Soo here’s the deal: my friend and I wanna build some replication nodes for our data at each other house for off site backup. We found THIS motherboard to suit the build very well (6 6TB HDDs ZFS2, 32GB of RAM, case TBD) but we’re unsure about the PSU to pick.
Efficiency freaks tend to go for purely 12V solutions and we would pursue that route if there was a way to properly power 6 drives that way. We also found the same motherboard in ITX format with a barrel jack for power but it has only two SATA power leads off of a single header on the board. That single header can’t possibly take the power load of 6 HDDs.
While searching I saw THIS PSU and I was wondering if using it with the intent to keep power consumption to a minimum is the right call or the poor 80 plus rating might make the whole thing meaningless (double the power consumption at idle with the disks powered down, for example).
How about scheduled boot and shutdown times? If it’s a seperate machine used only for backup, saving power by reducing power consumption to zero most of the time is very efficient.
I’m not sure you need a seperate server for this. Just use your homeserver with TrueNAS or whatever ZFS you are using. It’s running anyway and the power delta is just the drive(s). Just create a new (encrypted) pool or dataset and set permissions, done.
Using 2-3x 16-22TB drives not only makes things easier for a build (esp. ITX), but also is less power and better $/TB value. Storage efficiency will take a hit if not using stripe/RAID0 though. So that’s a matter of maths.
Makes sense, but we both have the need to have multiple copies backed up during the day that are work related, at least for now.
Separate machines because I tend to mess about with mine a lot and don’t want to risk pulling down his while screwing around or losing his data for that matter.
This I didn’t think about, makes total sense.
But what about the original question? Just out of curiosity.
You need to have CE + local standard certification (GS in Germany) to be able to sell it. So I guess it’s fine.
Otherwise you have the rare opportunity to report and share your experience with recovering your data with a sound backup strategy after a house fire.
So it’s a win scenario for the L1T community
If you are going to power down the disks at idle, power consumption should be very little with that board indeed. Power Supply does matter at those very low numbers, so I’d go for a better rated one from a reputable brand.
As a data point, I have a Firewall Box with a Supermicro Embedded (9W TDP CPU) Board and an NVME SSD, plus a i350 T4 Quad Gigabit NIC. 4 Ethernet Cables connected.
What’s the question? Any 80plus rated PSU of a similar power rating will have about the same performance. i.e. best at 50% load, but pretty good (over 80%) from 20-90% load.
And clicking through to any of the models will open the PDF which shows efficiency over the load curve.
You can do a bit better with silver, gold or platinum rated PSUs. 12vo will help a bit, too, eliminating several different unneeded voltage conversions, but not very much.
That’s interesting, but makes sense. I have some HP Prodesks with i7-8700s, gen3 NVMEs, and 1TB spinning rust that idle on less than 4W according to my kill-a-watt. Most of these OEM PSUs and boards tend to have proprietary 12VO.
King of hyperefficiency right now is the all SSD $449 6 bay Asustor Flashstor - From the wall it draws 13W idle and 23W when transferring files. Add a 2x8 GB RAM kit for $50.
Only sucky part is a 6x4TB setup and the cost of that will be roughly $900 for six drives. Oh, and no ECC support. Still, $1.4k for an all-flash NAS when DIY is something like $1k if going for the cheapest stuff, that’s not a bad deal. Not a cheap deal either though.
I know I can count on you to give me a roof to do so under if that happens
I can’t find 80 plus gold or better in low wattage! Even the SF600 platinum seems to be gone. I also think that spending 200+$ for a 700W+ unit might not make sense because I might be at the same efficiency as a lower wattage and rating PSU, if that makes sense.
If I buy that PSU and pair it with that 6W TDP CPU/MoBo am I gonna use 12W to idle that system and even more when doing stuff due to the low 80 plus rating?
I tried looking for a 12VO system, but there’s nothing I can buy. Also I would need to buy a much more power hungry CPU and that would defeat the purpose of this system.
Yeah, but it comes with a slower CPU and 4TB NVME SSDs are stupid expensive unfortunately. I would’ve loved a SATA edition, but they don’t make it. Good call, I thought about it for a bit.
Slow ass CPU (my Router has a better one), NVMe performance is really choked in terms of lanes…basically SATA speed. But it doesn’t matter because you’re stuck with 2.5G networking. My HDDs push out more throughput than this. And NVMe latency over the network is mediocre at best when talking 4k random IO and QD=1.
May have a niche in L1T homelab use, but otherwise cheap consumer junk for people falling for “super fast NVMe in your NAS, buy buy”.
Read the reviews man, this is not a problem in the real world due to how things are set up If you need more there is a 10GbE version but it draws roughly twice the power.
I do agree it has flaws though, lack of ECC being the biggest, and it is not something you run heavy media apps on. If that is the use case here then yeah, you need a bigger boi.
Here is an hour long review that does a pretty good job going over most glaring issues in case anyone wants to know…
It’s a consumer product, I don’t expect ECC. But if I pay 4x per TB on NAND compared to HDD and it comes with BTRFS (just great) I really want compression to get as much capacity as possible out of those M.2 slots. You can’t really do this with a “router CPU”.
Running VMs and Apps…yeah…probably not a good idea. But it’s first and foremost sold as a NAS. I don’t think people expect a fully fledged hypervisor. UI is in line with TV UI…basic and functional.
It’s a Raspberry Pi with 6x M.2, a fancy case and some TV-like Web UI.
If you want an external HDD plugged into the network for the family and your ISP router is in your living room and you want to put it next to it…that’s the use case. Silent, low power, provides utility, maximum usability focus.
That’s where we differ. You watch NASCompares and I watch ServeTheHome. I guess that’s why we probably agree to disagree
But do you, though? A $500 NAS vs a $800 DiY, excluding drives, does give a few bonus points. 6TB drives can now be had for $65, while it is still $150 for NVMe drives. That’s roughly $11 per TB vs 37,5 or a factor of ~3.4x.
Including the total costs though, 6x4TB SSD vs 6x6TB HDD would cost $900 vs $390. That is then $1190 for the all HDD version vs $1400 for the all SSD version. HDD cost ~$33/TB while SSD cost ~$58/TB,or a factor of roughly 1,75x price per TB.
That is close enough in my book to make the all-SSD solution worth a closer look. We’re talking about 30-50 kWh saved each month here, that is $4-$20 saved each month depending on your power utility.
Naturally, if your plan is to go with 6x12TB or 6x20TB then the HDD wins out by a massive margin.
Actually the Flashstor CPU (N5105) is slightly better than the N100 but yes, 4TB NVMe is not the cheapest price / TB.
In what terms? I was browsing the site you posted and the N100 is faster in compute. Not by a lot, sure, but it is. I used Geekbench scores for a rough idea and it’s faster on their database. Though it’s not that critical, either would do fine for my applicatiion.
Exactly. Not going for cheapest build ever, but a sensible choice is needed. Also, if the thing ever broke, I’d have no chance to recover the array unless I bought again the same thing.
These look interesting, but it goes back to my issue on how to power more than two drives since the board only exposes one SATA power header with two connectors on it. I’m pretty sure that if I daisy chained more power leads I’ll be burning that header up.
If you need more there is a 10GbE version but it draws roughly twice the power.