Answering Your Power Efficiency Questions! | Homelab Power Optimization Q&A

[@WolfgangsChannel]

The spreadsheet I talked about in the last video: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI

[@fjgaston]

Hi Wolfgang, nice video, I just got myself a fujitsu computer with D3417 motherboard, with 4 HDD an NVME ssd and a sata SSD, I use it as a NAS with OMV and ZFS and it works great, and I'm able to get C8 state with powertop --auto-tune. But I'm not sure how to set it up to get the maximum power efficiency. I don't have a power meter yet but the HDDs don't seem to stop spinning even if I used the appropriate setting in OMV. I'm also not sure how to set it up so that it goes into an "idle" state when it's not really doing stuff ? Not sure how to monitor these things kin debian (BTW I'll get my power meter soon)

[@thomasrichuno]

Thanks for the link to the spreadsheet 😊

[@olafschermann1592]

So true. A server is 90% of the time waiting for something to do but runs 7x24. A desktop is only running when it is needed. Therefore optimizing for idle power is a good approach.

[@martinmusli3044]

Can‘t one use Wake-on-LAN to mostly ignore the idle-time? And I know: Works only in certain use-cases, hardware needs to support it.

[@emeukal7683]

Homelab is. Proper servers serve 24/7.

[@MichaelSmith-fg8xh]

​@@martinmusli3044if you're using it for services (like Plex, wifi management, diagnostics) then no. If you're just using the home server to do ad-hoc tasks (test server, storage server that's not expected to be up the whole time) then yes... In my case i have both, my NAS is only on when it's being used, my virtualisation server is low power and always on because it manages my wifi (fw updates, managed roaming etc)

[@12gark]

I would also point out that even if the server is doing something, it's rarely at 100%. A system capable of idling at very low power consumption, is often very efficient when slightly loaded. So even if the server is doing something, it's probably a low load anyway. Home assistant for example runs on a potato basically, so having it doing something isn't really affecting your power consumption, and the server it's still basically idling even when doing something. Same thing for a NAS service, the only thing you have to add is hdd spinning, but still, if your idle is 20W, you're still going to be more efficient when the HDD are spinning that a system that idles at 35W.

[@dfgdfg_]

You were very patient with the comments. There are a lot of people who only exist to be unkind, ignore them. Do what you enjoy 🌟

[@sagejpc1175]

It's always a good day when Wolfgang uploads

[@swiss_chokolate4969]

Fax!

[@jennbob5521]

No

[@AdrianuX1985]

Very often on YT channels from the US when the topic of homelab is discussed they forget to mention energy consumption. As if electricity is free.

[@silverbackag9790]

Mine is. Just took me $60k in parts and $15k in labor and lots of head scratching to get there. But it (my off grid solar system) is designed for two homes, a big workshop, and a future business building (think a smaller version of LTT in home and garden niches). But I still watch power usage, my solar setup is large, but not infinite (30k watts continuous available, but at full load, my batteries (120 KWH) would deplete in four hours at night and cloudy days are an issue). Should last a week with normal usage during a week of cloudy weather if I watch what I’m doing (no big power tool and dust collector use).

[@Alice_Fumo]

​@@silverbackag9790 I'd just like to note that your electricity still comes at an opportunity cost where yes, you are now not paying for it, but every watt of wasted energy could instead be used mining bitcoin which would actively generate you money instead (sort of assuming you're not selling the energy itself, but same applies there) So instead of just thinking about money spent, loss of money gained is effectively the same.

[@DavidEsotica]

It was a great video Wolfgang. After a week of watching CPU and GPU reviews featuring insane power demands, it was refreshing to see power efficiency considered for computing tasks.

[@dexterman6361]

I admire your patience, and level responses to the rude folks out there. Sorry about that. I hope to someday build my homelab, and you're videos keep me informed. It's keeping that dream alive Thank you!

[@wacalitz]

With rolling blackouts being a normal thing on our power grid these days trying to reduce your power consumption has become a necessity here to be able to keep things running on ones backup power solutions. Researching a replacement server as we speak as I've ran into a little RAM limitations on my current server so trying to find an equivalently efficient solution (20-30w) and at the same time solve the limitation and upgrading the setup, so I'm finding these videos useful 👍

[@bocahdongo7769]

Also you'll cut the UPS battery capacity, or double the running time on the other side of coin

[@diginomad6016]

For the first time in seeing Western countries talking about blackouts and power supply costs which the American channels talks like it didn't exist or matter to them ..

