What would be a good LP NAS setup for home usage, for people (like me) who’re mega super paranoia about blasting anything above 75W 24/7 and then seeing power bill reaching quad digits (hyperbole, but you get the point 
)
I’m dead bored after studying frontend stuff, so I got my coffee n started thinking about this. And for now I thought that an older gen Ryzen 3 + GT 710 (if I even need a GPU) with TrueNAS and bunch of spinnin’ rust could work as one… Why an old gen ryzen? I don’t feel like messing with Pis and setting that as a NAS, it’s a headache for an impatient dingus like me. Nor do I have the firepower to recompile the kernel often enough Wondering what others have to say on this, coffee break topic.
Main consumer of power is usually the CPU. Undervolting and limiting PPT limits can really help, because you don’t really need a single core boosting to 4.7GHz. Most stuff in TrueNAS is multithreaded and threads are more important than clocks. Ryzen3 is plenty even under power limits. Setting CPU governors in the OS can improve this further.
If you don’t need a GPU, you can plug it out after installation as you administrate TrueNAS via WebGUI anyway. That’s a couple of watts idle power. Having an APU with integrated graphics is a nice thing to have in a NAS or (home)server.
Memory sticks use power too. Less memory, less power. But this directly conflicts with ZFS. I wouldn’t downgrade memory for the sake of power personally, too critical for pool performance.
10GbE over copper is quite the power hog.
SSDs are more power-efficient than HDDs. SSDs can switch power states quickly, but not all drives are made equal. ZFS has to be tweaked a bit to get the most out of your powersaving measures from storage (zfs_txg_timeout).
Efficient PSU. Makes a difference, although paying 50€ extra for 5W difference at the wall might not be worth it. You want a PSU that has very good efficiency at <=20% load.
The less heat you have, the less fans have to run. Reducing noise and power. Also saves money.
Anything down to like 30W (excluding storage) is achievable depending on your configuration and about what compromises you want to make.
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Those are really good points, if my keyboard could stop eating my space inputs, grr. Anywho, I don’t plan to run 10GbE due to one small fact. We don’t have 10GbE here… We barely have 1GbE XD (Balkan, not specifying where due to privacy sake). But yeah, An APU could do wonders if the WebGUI dies/decides to not show up at workfor some reason. RAM Wise, I think 16GB should be fine? Mby overkill. And SSDs are utterly expensive here for God knows what reason anymore, so I wanted to stick to spinnin’ rust for general media/software/old games storage.
Are you meaning your internet speed? Even if I had 1Mb/s internet, I’d still want 10G on my NAS!
Currently, depending on if an SSD only NAS is o.k. or not, I think the lowest power viable consumer NAS is the Argon EON Pi NAS. Four 2.5 Inch slots, runs on 20W maximum power.
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Yeah, net speed. Tho I also doubt we have routers / switches / (NAME HERE) that support 10GbE, so I’d have to import. aka sell my kidney
Kudos on this info, I’ll save it for “if I lose braincells over tinkering with DIY NAS”
Power supply is 12V 5A, where does the 20W number come from?
WIZARD SURPRISE! :v
12V 5A (60W) is the maximum draw. Let’s check for each component:
| Part | Idle Power | Max Power |
|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 4 8GB | 4W | 6W |
| Argon EON (Fan + Board) | 1W | 4W |
| SSD Disk #1 | 2W | 9W |
| SSD Disk #2 | 2W | 9W |
| SSD Disk #3 | 2W | 9W |
| SSD Disk #4 | 2W | 9W |
| Total | 13W | 46W |
So, yeah, 20W sounds like a reasonable average. 
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Odroid HC1, HC2 if you still find them somewhere… Or HC4.
Armbian and OpenMediaVault on board and you have a small NAS. 
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Holy math. ._. Didn’t expect to see that here, good stuff! ^^
Good point, could use this for my parents if my doofus of father doesn’t decide to upgrade his main pc… 
eh… Old hag. Never changed for past 20+ years xP
WRT54G Fiber Optic “Sleeper build” Router Mod?
just a thought I had.
Personally, I have been using HC1 with 5200rpm 1TB for years
On board OMV 4, 5, currently 6 (armbian / debian11)
Of course, one hdd and 1Gb/s is enough for me, but not everyone will like it… in addition, in 2022 HC1 / HC2 they can be hard to buy because they are EOL.
So it’s HC4 or something else. I recommend looking for sbc for the images that armbian has.
They consume little power, are quiet, and are fast enough for an average home LAN.
If you like the risk, you can stubbornly use ZeroPI and hdd on usb 2.0, but it’s such art for the sake of art.
That’s a good point… Hm, I could find one locally, and not have to import, I might go for that for my parents, but I need a buttload of storage on my end. Movies, Music, Pictures, discontinued/abandonware games, CD copies, etc etc etc…
I have standards, and I might be a masochist, this is too much torture for me XD Jokes aside, it could work if you really don’t care about speed and want the least possible power usage.
+1 for the HC4. Just don’t try to change to an unsupported OS, like I’m trying. Armbian with OMV is a good choice for someone who doesn’t care about customization and wants ease of use.
Amen to that. OTOH if you want to try your hand at distro optimization, there is a largely-excavated yet deep rabbit hole project (Yocto) for that too. Be prepared to spend years in docs, plans and changes though!
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Hey ya, I’ve got TrueNAS running on 2 relatively low power machines:
G4560, 2x 3.5" HDD’s, 1x boot NVMe = 30-40W
i3-9100, 6x3.5" HDD’s, 1x boot SSD and may be an NVMe for jails (I forget = 60W
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