyberpower PDU81005 is the cheapest “good” one and is over 400 bucks here . So… Most people won’t do that,even in a professional setting.
This is the reason I use a NAS specific box. So much more power efficient
I use a 5600g on b450 ITX board and 4x 8GB Seagate drives and see about 35W idle and about 40W average. It used to be 45W because I was forced to use a GPU in addition to a 3600 to boot (even though its headless, just a bad bios setup that I can’t fix) and getting a CPU with graphics dropped my idle consumption quite a bit. I suspect the extra wattage for your machine is probably the bigger motherboard and the less efficient CPU.
It is possible to get the machine part down into single digits wattage and then about 5W a drive is the floor without spinning them down, so the minimum you could likely see with a much less powerful CPU is about 30-35W.
If the aim is to save money, figure out how long it will take you to break even. Then the service life of such a machine
Most of the power draw is from the hdds. I have the same issue. If you want less power consumption. Invest in SSD or SSD and HDD hybrid where you store quick access files on SSD and rare access on hdd (then you can spin them down with timeout of , let’s say 30-60 min). This should save some energy
In my experience using a PC as a NAS, the power draw isn’t necessarily the drives as they spin down when idle.
I have an old desktop setup as NAS - with 2 drives or eight drives, idle power draw is virtually the same, about 100w, regardless of the OS (Windows, Linux, UnRAID, Proxmox).
I also have an old consumer NAS, with five 4TB drives, and it idles under 20w (I think last I checked it was ~15w… I need to check it again and write that down).
Two very similar systems, one designed to be a NAS, the other a desktop. It really comes down to the motherboard design and capabilities.
I also have a Dell SFF that idles at about 15w, regardless of drive count - one drive or four (and to get four I added a SATA expansion card and rigged some power splitters, really pushing the power supply). That box idling the same, even when pushed well past design, is pretty telling.
And don’t think that SSD drives would do better - spinning disk drives generally have far better idle power than SSD does, and usually much better write power consumption.
So it really depends, and mostly on the motherboard itself. Yes, you’ll get more power usage with more drives, but that’s at write and read time. My SFF idles at 12w, peaks at 80w when converting videos, the read/write power is negligible, same with the NAS (I transfer hundreds of gigs between them every few days).
Good point. I looked mostly at the spec sheet from the manufacturer and for example the Samsung 870 Evo vs Seagate IronWolf NAS Drive. Side note, AFAIK NVME drives have a higher power consumption. Especially PCIe 5.0.
My NAS with 2 HDDs from Seagate has a total powerdraw of around 30-40w. And I don’t spin the drives down.
- Latency of accessing files/loading times
- Lifespan reduction because of spin up / spin down Head moves (the most common for head crash, as I learned from my Teacher)
My NAS uses a similar amount of power. The drives use most of the power. The PC uses less than 20W on its own. Upgrading to a couple of large helium filled drives will save a good bit of power. SATA drives tend to use a little less power than SAS drives too.
Instructions unclear, now my server is slowly floating into the sky…
How do you monitor power consumption? I’m new to self hosting and I want to do that.
Some local libraries (e.g. in Heidelberg) or ecological initiatives lend devices to measure electricity consumption at the power plug. In particular, this is useful to measure other appliances as well.
Specifically for computers, they probably have some means to tell you their own consumption, but they may not be accurate or complete and will most certainly omit any peripherals, e.g. external hard drives.
Thank you! I will see if I can get my hands on one of those.
“Old PC” meaning what, exactly? Need some specs.
In general, a Qnap or Synology box is going to be much lower wattage than a full PC.
It’s 6th gen i5 processor with gigabyte motherboard. And Qnap is ts-531x.
I switched from an I3-530, nominal TDP 73W, to an N-100, nominal TDP 7W, and power from the wall didn’t change at all. Even the i3 ran around 0.1 CPU load, except when transcoding, and I’m left with the impression that most of the power goes into HDDs, RAM, maybe fans, and PS losses. My sense is that the best way to decrease homelab power use is to minimize the number of devices. Start with your seyrver at 60W, add a WAP at 10-15W, maybe a switch at 10-15W… Not because of the CPUs, necessarily, but because every CPU every CPU comes with systems to keep the CPU going, keep the power regulated, etc.
Power isn’t from drives, if your OS spins them down (as any NAS solution should).
You can only spin drives down if they’re idle. If you have a service that touches it - say, homeassistant logging data, tvheadend updating EPG - then they’re going to keep spinning.
A big portion of that is caused by the drives, so you’d have to compare the empty QNAP vs your empty machine. Also, depending on which NAS appliance, check that the CPU is actually powerful enough to run all your services.
Drives only consume power on reads and writes, if your NAS spins them down as it should (and apparently QNAP *doesn’t, which I didn’t know).
As per my other comment - 8 drives or 1 drive, same idle power for desktop hardware. My actual NAS uses about 1/8 the power at idle for 5 drives.
Drives only consume power on reads and writes, if your NAS spins them down as it should (and apparently QNAP *doesn’t, which I didn’t know).
not really. not all drives spin down by themselves, by default. and even if they do, it’ll happen relatively long after reads and writes, a the while it’ll consume power.