[@KarryKarryKarry]

That video was a huge help to me and it just randomly popped up on youtube. I’m now trying to assemble a power saving server based on that spreadsheet and I’ll be saving tons of money on electricity (totally justifying the expensive hardware). Many thanks from a frustrated Euro nerd feeling the power squeeze!

[@Slate245Ivanovo]

Now that's proper engagement. It's always great when you upload a helpful and interesting video. It's even better when response to community feedback turns into another video, going deeper on the same topic. Nice one!

[@biggothkitty]

Some people just cannot understand that the challenge is the fun part of the project. It's really easy to turn all the knobs up and add power, making something efficient is a much more analytical engineering task.

[@Urxiel]

Thanks for the video, Wolfgang :) Can't wait to see more of your homelab adventures! And definitely these QA videos are a nice change of pace. Take care.

[@3quin0x61]

Great channel, loving the sensible questions your answering to keep our hobby affordable and fun. With electricity prices sky-rocketing over the past few months, i too (like many of us i guess) have been looking into a more sensible build. These videos are a great help with achieving that goal (and maybe finding a new joy in getting there). For the 2.5" drives, they are definitely very power efficient, seeing they usually find theyre way into mobile devices. Idle draw at 3.5" being around 3-4w, 2.5" drives do 0.5w easily, however they are quite a bit slower (at same rpm, smaller size platter means less actual speed). Ive also been finding it hard to find reliable models, consumer drives often failing way too soon. (also smr being a no-go).

[@AndreasSchmidt76]

There was a question about a managed low power switch. Once I started to look into my home lab's power burners, my fancy catalyst was high up the line (200W). I replaced that with a zyxel GS1900-24E which is a managed switch with plenty of features and runs between 8 to 11W. That pushed the usage down by a lot. Now I'm looking into the servers.

[@Comradin]

Great video and so was the first one. Thanks for all the insights and clarifications!

[@leoworrall9449]

Why do I like Wolfgang’s channel ? Because he actually sound interested in the things he talks about.

[@MalumeOmega]

Fantastic follow-up to a fantastic video. Thank you for taking the time to make these videos.

[@peterg4527]

Thanks for this follow up I really look forward to learning more about the general tips for power efficiency

[@raracool04]

Fantastic video, I would wholeheartedly enjoy a potential video of you giving some advice for how to create a power-efficient workstation, where factors such as short term high intensity workloads, as well as hardware such as monitors and speakers, come into play. I share your concern over power efficiency, minus the knowledge, and with rising energy prices in Europe it's definitely a large factor in any future projects.

[@f99140]

Unrelated but I really like the shirts you're wearing during your videos! Thanks for this efficiency series, I really feel like more people should be invested in running gear with as low power consumption as possible.

[@teranokitty]

Unscripted, off-the-cuff videos are great! They're a simple way to get useful info.

[@chinesepopsongs00]

You explained well problems that many people interpret efficiency wrong.The most efficient setup is the setup that does the job you want it to do the cheapest. So if you have only light tasks it is overkill and not efficient to use a 4090 like someone mentioned. Sure output frames/sec per watt might be good but if you don't need that much power you are very wastefull. I have a homeserver that has several tasks and one way i saved power is combining tasks to one machine. So my VmWare host runs a virtual NAS and a virtual router and a virtual windows machine. Combining did mean 1 time the idle powerdraw instead of 3 times. For the router example i run PfSense. Starting that VM and creating a lot of traffic i only increase about 3 to 4 watts. I cannot find a physical box that has the same routing performance that only uses that little. Sure the host has a idle power but that is lower then 3 seperate devices idle power. I invested in the smallest titanium 80+ powersupply i could find (400W) which was more expensive but the 12 year warrenty was enough for me because i already had the experience that no mayor brand PSU i ever owned that is working 24/7 365 days a year makes it past about 6 to 7 years. So in case of this one making it 12 years or i case it dies and i get a new one i win.

[@chromerims]

Server build vid and this Q&A were both enjoyable 👍 Thank you.

[@BrianThomas]

I love this video and the one prior. I think you're doing a phenomenal job and the information is extremely valuable Thank you very much for posting. I've been on a quest for low power consumption server hardware and the spreadsheet that you provided is gold.

[@krakonoszkrusnychhor400]

Managed switches: I recently got Aruba 1930 JL683B. In IDLE (no ports connected), it uses a bit more than the mikrotik, around 25W. However, you also get up to 195W POE available. Also, there is a fan inside, but it's pretty quiet. I hear the fan is worse in the (older?) A version.

