Hardware for home server low electricity consumption

Hello,

I am searching for hardware to run small home server, it should be able to serve 3-4 HDD SATA, GEOM mirror and
running services like Apache, PHP, MariaDB, OpenVPN, music and video streaming over LAN, freeNAS?
what can you suggest nowadays?

thank you
 
DadAN, I see you've mentioned FreeNAS; just FYI, this forum's pretty strict about not discussing FreeBSD derivatives.

'hope you'll forgive me if this is all old news for you Amigo.

I used to be really fascinated with computer power consumption, and aimed for the lowest-power components, every time. Here's an article I wrote a while back with some of my measurements and findings, if you feel curious to skim through it (the chart near the bottom may be of most interest to you): Running FreeBSD on a Supermicro 5017A-EF.

And I learned something, over the years, running low-power hardware: the moment you're being paid to do something with it ('seems that in reality, multi-purposing is inevitable, for me at least), and you have to wait for the computer to do stuff, you will sincerely wish you'd spent more on a regular server-class system (Xeon, Opteron, EPYC, whatever). The regular performance-oriented stuff runs circles around the low-power stuff generally, and really doesn't use that much more power.

What that low-power stuff's good at is sitting and doing nothing performance-sensitive at all. The moment you feel in a hurry, not only will you wish you'd gone for normal workstation/server components--but you'll actually wind up using more electricity running on the low-power stuff, for the same computation job that would finish much, much faster on the normal-power stuff (what I mean's that the normal stuff's often far more computationally efficient, power-wise, than the low-power stuff is).

Happy days to you DadAN.
 
What are your performance requirements? You talk about what software needs to be installed. But there is a difference streaming one compressed audio stream (<100 kByte/second), and streaming a half-dozen high-quality 4K movies.

Another question: Why do you need 3-4 SATA disks? How much data do you have? If you have less than a few TB, the most power-efficient solution would be a single SSD. If you can't afford SSDs, or have too much data for one (SSDs now come in sizes up to 16TB), then the most power-efficient solution would be the minimum nuber of large nearline helium-filled drives.

Since a single disk is unsafe (RAID is mandatory today), you'll eventually need at least a second one. But depending on what your write traffic is, and whether it would be admissible for some writes (like the last hour's worth) to vanish in case of a hardware failure, you could significantly reduce power consumption by having only 1 disk that is always on, and once on hour mirror a snapshot of your file system to the second disk. In a nutshell, you can trade energy usage versus availability and reliability of the most recently written data.

I'll give you two examples of relatively low power consumption. My regular home server (now about 5 years old) is a MicroATX motherboard with a 1.8 GHz 32-bit Atom on it, using a motherboard that is selected to not require power-hungry PCIe cards (there are none), and 4 disks (two large spinning data disks, a boot SSD, and an external backup disk that is always on but physically stored in a large and heavy fire safe). A few years ago, I measured average power consumption to be ~35W. That machine can stream data over the internal ethernet at 20-40 MByte/second (most ethernet ports in the house are only 100baseT), which is enough for video. It also does all the other server functions (firewall, router, DNS, DHCP, NTP, NFS, Apache, ...).

The other example that surprised me recently: I had a Raspberry Pi 3 on my electronics workbench, and for fun connected a keyboard and display to it, and discovered that it is capable of running a Xwindows GUI, play music, and display video. The ethernet is a bit anemic (100baseT, connected internally via USB), but good enough for 10MByte/s. I also recently bought a 2TB Seagate USB-connected disk (it was on sale at Costco for $69, a deal too good to pass up). I bet a RPi3 with two USB-connected disks would have enough power to run as a home server at a throughput of several MByte/s. Whether it could ZFS (which would be my #1 choice for a file system with built-in RAID) is a difficult question though; one might have to use a simpler file system (UFS, ext4, ...) with a separate software RAID layer.
 
