lowering Power Consumption / Potential server rebuild

[iamwhoiamtoday]

Greetings!

My file server is a 12*2TB drive machine with 48GB memory and dual quad Xeons running FreeNAS / ZFS. I mainly use it for multimedia storage. (aka: I point iTunes and XMBC at it)

It currently pulls about 250watts sustained from the wall, even when not really being used. Electricity is provided in my current living situation, but in a few months I'll be moving, and then I'll have to actually pay for the power being consumed.
I have two 12-port PCI-X 3WARE cards that handle my current hard drives.

I'm looking at moving over to UNRAID, with a different motherboard / CPU, namely this mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186220
and my Intel Celeron G1610.

The real question I have is thus:
Will the PCI-X cards work in a normal PCI slot?
Should I put 6 drives / raid card in order to get the most throughput? or even 4 drives / raid card and 4 on the motherboard?

Any suggestions on how to best proceed? Or should I carry on with the current plan?

Thank you for your time!

 

[drescherjm]

Will the PCI-X cards work in a normal PCI slot?
Should I put 6 drives / raid card in order to get the most throughput?

Remember that a single drive will be max out the PCI bus. I would sell off the PCI-X controllers.

Any suggestions on how to best proceed?

Look for a board with 8+ SATA ports. If you need more get an LSI PCIe based sas HBA off ebay.

 

[Kerbysj]

I used to have a dual quad setup for the same use as yourself. Its completely unneeded! When it went bang! i ordered up a new haswell build with 32gb ram etc, that ive turned into an ESXI host. Not only does it use alot less power! I can also consolidate alot more boxes into it.
Electricity bill has halved!

If i were you i were try to consildate your setups. Buy right first time will save you alot of money.

Im not sure what power costs are over in the states but here in the uk it is 25p kw/hr during the day (about 45cents i guess?).
I installed a power meter on friday and at this very momment with my Host + 3 small PC's running XBMC running. plus all my home theatre in standby im only pulling 7.9p an hour. (0.44kwh)


I feel for you dude, Paying bills sucks!

 

[PigLover]

Get rid of the PCI-X cards & Get a MB with 4+2 SATA (very common) and an 8-port HBA.

I would normally recommend an EOM version of the LSI9201/9211-8I. IBM M1015 is one of these and is normally available on eBay for +/- $80. My only hesitation recommending this to you for this use case is that the LSIs won't let the drives spin-down and you are looking for FreeNAS and minimum power use - so no spin-down could be a killer for you.

Not sure what other HBA to recommend. Sorry.

 

[iamwhoiamtoday]

Look for a board with 8+ SATA ports. If you need more get an LSI PCIe based sas HBA off ebay.

I'll try to keep an eye out, thanks for the advice!


Kerbysj,
The only other always-on system that I have is my router, which is an Intel D525 system running IPFire. I've never played with ESXI, but I'll certainly look into it. Running both UNRAID and IPFire on said system shouldn't be too much of a headache

 

[MrMike]

Purely as an FYI, the D525 system would be using about the same power at idle as the G1610 system.

The LSI SAS2008 based HBAs recommended above are good.

Unraid is a good choice over FreeNAS or using ZFS in general for power consumption.

You will not have throughput issues with this setup, even if the SAS2008 controller is fully populated. The card is PCIe 2.0 x8 and is eight ports.

You may be better off with a motherboard like this as well, with more SATA ports.

 

[Deleted member 243478]

Power consumption is a big thing that people get wrong more often then not, I have done quite a bit of testing in various setups and here is what I found...

Power supplies - Get a good efficiency / reliable power supply but go a super large rating that it is under its efficiency range. There are some PSU's out there that are still over 90% efficient at 20-30% load though.

Low power / Consolidate HDD's - HDD's chew the most power in rigs, try to pick ones that offer lower idle consumption and try for higher density drives to lower the overall consumption.

Consolidate Resources - Run a virtualisation package like ESXi to run more software platforms on the 1 system and cut down on the amount of systems you need to run.

Obviously using twin Xeons is going to use quite a bit of power with a matching server board but I wouldn't be going for low end Celerons etc to save power as the gains are minimal compared to something like an i5 or i7 with the power saving features these days.

Take advantage of features like spindown to shut down arrays when you aren't home, just be careful as its hard finding controllers that support this feature.

To give you an example of where you can be, my current home rig is an i5 2500 running 5 VM's including freeBSD/ZFS, 7 x 7200rpm HDD's, APC UPS, router etc and its pulling 93w idle with no spin down.

 

[zomber38]

Just let your PC sleep when its idle. Use WOL to wake it up when you need to access the files.

But i am not sure if Freenas allows sleeping on idle.

Other wise, let Freenas spindown your drives when idle.

 

[iamwhoiamtoday]

Thanks to Ebay, I now have an Areca ARC-1280ML PCI-E x8 1GB 12-Port RAID Controller in the mail.

Soon as that gets in, the dual-quad system gets repurposed for other tasks, and the Celly goes into the beast.

I'll be sure to post pictures, naturally.


Thank y'all for the feedback / suggestions!

 

[uOpt]

First thing to do is measure the remaining power consumption with the drives all powered down.

 

[BonzTM]

In the same boat. 20 spinning drives in ZFS and looking to lower power consumption as well as increase flexibility. It's not easy adding 10 drives at a time on the wallet. Subbed.