[@smolicek90]

Hello, great videos man :) you mentioned some embeded MoBos, In my TrueNAS Core build i got my hands on Supermicro 4U 16bay case and this tiny MoBo ( X10SDV-4C-TLN2F ), it works realy fine for small server, a lot of features like Low power XeonD CPU, ECC RAM support, 10Gbit networking, IPMI, full 16x PCIe 3.0 (supports bifubrication, so you can buy riser and split it to 2x 8 ), M.2 slot and some SATAs. Its an older unit, but todays prices are afordable :) would say these kind of boards are golden for low power, at least thats why i bought it :)

[@cafsalvador]

Concerning the last section, you are absolutely right. I tested DietPi, Debian, and Ubuntu on my SBCs and low-power consumption devices. DietPi is more efficient regarding memory use, for sure, but in my experience, it won't save you significant power.

[@kchiem]

You could get something like a Beelink GR9/GTR5 with an AMD 5900 HX cpu. It's costs around the same as Mac Mini, uses around 2x the power as a mac mini on full load, but it's also about 2x as fast. Idles around 6w.

[@popcorny007]

Commenting for engagement, lol. I enjoy these unscripted videos, just needs to be regarding an interesting topic like this one

[@ovarb12]

New look? Very professional and oh great video like always. Thanks for the great content and keeping it varied. 👏

[@siematos1099]

yeap, the low-power homeserver question was quite a novel thing to me, too. got my tired braincells going and was an interesting topic to dig into as a followup to the video. I actually started to experiment with power states, too and was able to run some infrastructure services like dns/dhcp while being in low power states. where I just didn't care before, I'm saving around 1.5 kWh per day across 3 machines, just by fine tuning power states and how services run on them.

[@M.4y]

Do you have any tips? I have 4 VMs and 6 containers. I can't get below 100W. And I also have one storage Server which consumes around 140W :/

[@AIC_onyt]

murica home lab: i bought 4 dell r710 of ebay and run them 24/7 german homelab: raspberry pi or die. for the 'murica peapole here: in germany Power can cost (depending on region) up to 55ct/kwh. you can literally go bankrupt compiling gentoo XD

[@Airbag888]

not only Germany and it's about to get a lot worse

[@sotmrus]

@@Airbag888 Well, not everywhere: 0.08 USD per 1 kw. :)

[@ichnafi8512]

Regarding the Question on powerefficient Managed Switches: Have a look at Netgears GSS108E switches. They can to VLAN tagging and don't consume that much power. Another cool feature ist: one can disable the LEDs!

[@CharlieMartorelli]

Great video I do want to comment on the Mac mini. I run primarily Mac as my main OS and my main server is a Mac mini. For me it is the ultimate solution, we also have a iPhones and iPads in the house and the mini serves as a hub for them also, it is a real work horse and very power efficient. However my linux servers are loads of fun to tinker with and experiment on.. Thanks again for the video.

[@sillydilly2725]

I switched to a couple small, 1 liter, enterprise PCs and they payed them selves of in 2 years! (accounting for subscriptions and power costs on my old setup)

[@thechosen29_]

you make me want to build my own homelab! I will be using it for NAS, phone backup, cloud storage, and maybe pihole. currently saving up to build mine, hopefully will build one within next year😊

[@rexsceleratorum1632]

Saving up for a year? I'd recommend starting off with an old low end laptop, even one that was discarded because the screen died if you're willing to open it and disconnect the LVDS cable. Pretty much guaranteed not to be an energy hog. Just put plenty of memory in. The only real limitation will be the single SATA drive, but you can probably get by with external drives.

[@thechosen29_]

@@rexsceleratorum1632 that might be a good idea! I can probably get away with 2 max internal 2.5” HDD in order to use the laptop’s chassis. I will try find some cheap ass laptop while saving up. thanks mate

[@ian2120]

I am also trying to build my first NAS with a Ryzen 5 1600 and running into freezing issues. Haven't decided whether or not I'm going to give up and move to a 6th or 7th gen Intel platform. Thanks for shedding some light and the additional insight, Wolfgang!

[@pr0jectSkyneT]

Ensure virtualization (SVM) is enabled in the BIOS.

[@dizzyikea]

I have my entire house down to 64w at idle :) Home assistant just sips 5w on a Pi and controls pretty much everything with the power hungry devices only coming on when i have enough solar to power them. Throw in some nodered for more control you really can expand power saving out of just your home lab

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Teach me your ways 🙏

[@TB-us7el]

Your suggestions are good, but they often require people spending money on equipment that they may not already have. I think the first thing a person should do, if low power consumption is the goal, is assess what they need and only buy equipment as powerful as what is needed. If they use a component of a higher spec than necessary, then it'll not only cost more to purchase, but likely consume more power too. For example, if some only needs a file server, why not use a 2.5" USB3 HDD connected to your router? A router is usually always on. You need not buy anything new (unless your router doesn't have a USB3 port) and you have storage that can always be accessed for probably somewhere between 3-9w router power consumption and 3w HDD consumption while in use (while HDD heads are parked it will use much less power, fractions of a watt). BTW, certain models of router use much more electricity than others and in some parts of the world the difference between a router that uses 5w and one that uses 15w, will perhaps be 50 Euros or more per year - some routers (WIFI 6 mainly?) use closer to 30/40w. If you have no need for these capabilities, then this is just money flushed down the drain.

