Low budget, Power saving components for Europeans

[quasarlex]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for cheap and Power saving components to build a new NAS from scratch. Let' s Say 400€ + disks

Requisites: mini/micro atx, ecc Memory, 6/8 SATA available. I don t Need a powerful CPU or zillion RAM. I'm open to second hand hardware.

USA customers often discuss about cheap hardware on eBay but i can t find anything like that in eurozone

 

[quasarlex]

Nobody cares about power consumption?

I've found that some gaming or mainstream B550 motherboards support ECC ram. Do those use too much energy?

For example:

ASROCK B550M-ITX/AC AM4 MINI-ITX​

Gigabyte B550M DS3H
ASUS ROG STRIX B550-I GAMING
Gigabyte X570 I AORUS PRO

 

[Arwen]

Yes, we do. But, sometimes we solve it differently.

I have an always on miniature PC that I use for some minor services, (like printing, master location of documentation and scripts), then also for my media service. It runs probably around 5 to 10 watts under normal load. Probably up to 20 watts during a ZFS scrub or an OS update, (Gentoo Linux).

But, it does not run TrueNAS nor complex pool configuration, (just simple mirror for OS pool, and stripe for media pool).

TrueNAS & ZFS were both designed for the Enterprise Data Centers. While both work with many SOHO and normal consumer hardware just fine, it is a balancing act to find the right mixture for reliability, storage requirements and other details, like power & cost for you.


Thus, some of us have little experience making a TrueNAS server with low budget and low power use.

 

[joeschmuck]

Unfortunately everyone wants a quiet, low power, huge capacity, fast NAS, for very little money.

As @Arwen said, some of us have some experience and we solve things a little differently. I just built a NAS the checks the boxes of: quiet, low power (41 watts idle, close to 80 watts for a scrub), fast, but the capacity is limited to approx 8TB (I could add 4TB more as I have it, but I don't need it and I'd have to rebuild my pool) so capacity is fair, and the cost was way up there so it was not cheap.

You might be looking for an Atom based Supermicro board. That hits all the marks as a NAS with low power.

 

[Davvo]

Nobody cares about power consumption?

No, you just posted in the wrong section.

In Europe we do not have the same availability of SoC motherboards that fit those requirements (especially price), period.
But you can get a very good NAS for less than €400:​

• Supermicro X11SSL-F on eBay for €120​
• Intel Pentium G4560 on eBay for less than €10​
• MSI MAG A550BN 550W 80+ Bronze PSU on Amazon (new) for less than €65​
• 16 GB of DDR4 ECC RAM on eBay for less than €65​
• 16 GB MLC NAND USB (for the boot drive) on Amazon (new) for less than €45​

Actually, for less than €300 (plus shipping) you would have a great system with a very reasonable power consumption. Note the lack of a case (very personal) and CPU cooler (you have to either contact the seller or wait until you get the motherboard in your hands to ascertain wheter there is a backplate attached to the mortherboard since it changes the type of cooler you are able to fit in, but it's a small expenditure either way; I put a respectable PSU for a few drives, but you might actually need something more powerful depending on your use case.

TL;DR: today more than two years ago it's absolutely possible living in europe and building a reasonably efficent system with used server-grade hardware with a few compromises; we cannot compete with the used NA market for server-grade ITX and SoC components though.​

 

[joeschmuck]

No, you just posted in the wrong section.

Thanks for pointing that out... Moved.

 

[quasarlex]

Unfortunately everyone wants a quiet, low power, huge capacity, fast NAS, for very little money.

As @Arwen said, some of us have some experience and we solve things a little differently. I just built a NAS the checks the boxes of: quiet, low power (41 watts idle, close to 80 watts for a scrub), fast, but the capacity is limited to approx 8TB (I could add 4TB more as I have it, but I don't need it and I'd have to rebuild my pool) so capacity is fair, and the cost was way up there so it was not cheap.

You might be looking for an Atom based Supermicro board. That hits all the marks as a NAS with low power.

Thanks for all your response. I'm looking for some of the supermicro X1SSL-xx on eBay.

What are the suggested atom boards?

I Just want tò point this out:
- i don t Need High nor mid/High computation Power. I won't deploy vms (but Happy if i could)
- i don t Need many tb (but at least 10-15 upgradable yes
- i don t want to lose files so i Will probably go for raidz2 and offline periodic backup
- i don t want to pay extra Money on the Electric bill

 

[joeschmuck]

Supermicro A1SAM-F C2550 is the only one I have personal experience with. One other thing for low power, choosing the correct power supply.

As for storage capacity, you could purchase three 18TB drives and put them in a Mirror. This gives you the redundancy you want and the capacity as well. Another feature of going this route is the resilver times are much faster.

So for you, I could see you buying an Atom board, 16GB ECC RAM (expandable to 64GB), 128GB SSD (Boot Drive), three 18TB HDDs (in Mirror), probably a 300 watt power supply (see link below to explain power quality ratings), and a case able to hold all this and any future storage you may desire. For this build, a 4 bay HDD would work nicely. You can purchase a cheap case for little money, or buy a high quality case that will last you decades (you just replace the internal components). If you lived near me I would sell you my A1SAM-F system. Power consumption is: Power Off = ~1 Watt, Power On (BIOS POST) = 22 to 28 Watts, Booting into TrueNAS = 28 Watts, and Idle = 27 Watts. And I'm using a 500 watt power supply. I would add 10 more watts (could be less) to replace the HDD in the machine now with three 18TB drives. If you buy Helium drives, they do consume less power as well.

