Hello everyone,
I’m currently in the progress of building my new “low power” homeserver/nas and wanted to share my experience.
For the process of choosing parts, i was trying to get the most power with the lowest noise and power consumption. I live in Germany where electricity is not cheap. In addition to that this thing needs to be quiet, as it will either live in my Office where i work, or in the living room.
I was somewhat inspired by the level1techs video where Wendell build the Jonsbo N1 homeserver.
I plan to use Proxmox as my hypervisor and then run a couple of VMs and containers which i will need to migrate from my old setup. My goal was to be under 50 watts in idle/normal conditions excluding the HDDs. First tests showed a idle power consumption of around 35 watts. And that’s including 3 fans and 4 SATA SSDs for testing.
My parts so far:
- Minisforum ar900i CPU/Motherboard combo
- 96GB Kit Crucial RAM 96GB Kit (2x48GB) DDR5 5600MHz CT2K48G56C46S5
- 2x Crucial P3 500GB M.2 PCIe Gen3 NVMe Internal SSD (Boot drive in zfs-mirror)
(yes, they could have been smaller but that’s what was available and relatively cheap) - 2x Crucial P3 Plus 2TB M.2 PCIe Gen4 NVMe Internal SSD (VM Storage in zfs-mirror)
- Corsair RM750e (2023) Fully Modular Low Noise ATX Power Supply
- Noctua NF-A12x25 LS-PWM (CPU FAN)
- Fractal Node 804
And then either one of these two cards, whatever works best and has a small powerfootprint:
- LSI SAS 9207-8i SATA / SAS-Controller
- Startech SATA PCIe Controller 8 Port (8p6g-pcie-sata-card)
For testing purposes i have 4 older MX500 1TB Sata SSDs.
In the future i plan to put eight 18 or 20TB HDDs with either raidz1 or raidz2 into this case for bulk sorage.
Now for the fun part:
I installed Proxmox without the PCIe Cards, just to see if everything is working.
After that i plugged both cards in, one after the other, but with both Proxmox wouldnt even boot up. As i was thinking about what was going on, and being mad, that i need to return everything, i noticed my Windows Install Thumbdrive, and thought i’d give it a shot. And to my suprise, all SATA SSDs showed up in the installer.
I then installed windows, and a few hurdles later (the windows base network driver is not working for this board, so i had no internet. I found a driver package over at minisforums website, and installed it all) the SSDs where running perfectly with either the LSI HBA or the Startech PCIe to SATA card.
I quickly did some “benchmarks” of the disks to determine the speed and the power consumption of either card. Both tests where run simultaneously. On the left side is an striped volume of two 1TB MX500 SATA drives. The right side is a mirror of two more of these. All 4 drives are on the same port of the adapter, as i wanted to see what the bottleneck would be, if i max them out with 8 drives.
First is the LSI 8207-8i and after that i ran that test again with the Startech SATA Controller.
As you can see, both card did their Job, but the LSI HBA with only about 5 Watts more had the overall best performance, as expected.
So i think i can rule out a hardware defect, or some funky behavior with the PCIe lanes, as i maxed this board out. All 4 NVMe slots are populated in addition to the PCIe slot.
So far i really like this setup because its relatively modest in power consumption, nearly silent, but has power if i need it. I hope i get this working in the next week or so, or i am forced to send the parts back, before my return window closes, and get some more traditional parts.
Next up is again installing Proxmox and try to find out where the problem is. At the moment i guess there are drivers missing or incompatible in linux?!
If anyone has a suggestion, i would be happy to hear it.
Good day to you all 