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Absolutely! This video was targeted at homelab enthusiasts, who would probably already have some servers at home. And in some cases, depending on how power hungry your current hardware is and how expensive your electricity is, you might actually save some money by selling your current hardware and replacing it with a more power-efficient option. Other than that, definitely some good points, and I will consider making a video about super-budget low power hardware (e.g. using your router as a mini-NAS, like you said)

[@Alex_FR_IT]

thunderbolt (chipset to provide TB functionality to a PC) draws a lot of power. There's a topic that is often forgotten in this videos (including yours): remote management. Minimum requirement: vPRO (allows to have a remote KVM at HW level, allowing to also enter the BIOS), ideal: remote management HW (HP iLO, Dell iDRAC) and these sadly can be game changers depending on the implemntation; as an example iDRAC 7 on 12th gen PowerEdge server draw 10w (whether the system is powered on or not). I'm actually running a PowerEdge R520 with 2x E2450l v2, 8x 16GB DD3L (1,35v) ECC DIMMs, 1x integrated SAS HBA (driving the 8x 3.5" 7,2K SAS drives), 1x PCIe external SAS (driving an external enclosure with 12x 7,2k SAS drives), 1 dual FC8 HBA (to connect the 2x LTO-5 tape library) and 4x internal SATA drives driving small SSDs. Trying to find a more power efficient alternative to the server (the external enclosure is quite power efficient) but nothing that offers enough PCIe lanes/slots and DIMM slots + remote management at a decent price. Suggestions are welcome! :)

[@indyjake500]

I've enjoyed both of these videos. Ignore the naysayers. Well done sir. Thank you.

[@andyholmes999]

for interest, a 5 port unmanaged 2.5gb switch draws 5w average, also an ubiquiti nanoHD with ppoe adapter draws 6w ive found

[@Sebyllis7350k]

I am greatly entertained by the idea of "ultimate power consumption build" at 9:59. Can we see that project come true someday on your channel? :)

[@samiraperi467]

Re ECC, it's not like Xeons are necessarily expensive or power hungry either. I have a 12 core Haswell Xeon in my NAS, and according to intel-undervolt it draws under 30W under full non-AVX load, ~1W idle. It was 65€ when I bought it (from an EU seller because I live in EU), and there were 45€ units available on Aliexpress. Sure the base clock is 1.8GHz and it won't boost beyond 2.5GHz but it's still faster in MT loads than the i7-6800K it replaced. And C-states work at least up to C6 in stock Debian.

[@deepspacecow2644]

ryzen supports ecc

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Ryzen is also not the best choice for a power efficient server because of the relatively high idle consumption

[@bhasselgren]

Just found your channel. Amazing content, love your voice and so on! 5/5!

[@jordanh9210]

For encoding, my 4090 idles at 40W (just the card) and up to 65W while encoding (CPU limited). In contrast my 13th gen i9900H uses 5-7W at idle in windows (while hosting a webserver, jellyfin and some other things) and 10-15W under load and its only a 50% drop in performance (still plenty fast for live encoding), if i unlimit my laptop and use performance mode it runs 40W peak and I get around 70-80% the encoding performance but thats still an easy win considering that all on the CPU and the 4090 you have to add your CPU watts at full bore. Really hope to see channels make some content around laptops as servers since if you arent using it you might as well, they are very affordable compared to a full system and as long as your fine with using external Ethernet and storage array they are just so handy. Plus the way mine is setup I can unplug it and still use it as a laptop so win win. 4090's are actually very efficient for gaming and other heavy loads if you power limit them or they have a bottle neck. Mine runs 85W under the same load as my old RX5700XT which used 180-200W, under heavier load i've never seen it get above 180W and im using a 100Hz 1440p ultrawide. Unless you can totally power them off when not in use I wouldnt use them for a server due to their high idle consumption (maybe its different with no display output but i doubt its much).

[@KevinVisscher]

Liked before watching.

[@Ruby_Mochii]

Most of it he already explained from the previous video, or at least I understood that much. Some were interesting suggestions. One comment completely missed the point of a NAS and if you want to build it with latest cpu and 4090 go for it! You can probably afford it along with the power bills too!

