FreeNAS power effiency upgrade for home

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trizc

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Oct 17, 2011
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I currently run an am3 AMD Athlon II X2 250. I am looking to further reduce idle power usage.

I am thinking about switching to intel atom C2550
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157419

having less controller cards for sata and reducing to one stick of ram (since it seems additional sticks is an increase of 50% watt usage of idle usage of the atom board)

is ECC ram necessary or can ZFS do without?
i am thinking about a raidz2 with 5-6 1TB and raidz1 with 3-4 2TB

I will be going for this case:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147165

I suppose a platinum rated PSU would be necessary? I hear things about less than 85% efficiency at 10% loads even with platinum.

in terms of wear on the hard drives, would having the machine sleep and using WOL (or ipmi?) have a negative effect on drive life than runnning 24/7 with the drives on spindown?

I have an assortment of different drives (green to 7200, even laptop drives in the same array), I don't think I have been using and spin down, but have had 0 problems so far.
 
ZFS is a bit better with memory errors but not nearly good enough.

No way you make the cost of the board back in the idle power bill, though, unless you are in a south pole station or so.

I have bad experience with using automatic idle poweroff on drives.
 
i would be running it at my parent's so i'd want to use lowest power possible, since I am not paying for utilities.

I should measure the usage at the wall of my current setup but reading idle usage of the cpu online (and when i originally checked) it was somewhere around 80-120w (with a few drives in there)
 
trizc said:
I currently run an am3 AMD Athlon II X2 250. I am looking to further reduce idle power usage.

I am thinking about switching to intel atom C2550
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157419

having less controller cards for sata and reducing to one stick of ram (since it seems additional sticks is an increase of 50% watt usage of idle usage of the atom board)

is ECC ram necessary or can ZFS do without?
i am thinking about a raidz2 with 5-6 1TB and raidz1 with 3-4 2TB

I will be going for this case:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147165

I suppose a platinum rated PSU would be necessary? I hear things about less than 85% efficiency at 10% loads even with platinum.

in terms of wear on the hard drives, would having the machine sleep and using WOL (or ipmi?) have a negative effect on drive life than runnning 24/7 with the drives on spindown?

I have an assortment of different drives (green to 7200, even laptop drives in the same array), I don't think I have been using and spin down, but have had 0 problems so far.
Click to expand...

I haven't had good luck with Freenas and sleep/WOL, but not a lot of effort.

That atom board is a good choice.

Yes run ECC memory. You have a server board, why not the slight extra cost for ECC memory?

I suggest a Dell RM112 for a PSU. Used on ebay cheap and nothing matches its efficiency at low loads. You'll need to do some repinning/soldering/adapting.
 
uOpt said:
No way you make the cost of the board back in the idle power bill, though, unless you are in a south pole station or so.
Click to expand...

I also have a ZFS server with a Regor 250 in a Supermicro board. According to my UPS, it uses about 85W idle with 4 3.5" & 1 2.5" drive, and runs up to maybe a little over 100W doing the weekly MD5 rsync.

I did the power calculations, and any actual server upgrade would take like 10-20 years to pay off, and we moved a year ago to a part of the country where power costs twice what it used to. I have a _severe_ case of upgrade itch for it, but I'll probably just run until failure.
 
what are your thoughts on this deal at microcenter?
A6 6400k
and
A55BM-E Socket FM2+ A55 mATX

the mobo has 6 sata ports which would be an upgrade from the 4 sata on my am3. and it seems that 6400k idle is around 38W.

price of 69.99 + tax total for both seems pretty nice, and if it reduces it actually by half, it would pay off quickly (pretty sure my parents are in a higher tier kwh rate right now, will need to do some auditing with the kill-a-watt)

recently i had a few drives go bad, the machine turned off. cpu fan was "stuck" (felt unlubricated), one ram stick with memory errors, 2-3 drives with smart errors. also the router that was plugged in the same power strip went fubar. (i wonder if it has something to do with transferring 200+ gigabytes over powerline adapters, perhaps unstable electrical wiring).
I assume it had to do something with a surge or brownout so i purchased a cyberpower ups with line conditioning from costco B&M (was $90, not bad, 1350va).
anyhow, still not sure if it can justify an upgrade. i will probably switch out the lian li case to the 12bay rosewill case. hotswap will make life a little less untangled
 
trizc said:
what are your thoughts on this deal at microcenter?
A6 6400k
and
A55BM-E Socket FM2+ A55 mATX
Click to expand...

If you stick with AM3+ you can have ECC capability for not much more money if you are willing to buy Asus.
 
I did the math, and even if you *only* spent $70, and the new device only used 38W (not including the drives). it would still take 1.75 years to break even at $.11/kwh. My system runs 80W at idle with 5 hard drives running. If you have to buy memory for the new rig, it probably pushes out the break even point to 4-5years, unless you live in Cali and have utterly obscene power rates.

If you want to save power, updating lighting will have far more impact than computers. I have an Excel spread sheet I made to calculate power savings by updating equipment.

Our last house had 6 can lights in the kitchen, updating them with 6 CFLs and estimating that they only run for 3 hours per day, saves an estimated $62/year and pays off in .15 months (or less), considering the minimal cost of entry.

Our last house also had 5 exterior lights that ran 24/7 (our new house I installed photoelectric LED & CFL that only run at night). Replacing those with CFLs saves about $240 a year, and ran less than $10.

Even replacing a power-hogging 350W server with a new Xeon rig would probably take almost two years to payoff, considering the cost of entry.

I have the file to back up what I am talking about, just am on my netbook at work and can't take the time to post the screen caps at the moment.

Just some food for thought, though. Upgrade computers for capability, or just because you want to--but rarely if ever does the math for the home user play out.
 
@iroc409; Here in Australia we have privatised the power grid so the prices are crazy high, i pay 31c/KWh, and in some cases as high as 36c/KWh, 3 times what you pay, so power efficiency is important in a 24/7 machine.
 
I have a 250u and an old Biostar board with an 40GB SSD and (3) 1 TB drives running FreeNas. I'm only seeing 18-20w at wall idling, which it does 99.99% of the time. As the above poster said, the ROI to go lower just isn't there. And yes it is running 8GB of ECC memory.

250u was a good pickup from ebay.
 
uavv99 said:
@iroc409; Here in Australia we have privatised the power grid so the prices are crazy high, i pay 31c/KWh, and in some cases as high as 36c/KWh, 3 times what you pay, so power efficiency is important in a 24/7 machine.
Click to expand...

Well, you still need to do the math. It seems the AUD $ and US $ is close. To replace my 80W server with a 50W server for $450 @ $.36/kWh would still take almost 5 years to break even.

The OP didn't say where he lived, so that makes a big difference, i.e. CA vs. southern WA if in the USA.
 
living in southern california actually. believe the electricity bill is in tier2 or tier3 which i cannot check the rates right now but will range from 25c-32c/kwh

bill is around 200 a month so once i return home from college, gonna do some experimenting with the kill-a-watt

will look into new lighting sources if we dont have cfl already
 
It regard to the power line adapter statement above, that should be plugged into a wall socket with nothing else. That is what they are designed for at least.

In regard to power, my Synology ds24xx units use 65 watts running and 36 watts idle. I have 6 flash disks and 6 hard drives in there.
 
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