Not sure where to post - Low idle power consumption setup

K

Keljian

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 7, 2006
Messages
1,829
Hey folks

I'm on a mission to reduce the standby power consumption in my household and my server is a constant target.

It currently is set up as follows:
  • i7-4790 (undervolted 0.1v)
  • 32 gig generic ddr3 (also undervolted to 1.25v)
  • Asrock B85M pro4
  • M1505/LSI 9211-8
  • 8 x2 tb drives
  • Coolermaster V450s - chosen due to low load efficiency
  • 2x 120mm fans in the front blowing on the drives (pwm) - Noctua
  • 1x 140mm case side Antec Truequiet
  • 1x 140mm top rear of the case Antec truequiet
  • 1x 120mm rear of case (Noctua)
  • 1x samsung 850 pro (256gig) sata
Currently it idles at about 70w, with drives spun down that reduces to about to 35-40w but I keep them spun up at the moment due to the fact that spin up/spin down lags media playback and other things.

Thoughts:
  • I can't reduce the number of drives yet, but intend to in reasonable short order.
  • I can potentially move to an i5-4570t (2 core), which may bring down idle power use by about 5W (at a guess?) - I typically don't need the grunt of the 4 cores. Load consumption isn't an issue as it's not usually loaded to any great extent.
  • I could potentially shut down the drives once a day, then spin up once a day (eg 12am-7am)
  • I could move to a newer drive controller which could save me 5-7w

Any other thoughts?
 
Last edited:
Ssd and zen2 with a custom power table is the expensive option.
 
How much are you willing to spend to save $40 per year?

Changing the processor won't save you anything. The idle state power consumption between CPUs is negligible, and if you aren't applying a load, the peak power (TDPish) doesn't matter, either. If you really want to, you should be able to disable cores in the BIOS. Go single core at 1/4 the (very low idle) power? Do you really need 32GB of memory? Could you live with a single stick?

The only thing that is really going to cut the power usage without spending money is to let the drives spin down. It takes 10 seconds maybe to spin up and get access to the files? Is the responsiveness that important? I also think you're overdoing it with the fans, you really shouldn't need that many. I cool 12 drives that are allowed to spin down plus controllers with 2x 140mm front fans set to slow. It does not get warm inside that case.

Beyond that, replacing the drives with fewer but larger drives, something you were planning anyway, is the only other realistic option.
 
Well for every 10W I save, I save in the order of $10/year, and clearly I don't replace hardware that often, so $50-80 for 20W is worth it. The fans are moving very slowly, so it's not like they're eating up much power. Memory wise I need 16gb, saving 1-2W in going down really doesn't make a lot of sense, especially as it is undervolted.

Fewer larger drives means hundreds of dollars ($500 for 2x 10tb, which gets me close to my existing storage capacity, double that for growing it) I run Raidz2 so not sure where the redundancy equation sits. Thing is, 4 drives takes me from 35w of drive consumption down to 18w or so.. so it doesn't save me much compared to the cost.
 
No offense but if saving about $10-$20/year is a big thing to you, you shouldn't be running a server 24/7 anyway. The only way you're going to get any power savings is by reducing the number of drives and you already know that. You're going to be paying for this one way or another. It's just up to you as to how you do it. I don't think you can even look at the cost of new drives as a negative against what you want to do. Those drives are likely quite old and past the point of replacement due to age. The way you should be looking at this is that by replacing the drives you need to replace in the first place you'll end up with some power savings in the long run.
 
Keljian said:
Actually they aren’t that old, oldest is about 3-4 years.
Click to expand...


Doesn't matter - Each drive uses at least 4w idle.

Try removing all 8 drives, and be amazed when your power consumption drops by 25-35 watts (I'm assuming these are 3.5" 5400 rpm drives, right?)

https://www.silentpcreview.com/Recommended_Hard_Drives
if you like RAID redundancy, you can switch to 2.0 tb 2.5" hard drives. They idle at < 1w :D

Or you can switch to 2x8TB. Both would probably have the same power consumption.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top