[@frizzletits8511]

Hahahaha “no fancy editing” bit had me laughing

[@alan_core]

Wolfgang is a solid dude.

[@HORNOMINATOR]

ultimate power consumption build :D i wann see that

[@paolovisentin]

Liked it! Many thanks!

[@Meloso968]

+1 on the random freezes with ryzen 1st gen. I have a ryzen 5 1600 and the only solution was to disable the c-states in the bios.

[@jammetortiz808]

ehh, you can get low power managed switches but only up to like 8 ports. I think TP-Link SG 108E is the lowest power managed switch for 8 ports. its like < 3W fully utilized.

[@dupajasio4801]

Since Cyrix CPU era, I know so old, I've never been Intel fan. AMD is and will be my choice. But Wolfgang you are addressing great points. Power consumption on the low utilization levels. So much of it is wasted just because of bad server or desktop designs. Another excellent video. LOL thx

[@wcg66]

A very cool hack for a Mac Mini is running a RAID card with PCIe over thunderbolt. There are reasonable options for this and with a cheap RAID card in HBA/IT mode. Someone actually rigged this all in 2U sever case. It wouldn't make sense to buy this but if you have a Mac Mini already...

[@frankniethardt1813]

Although some of the consumer CPUs support ECC there are a lot of Xeon E3-1200 series L CPUs that supports ECC and have a TDP of just 25W. I like the Fujitsu TX1330 servers as they draw very low power compared to the other servers. Only downside is that the license to enable KVM capability is bound to the server and quite expensive...

[@sjukfan]

2:51 1999 I worked at a school with 100 computers and whenever the power came back after a blackout 100 computers turning on at the same time blew the fuses.

[@SilentDecode]

Keep in mind that SMR disks are NOT supported by TrueNAS or ZFS even. CMR is the only option. So 2,5" disks are inefficient, because they can't be bigger than 2TB each. So you will need 5 of those to get to 10TB (without factoring in redundancy). By the time you have 5x 2TB 2,5" disks running, it consumes almost the same as a single 10TB disk.

[@WolfgangsChannel]

The image shown in the video while I’m talking clearly shows 5TB 2.5” drives

[@SilentDecode]

@@WolfgangsChannel Which is clearly an SMR disk, if you read the site of Seagate correctly. SMR is not recommended for any ZFS application, whether it's TrueNAS or something else.

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Sorry, I understood your comment as “the biggest 2.5” drive you can get is 2TB”. Yes, SMR drives are definitely not recommended for anything ZFS-rated That being said, many people use Unraid or Mergerfs instead, and those aren’t as picky as ZFS

[@SilentDecode]

@@WolfgangsChannel Hence why I specifically said anything that runs ZFS :) Nice efficient homeserver though. I'm running less-efficient enterprise gear at home 😆

[@aflawrence]

How did you add your Tasmota data to the Unraid dashboard? Great video covering ways to economize energy and save costs.

[@diacritic8508]

Just switch it off for the night and save 1/3 of the energy consumption. Many people with a home server don't actually need to run their home servers 24/7. If you think about it for a second, you might be surprised to find your home server could also take a rest while you're asleep. And if that's the case, pressing the power button twice a day goes a long way, or you can even automate switching it on in the morning and off at night. Having a scheduled shutdown time for the server could also help to get rid of bad habits of staying up all night scrolling through meaningless stuff in a brain dead state instead of getting a good night's sleep.

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Yep, I'm actually doing that with mine, and depending on your use case you might even want to put your server into S3 sleep automatically if it doesn't do anything and wake it up on network access.

[@diacritic8508]

​@@WolfgangsChannel My system sports a nearly 10 years old Haswell i5-4670 along with an uATX Asus H87M-PRO and while I'm super happy with the 6 SATA ports and 4 PCIe slots that's also fully packed (a dedicated, but low end, low consumption GPU too), but my system draws 10W when it's turned off ... I find that's quite significant for a stand-by device. I'll also try to measure C8 sleep power draw if I'm able to get there, but because it does nothing meaningful at night, I completely switch it off ie. cut it off from electricity. Maybe I missed it, but how do you make sure your system stays in sleep mode at night if it's running tasks that can easily generate traffic 24/7 eg. torrents? By the way great content Wolfgang, love your honesty and the German point of view you're bringing in.

[@DunOpondo]

Great content 👍🏿

[@XiaOmegaX]

low power price to performance goes to the i5-6500T and i5-8500T tinyminimicro's on ebay. J4105 thin clients are next best. For a basic raspi replacement the ultra-tiny wyse with the atom x5 in it is great, 2W and hosts as many micro-services as you need.

