Optimizing power consumption: TrueNAS Scale Server

[DigitalMinimalist]

Hi,

any suggestions how I could improve power consumption of my server?

I currently see 70W idle as is, but if I remove the 4x HDD I get down to 45W
The CPU is lowered to 45W TDP

Only areas where I see potential:
other CPU
other HDDs

I already got a HP T620+ to run Proxmox with OPNSense, pi-hole, Home Assistant, Omada Controller to be able to NOT run the storage server 24/7.

Asrock Rack X470D4U
Ryzen 2700X
Noctua NH-U9DX i4
4x16GB ECC DDR4 Samsung 2666Mhz

Crucial P2 250GB for OS
Asus Hyper V2 with 4x Micron 7300 Pro 960GB (PLP, 1.9PB TBW)

• 2x mirrored for VMs
• 2x mirrored for special vDev

Intel X710-DA2 NIC

5x 3.5 Backplane RaidSonic Icy Box IB-555SSK

• initially 4x 4TB CMR striped mirror -> upgrade later to 12-16TB CMR Helium drives

Seasonic Focus 850W

Case: Unykach 4329 (4U)

UPC: APC Smart-UPS X 1000VA (power consumption above measured independently from UPC)

 

[danb35]

I currently see 70W idle as is, but if I remove the 4x HDD I get down to 45W

So that means 4x HDDs draw 25W, or just over 6W each. I doubt you'll see significantly less than that with other spinners. Replacing them with SSDs would likely save you a few watts, but at significant expense.

 

[MisterE2002]

Indeed, most disks are 8Watt i think? Only suggestion maybe is a PSU fine tuned so it performs at peak performance at the most rendement power draw. (80%?). But even this will not save much i guess.

The most efficient is to use one (heavier) machine for everything (nas + applications combined)

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Lowest I get with my beloved Atom based Supermicro systems is 60 W with 4 spinning disks. I always advise against spinning down for durability reasons. My Atom based OPNsense firewall with 16 G of memory and 2 SSDs runs at about 20 W. But that really limits the capacity and will hardly qualify as a NAS.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

any suggestions how I could improve power consumption of my server?

I instantly thought, "YEAH! Add a few hard drives!" and was all happy.

But you're all meaning to reduce power consumption, I get that. I'm running 200W continuous and am about to add another 100W of spinners, meaning in winter I'm not going to be cold....

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Planning to get a small balcony photovoltaic power module this spring. All the rage currently in Germany. Up to 600 watts.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

I'm on the other end of the Watts scale regarding power needs:

This Tiny Nuclear Reactor Will Change Energy—and Now It's Officially Safe

A massive step for a mini reactor.

www.popularmechanics.com

 

[NickF]

I just installed a second 20 amp circuit in my server closet. It vastly optimized my power consumption. Now I am splitting my electrical load across two phases and i have a UPS on each phase. I can even run an air conditioner in addition to my server load now.

If you want to reduce electricity usage, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Go watch some JeffGeerling videos and replace your NAS with a PiCluster

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

That's not really a home lab, is it?

I measure the total consumption of all my machines which is a nice round 200 W at the moment. 1 TN CORE, 1 ESXi with a hybrid TN SCALE, 1 OPNsense, a TuringPi I, switches, DSL modem ...

That's about 45€ per month - if I did not forget to update my energy fee in the monitoring settings, which I need to check tomorrow.

But to repeat myself, a NAS with any real value, private or business, and a bunch of spinning drives, 60 W is in my experience as low as you can get. And pretty good, anyway. Think of standard tower machines two decades ago that served as workplace PCs ... we have so much computing power at our disposal today, it's mind boggling.

 

[NickF]

That's not really a home lab, is it?

I measure the total consumption of all my machines which is a nice round 200 W at the moment. 1 TN CORE, 1 ESXi with a hybrid TN SCALE, 1 OPNsense, a TuringPi I, switches, DSL modem ...

That's about 45€ per month - if I did not forget to update my energy fee in the monitoring settings, which I need to check tomorrow.

But to repeat myself, a NAS with any real value, private or business, and a bunch of spinning drives, 60 W is in my experience as low as you can get. And pretty good, anyway. Think of standard tower machines two decades ago that served as workplace PCs ... we have so much computing power at our disposal today, it's mind boggling.

