Low-powered homeNAS+pfSense+apps+VM

Well just calculate the power draw delta, use .3 per kWh and assume 7-8 years of 24/7 service. Old hardware gets very expensive very quickly for most power bills.

The power for HDDs won’t change, 10Gb might take a LITTLE less on a newer system. How much math will the CPU have to do really? Get a platinum rated PSU or something… pretty sure that’s common even with older servers. Lower power, slow ass DIMMs. A reasonable fan setting… eh

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It depends on the older hardware … If you want a lot of cores, plenty of ecc memory, and redundant power supply, then you’ll be looking at 180-200W at idle plus network and storage, if you can live with more reasonable cpu requirements, you have options in the 35-55W range before adding storage and network

I used to have two microserver gen8s (see previous posts), but have recently side-graded to a [Supermicro X9SRi-F] with a 6 core Xeon E5-1650 v2 @ 3.50GHz, 32GB of DDR3 RAM, 10Gbit network card, two 1TB NVME drives and reused 3x6TB wd-reds I had in one of the microservers

The new system hosts two VMs, my main router/firewall and my docker (home automation/sensors/whatever) setup, runs 24/7 and draws between 48 and 65W depending on the load, usually sits at 55W …

A modern zen processor would run circles around it when doing video encoding and cpu intensive ‘stuff’, but that board has IPMI, 4x6Gb SAS/SATA onboard, 4x3Gb SATA onboard, and pci slots to hold a 10Gbit card, a dual slot NVME card (with bifurcation working) and one more 4x slot to spare … paid 280EUR for the motherboard an proc, had everything else in my ‘spare parts bin’ , except for the 10Gbit card that cost me another 200 EUR (wen with an original Intel …)

So, would I have been better off in terms of future proofing with an x570D4U-2L2T and a Zen cpu? definitely, would it have been cheaper? Definitely not, but we’re not comparing at the same performance level. Would my NAS need the additional performance? Only when doing video decoding (that I do not do generally) …

Would I have been better off with a X9 dual core rack mounted solution? Hell no, the power draw would have been 4x, and the cpu performance would still have been less than the x570D4U-2L2T with a decent proc, even undervolted …

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I specifically remember digging through various SuperMicro motherboard manuals (of the Sandy/Ivybridge generation, X9) and seeing some with that. Turn a couple 16xs into 8 4xs.
A single E5-2695 V2, maybe turn off turbo. Some of those have 10Gbe, some even have 4 of them integrated. I think some variation of the X9DRH had 4. A modern low end GPU could be dedicated to video decode, especially if it’s only a couple users at a time; personally a fan of the simplicity of CPU decode for everything… because i imagine everything supports that, especially if multiple VMs need it, not having to worry about everything having/supporting SRIOV.
EDIT: According to a recent Level1 video, you want good single threaded performance for 10Gb… sounded like if you just want it to be ammazing low latency and what not, I don’t know.

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