[@gl2004-g4d]

Great video! Would you please talk more about how to make VMs more power efficient, espacially a VM with passthroughed HDD or GPU

[@Airbag888]

I put a like and clicked on subscribe twice (cause of course I already was) Loved the video especially because I've been chasing after the fabled unicorn of 10Gbe home server with ability to not bottleneck transfers and possibly do more than just host files. I did not look but for the asrock board with the celeron, is there enough lanes to power a 10Gbe sfp+ card on that pciex1 (I'm 90% sure there isn't but don't want to find out the bad news myself I guess :p ) Loved the ebay posts you showed. I really do not understand German and you are our lifeline and curator for everything going on that forum. Please keep the links coming, maybe have a community post twice a month with good deals for power efficient servers.. I honestly think you're one of the only channels doing this in English on YT so could be 1 more 'thing' for your channel to grow on, especially when in around 12 months people REALLY start looking for the best ways to reduce their expenses Oh and TIL 2.5" drives were all SMR.. so much for that hope.. I guess we can only hope SSD prices keep falling until the size we need comes within budget. Although I guess 1-2 TB nvme cache is also ok

[@Airbag888]

I keep coming back to the video with more questions... while you explained T series intel CPUs are like 'a trap' and tdp is not the full story can you comment on the potential gains from having a decent undervolting done? Aka, maintain same peak performance and lower voltage draw when doing so while reaping the benefits of good idle power draw. I suspect it won't change a lot at idle though

[@WolfgangsChannel]

I haven't tested undervolting, but since the CPU is usually a very small part of the overall power consumption at idle, I don't see it having a big impact.

[@Airbag888]

@@WolfgangsChannel It might also just mainly matter under load vs idle.. Anyway more testing should clear this. Other topic, for the picoPSU I can only find 12V DC versions that have the 4pin CPU plug whereas the 'wide voltage' ones don't include that.. the issue is I have a few laptop power bricks that are 19.x V and it would save me some to get the wide voltage one... Is this a known limitation?

[@WolfgangsChannel]

My wide-voltage model also doesn't have an EPS connector. Not sure what that's all about

[@Airbag888]

@@WolfgangsChannel I see.. I only saw some 300W "picos" and hdplex models (out of stock) that had the EPS and were also wide voltage... So if I understand correctly you're using 12V DC Input pico's for your build right? As opposed to running wild and not using a EPS supply lol

[@reinekewf7987]

the thing is with the Ryzen G and GE prozessors there are exactly the same tho only difference is who it is deployed. in a laptop for example, there are configured mostly as GE because of the weak cooling solution therefore the TDP is set to 45W and marked as GE but on a desktop platform you can choose if you want a G with 65W or a GE with 45W. but the idle consumption does not change maybe by a little because some under volting but this might be 0.1W or so. i have a server with a 5700G in it and it is set to 45W because my server is passive cooled and the case cant handle 65W. this is not the only reason my system runs about 3% to 7% so i could ignore the TDP but i use this system also as a compute machine for some heavy calculations. i could do this on my gaming system but i dont want it to run for hours and drawing 300W if my server can do the same stuff with 50W and needs only 100% more time, so a 3h job on my gaming system uses 0.9kwh and my server needts only 0.3kwh for the same task and it took 6h. i dont see the point using my gaming pc for such things and on my daily driver pc this needs way longer because it is a asrock j4050-itx in it. my monitor uses more power as my computer ^^

[@Tyrian2k]

Also maybe you should take a look at the odroid H3+ for a power efficient home server

[@itssoaztek4592]

Exactly .... or the Odroid H3 😉. The idle power consumption of H3 and H3+ boards may or may not be very similar. However, the H3 is less expensive. The only difference is the CPU, i.e. H3 CPU has lower clockspeed than the H3+. I've been wanting and waiting for an affordable low-power x86 64-bit single board computer with 8GB or more RAM, dual GB NICs, at least two SATA ports and passive cooling since 2015. Finally it arrived! (Literally, got my H3 yesterday 😊😊). If all goes well it will replace a 1L mini-PC serving as a NAS. The mini-PC will then replace my desktop PC (which uses far too much power).

[@LampJustin]

As to the Ryzen Freezes: I myself suffer from the same problem, it's a 1600 as well and I did just the same. Disabling C-States works, but yes it uses 60W with 5 drives. That's really unfortunate... At least my second nas runs at 36W with a 5600G and does not suffer from that problem. Enabling the power stuff and limiting the TDP to 45W actually does make a noticeable difference in idle.

