Hi,
I would like to build (my first) FreeNAS box, with a low energy consumption goal.
I gather SSDs are much lower power consumption than disks. Like 8w versus 0.5w or less. If I have a simple 4 or 6 disks system, I might be at 32 + watts on disk alone - while the ssd would be 2+w? If disks are spun down, does that reduce their wattage, I can't find anything useful on this? Anyone comment on this? my training is mechanical engineering, I think the energy consumption in a low friction bearing is very low and most of the heat comes from the IC chips. I can't find any figures on real world energy consumption of disks spinning versus static.
I read that SSDs lie about themselves and can be difficult to use. Seems most FreeNAS builders populate the zpools with disks not SSDs (excepting boot and maybe z-intent-log), so an SSD setup is a bit of an atypical build for a first timer builder? Further - FreeNAS does lots of clever data scrubbing etc, so spinning down is pointless as any disk will be spunup for these tasks, even if SMART doesn't spin it up every 30s. Any commments? Is spindown pointless with FreeNAS? Does this mean FreeNAS forces disks to be at 'higher' energy consumption most of the time? And what does that mean in practice?
Ok, the use case: Just a simple family home NAS, mainly for file serving. It will look after 4 people's home dirs (20gb each over last 10 years), and also 3 shared smallish directories of music (25GB), photos (250gb) and video (1.2TB). I am not expecting to transcode much as the video folder is small relatively, and contains material my children have grown out of. I would be transcoding only occasionally and to (one target ever) a 4k smart TV. Our video consumption at home is mainly streamed from Prime or iPlayer etc. Accessibility: Files might be accessed for 2 hours on 5 nights of the week, so disks are spun down in the current arrangement at midnight and stay down till 5 to 7 pm when we do life-admin after work in the evenings. Photos accessed once a week tops, music rarely though this might increase to weekly/daily with better media serving, and video rarely - though again might increase a little to weekly with a better media serving.
For energy efficiency I read that newer gen processors (?i5/i7/E series) are very efficient and might sit at 4w idle, where a low TDP older processor may actually have a higher idle wattage, so really I want to be buying a new processor. For the rest of the build: will use my existing tower, and get entry level (if that term is applicable) ASRock rack or supermicro, as efficient psu as I can find, and ECC ram as is the received wisdom, plus modern intel NIC. Nothing surprising for the rest of the build - that is as low power as it is going to be, no?
Part 2:
Prior to coming to FreeNAS, for a long time I thought that higher reliability setups include a UPS - so your data is safe when you have power outs. This happens fairly regularly in my house, - not least because I drill a wall cable or something, in addition local supply pops off from time to time. Do people still mitigate disk damage with a UPS or is this pointless now there is C.O.W? If builds do include UPS, is there a tried path here - does it signal to FreeNAS to park the disks?
I would be grateful for pasting your favourite links regarding this, if you don't have time to type anything out.
I would like to build (my first) FreeNAS box, with a low energy consumption goal.
I gather SSDs are much lower power consumption than disks. Like 8w versus 0.5w or less. If I have a simple 4 or 6 disks system, I might be at 32 + watts on disk alone - while the ssd would be 2+w? If disks are spun down, does that reduce their wattage, I can't find anything useful on this? Anyone comment on this? my training is mechanical engineering, I think the energy consumption in a low friction bearing is very low and most of the heat comes from the IC chips. I can't find any figures on real world energy consumption of disks spinning versus static.
I read that SSDs lie about themselves and can be difficult to use. Seems most FreeNAS builders populate the zpools with disks not SSDs (excepting boot and maybe z-intent-log), so an SSD setup is a bit of an atypical build for a first timer builder? Further - FreeNAS does lots of clever data scrubbing etc, so spinning down is pointless as any disk will be spunup for these tasks, even if SMART doesn't spin it up every 30s. Any commments? Is spindown pointless with FreeNAS? Does this mean FreeNAS forces disks to be at 'higher' energy consumption most of the time? And what does that mean in practice?
Ok, the use case: Just a simple family home NAS, mainly for file serving. It will look after 4 people's home dirs (20gb each over last 10 years), and also 3 shared smallish directories of music (25GB), photos (250gb) and video (1.2TB). I am not expecting to transcode much as the video folder is small relatively, and contains material my children have grown out of. I would be transcoding only occasionally and to (one target ever) a 4k smart TV. Our video consumption at home is mainly streamed from Prime or iPlayer etc. Accessibility: Files might be accessed for 2 hours on 5 nights of the week, so disks are spun down in the current arrangement at midnight and stay down till 5 to 7 pm when we do life-admin after work in the evenings. Photos accessed once a week tops, music rarely though this might increase to weekly/daily with better media serving, and video rarely - though again might increase a little to weekly with a better media serving.
For energy efficiency I read that newer gen processors (?i5/i7/E series) are very efficient and might sit at 4w idle, where a low TDP older processor may actually have a higher idle wattage, so really I want to be buying a new processor. For the rest of the build: will use my existing tower, and get entry level (if that term is applicable) ASRock rack or supermicro, as efficient psu as I can find, and ECC ram as is the received wisdom, plus modern intel NIC. Nothing surprising for the rest of the build - that is as low power as it is going to be, no?
Part 2:
Prior to coming to FreeNAS, for a long time I thought that higher reliability setups include a UPS - so your data is safe when you have power outs. This happens fairly regularly in my house, - not least because I drill a wall cable or something, in addition local supply pops off from time to time. Do people still mitigate disk damage with a UPS or is this pointless now there is C.O.W? If builds do include UPS, is there a tried path here - does it signal to FreeNAS to park the disks?
I would be grateful for pasting your favourite links regarding this, if you don't have time to type anything out.