Do not get carried away with 80-Plus ratings, I stick with the GOLD ratings and from a manufacturer I like, both are personal preferences.

Power supply ratings explained: 80 Plus Platinum vs. Gold vs. Bronze vs. White

Here’s what you actually get when opting for a Gold-rated PSU over a Bronze one.

www.pcworld.com

Additionally, my little Atom was running ESXi 7 and I had TrueNAS and Ubuntu running at the same time, no issues. Ubuntu was not as snappy as it is on my Xeon CPU, but it worked.

That was just something for you to think about, there are other options out there, this was just my experience with an Atom board.

 

[quasarlex]

Supermicro A1SAM-F C2550 is the only one I have personal experience with. One other thing for low power, choosing the correct power supply.

As for storage capacity, you could purchase three 18TB drives and put them in a Mirror. This gives you the redundancy you want and the capacity as well. Another feature of going this route is the resilver times are much faster.

So for you, I could see you buying an Atom board, 16GB ECC RAM (expandable to 64GB), 128GB SSD (Boot Drive), three 18TB HDDs (in Mirror), probably a 300 watt power supply (see link below to explain power quality ratings), and a case able to hold all this and any future storage you may desire. For this build, a 4 bay HDD would work nicely. You can purchase a cheap case for little money, or buy a high quality case that will last you decades (you just replace the internal components). If you lived near me I would sell you my A1SAM-F system. Power consumption is: Power Off = ~1 Watt, Power On (BIOS POST) = 22 to 28 Watts, Booting into TrueNAS = 28 Watts, and Idle = 27 Watts. And I'm using a 500 watt power supply. I would add 10 more watts (could be less) to replace the HDD in the machine now with three 18TB drives. If you buy Helium drives, they do consume less power as well.

Do not get carried away with 80-Plus ratings, I stick with the GOLD ratings and from a manufacturer I like, both are personal preferences.

Power supply ratings explained: 80 Plus Platinum vs. Gold vs. Bronze vs. White

Here’s what you actually get when opting for a Gold-rated PSU over a Bronze one.

www.pcworld.com

Additionally, my little Atom was running ESXi 7 and I had TrueNAS and Ubuntu running at the same time, no issues. Ubuntu was not as snappy as it is on my Xeon CPU, but it worked.

That was just something for you to think about, there are other options out there, this was just my experience with an Atom board.

The only one i can find is this https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SAM-2550F.cfm but it has only 2xSATA3 ports, could you please confirm this is the one you have?

About mirrors/raidz2: is mirror less safe since it can tolerate a maximum of 1 failed disk and raidz2 can tolerate 2?

anyway i'm not sure about the atom: there are some xeon out there with a decent power and idle state, but on the need they can give much more power. The @Davvo build looks way more interesting

Only doubt: it has 6 sata ports. If i want to get 5HDD (raidz2) and a mirrored boot pool that's not enough. Is the mirrored pool worth? I could get a X11SSM-F/X11SSL-cF/X11SCH-F as suggested in the hw reccomendation buy i couldn't find one with decent price. What about this?

it looks like adding an HBA IT mode card prevents the CPU to going to cstate > 2

 

[joeschmuck]

That is the one. It also has four SATA2 ports. SATA2 is fast as well, don't let that fool you.

Mirrors are basically the exact same data on all the drives, so if you lose a drive, the other drive still has the data. A 3 way mirror has 3 drives with all the same data, you can lose two and still have all your data.

You will need to do your research on what provides lower power, I just gave you one option. Remember, it's not just the CPU that eats power.

You do not need a mirrored boot pool. They are not worth it in my opinion unless you are travelling a lot and you setup remote access to try and swap the boot drive on the road. The transfer is not automatic.

I can't speak to cstate2. Why would you need to add an HBA?

You are overthinking this if you want a low power device.

 

[Davvo]

Do not go with a mirrored boot pool, it's useless: if you need redundancy at the boot pool level, you need at least three drives; going USB boot drive would leave all the 6 SATA ports available to HDDs. SATA 2 is fine for HDDs: it supports up to 3 Gb/s which is equal to around 300 MB/s.

The motherboard you linked costs almost €300 and does not support Pentiums: it would be very difficult to stay under €400; if you want more than 6 ports you can find the X11SSH-F on eBay for less than €270.

Please read the following resources:​

ZFS Storage Pool Layout

This amazing document, created by iXsystems in February 2022 as a "White Paper", cleanly explains how to qualify pool performance touching briefly on how ZFS stores data and presents the advantages, performance and disadvantages of each pool...

www.truenas.com

Assessing the Potential for Data Loss

This guide was written to be read from top to bottom without jumps, with the intent of spreading awareness to both new and experienced users; the author of this document assumes the understanding of the concepts explained in the following...

www.truenas.com