[@naoltitude9516]

I just binged your videos yesterday...

[@ewerybody]

5:33 "You have to break even on the hardware costs" ... depends. Well, I'm not rich AF but I would invest "some" money to lower my consumption!! Sure, if you have money you could also just spend it on Energy. And I know this videos are not about the environment but lower consumption is also good in that regard! 😉👍

[@ewerybody]

True: Spending LOADS of money and resources just to have the lowest consumption is also stupid. The sweet spot of what makes sense for whom is probably somewhere else for each and everyone ✌

[@ewerybody]

"pick your poison" :D yeah! 👍

[@dotgif397]

you seem pretty chill

[@boredstudent9468]

I've got my freeze bug fixed by updating the BIOS

[@greatwavefan397]

How important are CPU security features (like Secure Boot, Anti-theft Technology, OS Guard, etc.) when building a desktop, router, or server? If they are, which ones are the most essential depending on each use?

[@Lordniksidor]

My nas does nothing probably 99 percent of the time so i totally agree idle power consumption is paramount importance. I'm planning to build a diy nas then i can get rid of the dedicated laptop running my home assistant instance and jellyfin or plex

[@cinemaipswich4636]

Editing off your NAS only "references" the files used. It is non-destructive. It is only when one "delivers" or "renders out" the final project that the original files come into play.

[@xGshikamaru]

I'm about to finish my NAS build (my current cloud runs on a raspberry pi with 2 pidrive in raid1 and it's showing its limits but it uses close to no power). Not exactly cheap but not over the top, I do have a few 1TB 3.5 inch drives laying around that I'd be using to get me started, I'm thinking about using mergerfs (so no raid), and rotate those drives around when I need more storage. What's your opinion on snapraid to add a bit of redundancy to the array? I'm on the fence when it comes to using it cause it would mean I need to use my biggest drive as parity. Would it kind of work if I just set a lvm vg that's half the capacity of the drive and use that as parity? Of course I'm aware that all the content that gets on this drive would be lost if it failed since data and parity would be on the same drive, but once I get another bigger drive I can just use that as parity and reclaim that space on the other drive. That's what bothers me with Raid, it's hard to grow your NAS space without replacing the entire array.

[@xmine08]

The Ryzen 1000-series hat a lot of issues, including freeze bugs. Don't think it'll be resolved anymore as those who care enough (and have the skills or money) have moved on to later series CPUs. It's support for x86 emulation (in x64 mode in simple terms) was also super broken iirc. In short: Stay away from those CPUs, later ryzens are fine

[@LemmingOverlord]

@WolfgangsChannel have you played around with disabling hardware components in BIOS to further restrict power consumption? I always think there are certain built-in components that could do with being disabled altogether for certain setups, in particular servers.

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Of course. I usually disable serial/parallel ports and audio on all of my server motherboards. But other than that, there isn't really much to do

[@johanneshepperle8390]

Schönes Video und das aus dem Saarland :)

[@Rene-kg7pf]

Good video and content

[@peterhansert4245]

Hey there, nice video! May I ask what's your setup in 7:10 ? I'm using a HP Elitedesk 800 G3 Tower with i5-7600T, 2x 4TB WD Red Pro (3.5"), 1x 240GB SSD, 32GB DDR4-2133 (non ECC) RAM. --> Total 125$ Idle around 21W with Proxmox and 1 VM. Will add like ~5 more VM's and assume Idle state will rise up to 30W+ Thought about upgrading to i7-7700 since its same price for me. Did I do a bad choice with the setup to achieve a low power consumption server?

[@BrianThomas]

I didn't hear any questions about a UPS. With have High density HHDs power failures can wreak havoc with data integrity. In what ways do you deal with power failure?

[@WolfgangsChannel]

A UPS will marginally increase your power draw. Newer ones are a bit more efficient though, and having one is definitely useful. At the same time, modern PC components survive sudden power failures pretty well, and most popular file systems for mass data storage are journaled and feature data integrity checks. So a power failure wouldn’t be as fatal as it would be like 20 years ago. A UPS is mostly useful for redundancy and gives you the ability to keep mission critical services running during a short power outage. It definitely shouldn’t be your last line of defense against a data loss

[@beck320]

Updating the bios on my first gen ryzen system fixed my freezing issue

[@blaiseutube]

Is there an affiliate link for the power draw monitor.? 0:49

[@crzr5]

Using 2.5 laptop hdds vs 3.5 ones could be more power efficient, but you have to consider if they're prepared to work in arrays, considering the vibration that they would be suffering

[@samiraperi467]

Also 2.5" HDDs are *much* slower in random seeks. You'll want caching.