With everything I am about around 500. That’s with more than 30 drives, spinning and ssd, and my network switches and firewalls. I really don’t think it’s that bad. But cooling 500-600 watts of heat in a tiny closet requires a decent sized air conditioner when the door is closed f

 

[DigitalMinimalist]

Thank you for all the answers.

My initial goal was one server which runs everything with TN Scale in the 50W range.

But I’m still playing with the best config and cannot reboot as the whole network depends on OPNSense.
The Thin Client runs at 5-10W with 4 (slow) cores - still better than RPi.

Any potential with a Ryzen 5000 CPU?

I want around >24TB of net storage space. I could go for a 2x20TB RAID1 setup instead of 4x HDD (HDDs not bought yet)

I tried a few different PSUs, but the difference was negligible - I have an „efficient“ 300W, but it was same consumption.

What I hear: 70W is not too bad

What would be the most elegant option to send the HDDs, or whole server to sleep over night?

 

[NugentS]

I instantly thought, "YEAH! Add a few hard drives!" and was all happy.

But you're all meaning to reduce power consumption, I get that. I'm running 200W continuous and am about to add another 100W of spinners, meaning in winter I'm not going to be cold....

My Main NAS pulls 366 Watts at the plug.
It is running 60+% average utilisation on the twin CPU's and has been for 6 months+ due to a very long running high utilisation container. But the end of that batch run is in site (another month or two maybe)

 

[LarsR]

I'm running a similar setup with a ryzen 7 3700x, with 8x HDD, 2x 2.5" SSD and 2 M.2 SSD, a mellanox connect x-3, LSI HBA and a small Nvidia gpu just for video output.
CPU is set to 45W and the system draws around 80W from the wall.
Looking at powertop, the system won't go below C2. It also shows the CPU using between 7.8-25W.
I think i've read somewhere that the implementation of c-states for ryzen gets an improvement with the newer Kernel Versions. So I'm hoping to see an improvement with kobia later this year.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

Building a Power Efficient Home Server!

WD Red Drives: https://www.westerndigital.com/en-us/products/network-attached-storage.internalFollow me:Mastodon https://mastodon.technology/web/@notthebeeGi...

www.youtube.com

 

[DigitalMinimalist]

@WI_Hedgehog Yes I now this video :)

As it is mainly a backup and mediaserver and I/O intensive will be on the VM Pool, I probably should try to spin down the HDDs.
What is currently the best option in TrueNAS scale to force spin-down in idle?

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

@DigitalMinimalist :

Ease of Use
- HDD Spindown Timer Script

From: Resources List including Detailed Hardware and System Build Notes (plus new user advice / help)

 

[DigitalMinimalist]

Thank you very much for the spindown timer

Two question:

• what is the advantage of the script vs. TrueNAS built in spin down functionality?
  • I realized yesterday that my HDDs were set to "always on" -> switching to "5" reduced power consumption from 79W to 52W :)
• Linux noob question: how do I copy the script to my system?

 

[Alecmascot]

Linux noob question: how do I copy the script to my system?

I use WinSCP

 

[DigitalMinimalist]

Quick update:
I use the TNS built-in functionality to spin down the HDDs after 5 Min -> as mentioned, this will reduce idle power draw significantly

I'm running following regular tasks:

Scrub Software pool (mirrored NVME for VMs, etc.) - daily at midnight - duration 30 sec
Scrub Storage pool (4x16TB HDD in RAID10) -1st of the month at 8am - duration 22h (not sure if it took so long, as it was the first scrub) - any thoughts?

Snapshot Software pool - daily at midnight - 7 day retention
Snapshot Storage pool - daily at midnight - 7 day retention - too often?

SMART test short for HDDS - daily at midnight
SMART test long for HDDS - 1st of the month at midnight

CRON job: shutdown server at 1am - every day
Smart Power Socket Timer: SWITCH OFF power completely at 1:15am - every day
Smart Power Socket Timer: SWITCH ON power at 7:30am - every day - BIOS set to power on if electricity is there

P.S. high power consumption during scrub

I might add backup tasks to OneDrive very soon.

Any thoughts about the task layout and the power saving measures?
Other ideas to reduce power consumption?

 

[donatopace]

Hello,
there are several solutions but one of the most important that could be added to TRUENAS SCALE is the following:
MODERN STANDBY for Linux
S0ix-states

https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-states-linux
https://github.com/intel/S0ixSelftestTool