I built few of these for few local business happily running FreeBSD 11.1. Price is well under $1500. Very light on electric consumption

  1. Motherboard: Supermicro Atom C2758 64GB DDR3 PCIE SATA USB Mini ITX DDR3 1333 NA Motherboards MBD-A1SRI-2758F-O
  2. RAM 4x8GB=32 GB: Micron Consumer Products Group CT102472BF160B 8gb DDR3-1600 1.35v Dr X8 Unbuffered ECC Sodimm 204p
  3. Supermicro Superchassis CSE-721TQ-250B Mini-Tower with 250W Power Supply
  4. HDD for OS: Transcend 2x64GB MLC SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5" Solid State Drive 37 (TS64GSSD370S)
  5. HDD for data: 2x4TB WD Red 4TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD40EFRX
Note that I switched to buying 8TB drives since that last build. If the money is not an issue I would go for Gold instead of Reds.
 
Hi,

thanks for all suggestions :)
Want to build small home server.
3-4 SATA 3 ports are planned to have some reserve for future data

My plan is to use 2 disks for system mirror and 1 disk for non critical data or another mirror in case of 2 disks.


My hardware requirements are
processor Intel Atom


ECC RAM memory (from 8GB but upgrade possible to 16 at least)
(wants to run ZFS)

minimum 4 SATA 3 ports 6Gb, better 6

1 Gb ethernet LAN port


remote control if possible

USB3 ports

COM port, PCI-E slot (not requirement)

Power consumption up to 80-90W, seems I will have to choose something from supermicro, what do you suggest ?
Server will be used by 1-3 ppl, it will be really home server for user data.
thanks
 
I second some of the thoughts above suggesting that performance can easily be, or become, a consideration. You're not going to get both low power consumption and performance.

One thing that is often overlooked though is the efficiency of the power supply. Switching supplies will typically have best efficiency at some specific load and be very inefficient at low loads. Make sure that you consider the length of time for any particular load level usage and not use an average as that is meaningless. For example, you could have 80% efficiency for a total of 30 minutes per day at full load, and then be working at 50% efficiency the rest of the time. Also, it is worth doing actual measurements as the real world is generally quite different from what you see in a file written by somebody trying to sell a product.
 
that one does not support ECC.. btw is there some catalogue of motherboards were you can search by criteria? :)
 
support ECC
With such criteria it doesn't sound like you're on the right track. Yes, ECC has the advantage of being able to get cheap outdated server RAM from Ebay, but for a home server is there any other advantage - I mean an advantage that you will be able to detect?
 
That is a desktop motherboard. I have J4205. It is collecting dust. Unfortunately even OpenBSD has no stable video driver for Apollo Lake

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=150977304620767&w=2

X is crashing. DragonFly guys have some patches. One of OpenBSD guys was playing with it. I will try it again after 6.3 release.

It could be very good firewall hardware for SOHO possibly good DragonFly file server with Hammer. I would not run ZFS on it.
 
Is this even possible? Last time I looked at the Intel datasheets for the Atom processors, there was no mention of ECC RAM and the amount of memory was restricted to 2GB or 8Gb depending on the type of memory DDR vs LPDDR.
Did you check my post? Here it is again

Motherboard: Supermicro Atom C2758 64GB DDR3 PCIE SATA USB Mini ITX DDR3 1333 NA Motherboards MBD-A1SRI-2758F-O

I have 32 GB of ECC Unbuffered memory although Sodimm 204 which is more expensive than normal standard size server ECC unbuffered memory.
 
Did you check my post? Here it is again

Motherboard: Supermicro Atom C2758 64GB DDR3 PCIE SATA USB Mini ITX DDR3 1333 NA Motherboards MBD-A1SRI-2758F-O

This one looking pretty okay but only 2 SATA 3 ports available, nowadays almost all new disks are SATA3..
 
This one looking pretty okay but only 2 SATA 3 ports available, nowadays almost all new disks are SATA3..
it has total of 4 ports 2 of which are 6Gb/s and 2 have speed 3Gb/s. Use faster ports for data drives. Two let say Golds of 8TB in ZFS mirror. Your bottleneck is going to be 1Gig/s NIC unless you upgrade to infiniband.
 
I have J4205. It is collecting dust. Unfortunately even OpenBSD has no stable video driver for Apollo Lake
I have a Asrock j3355m (same video) and it recently is running in openbsd current with caveats. The intel video driver wants to load some intel firmware which I suspect manages the C-states. It would not wake from sleep in deep C states - the work around was to disable C states in the bios.

When I first bought the board, OpenBSD video did not work, but Debian 9 did. It also incorporated the intel video firmware in a non-free package.
 
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iUse faster ports for data drives.
Spinning disk drives max out at about 250-300 MByte/s, which is about 2 Gbit/s. So for a single spinning drive, a 3gig port is perfectly adequate. Even consumer SSDs can do more than that (enterprise grade SSDs are typically bandwidth-limited by their interface, I don't know whether consumer-grade SSDs are too). Better advice: Use faster ports for SSDs, slower ports for spinning rust.

In practice, with a slow machine (Atom!) and a 1gig Ethernet network if the machines main purpose will be a server, the bottleneck will not be the disk interfaces anyway
 
Just to throw in a slightly more capable option than the mentioned Atom C2xxx: Have a look at the smaller (i.e. 4-core) variants of the Xeon-D 1500 platform.

We're running 2 Xeon-D1518 systems (Supermicro X10SDV-TP8F) as Gateways/Routers (FreeBSD and SmartOS + FreeBSD in KVM VMs) and they are usually using ~40-45W under normal load with redundand PSUs (the second PSU adds ~5W to the figure). Higest I've ever seen was 72W when cold-booting the system; as soon as the BCM is kicking in this drops to ~60W while the OS is booting. A Kernel build runs at ~55W, idle system with all NICs powered is ~35W. (All numbers are from the PSU readings in the IPMI, which match the UPS load readings within ~1W accuracy)
Both systems are equipped with 2x16GB Reg ECC and 2x 240GB intel DC S3520 and all NICs are in use (4x GbE + 2x 10GbE SFP+), so the power consumption is pretty impressive IMHO, especially considering these are quite beefy CPUs for only 4C/8T.
Getting dual 10GbE from the SoC is also great, as a dedicated PCIe Card would easily draw an additional 20W+
 
It would help tremendously if you could tell where you live (country) as availability and pricing can be quite a bit different in let's say EU vs CA/US.
What robroy mentioned is something that you should highly take into consideration, not to mention that it's usually a premium price for low-power hardware which might actually end up being more expensive than going for the run of the mill stuff in the end. If you're a somewhat "regular" home user and do compilation etc from time to time I'd say that a Dell T30 and/or T130.
You can find decently priced ones (if you're in the US) at Dell outlet site. http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnline...x?brandid=2804&c=us&cs=28&l=en&s=dfb&frid=208
If you're concerned about power usage you can get an adapter cable to replace the PSU with a standard ATX one instead with Gold rating but I doubt it'll help much. I haven't looked into these models that much but if you're lucky they might also use standard mATX form factor (Dell T20 used that at least) which means that you could move the hardware into a larger case if needed but that's really just necessary if you want to have a lot of HDDs.

These are really nice sources of information (in german however) but you can use Google/Bing/* Translate to english.
https://www.hardwareluxx.de/comunity/f101/dell-poweredge-t30-1142541.html
https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/f101/dell-poweredge-t130-1106619.html
 
Hi all,

I'm going to hijack this thread since I now have the same question and two years have passed.
  • I'm tempted to give the RockPro64 ARM-based SoC from Pine64 (4GB RAM) a try. With all necessary parts (SoC, case,...), a complete new low-power SOHO NAS is ~180$ w/o disks. That's about the same price as for used/refurbished x86 systems, which I usually prefer due to the price/performance ratio. I'm aware to expect some pitfalls & hurdles to get FreeBSD up & running on that, that's ok.
  • The alternative is to look for a good small case & mITX SuperMicro x64 board (used/refurbished), which for shure will save me some headache and more or less should work out of the box. The guys @ XigmaNAS recommend this brand (server boards in general) - among other reasons - for these have IPMI.
Any new suggestions/comments/recommendations?

Thx in advance.
 
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