[@jcfawerd]

Those laptop drives are designed with vibration in mind, since they are mostly used in portable env

[@Slackware1995]

Re: staggered hdd start This used to be a much bigger deal but not as much now as hdd power usage is many times less than they used to be. 5 1/2 full height SCSI drives sounded like a jet engine starting up and used almost as much power (slight exaggeration)

[@Aisonas]

Hi Wolfgang, thanks for the amazing tips ! I have a question regarding redudancy: RAID offers relative security against disc failure. whould you happen to have an idea on how to secure oneself, in case the NAS / Homelab is lost, for example due to theft or physical destruction due to fire/flood etc.... ? Is it possible to mirror the contents automatic on another physical location ? thanks for the great work!

[@Mr_Sh1tcoin]

You're using the wrong terms; RAID offers NO security but redundancy. These are two very different things! If youre talking how to address catastrophic failure events (fire or flood), then youre not looking to RAID to offer redundancy, but offsite backups or an offsite DR mirror copy. If youre talking theft, now you're talking security; encryption at rest and physical security are things to look at. How to secure storage devices so they can't be stolen and if they are stolen, the data is encrypted so it's not accessible.

[@vinterbaereren]

oh no i'm in the video cool to know that i3's were able to support ecc

[@ИгорьБотухов]

Hello! Thank you very much for all your videos, I do not often write comments, but I really want to know why you chose unraid? I heard that you wanted to choose truenas. Why did you leave the pure Ubuntu server. Thanks in advance!

[@WolfgangsChannel]

That’s worth an entire video of its own

[@ИгорьБотухов]

@@WolfgangsChannel ahahah, waiting for entire video! Thank you 💖

[@User-md3ul]

I'm running now a ryzen 3600 in the homeserver. Mostly because I just bought a 5700X for the PC and switched them out. (So basically last AM4 upgrade.) I only have two C-States, interestingly. Let's see if I can get that lower, the mainboard has some dee-c-state support in the bios, but I'm currently a little bit hesitant to experiment with that..

[@kowaletzki]

I'm retiring my current gaming rig and want to use it as a server. It's a Ryzen 1700 and it also doesn't go deeper than C2 on Linux. Interestingly, it goes 70%+ C6 on Windows under HWinfo. Have you gotten anywhere further with your project?

[@User-md3ul]

@@kowaletzki I didn't get to try around with my bios. For ryzen 1700 this may be related to a kernel bug, I know that 1000 series had a hardware bug that resulted in system freezes when going into low-power on linux - but this could be old information.

[@fy7589]

You can both undervolt and underclock any ryzen cpu and pretty much any intel cpu and get them ridiculously efficient without having too much performance loss. The power consumption of these cpu's increase quadratically if you overclock because while overclocking you also need to raise the voltage of the vcore rail. Say you have a 4 ghz cpu, You overlock it to 4.4 without raising the voltage (that's pretty unrealistic but let's say it's somehow still stable). You suddenly increased the current draw from 100 amps to 110 amps, so if your vcore voltage is say 1.2 volts, you were pulling about 120 watts of power. Now you're pulling 132 watts of power. But suppose it's not stable because it needs more voltage. Say you increased the vcore voltage to 1.3 volts to get it back to being stable, Now congratulations you are pulling 143 watts of power. But the cpu is now running hotter and it's dissipating the heat to the power plain as the power plain is a nice chunk of copper and thru the inductors which are also made of copper, those run hotter now, as they run hotter, their resistance increases so there's a voltage drop and you need to increase the voltage even more to make up for that. You finally sat up the vcore to 1.35 volts so now the cpu is stable finally. But now it's 110 amps * 1.35 volts and that's 148.5 watts. You have successfully gained 10% performance at the cost of 23.75% power increase. These numbers are made up but this really is how overclocking works. But you can potentially go the other way around. Undervolt the vcore power and underclock it a bit. Like from 4.0 to 3.8 and reduce the vcore from 1.2 to 1.1. It'll likely be very stable even leave some room for more undervolting unless the motherboard is an utter junk. You can reduce the 120 watts power consumption to 1.1*(1-(3.8/4.0))*100amps 104.5 watts. That's about 15% less power for 5% less performance. A pretty good deal. You can even go further but there's a limit how low you can set the vcore, but I'm guessing you can still increase the efficiency by like 30-40% while only giving up about 10% performance. And this is not even considering the decrease of resistance of the power plain thus less power losses in the power plain and the vrm.

[@clomads]

Was about to sell my M1 Mac Mini, but then my N5095 mini pc w/ UNRAID got messed up and I decided to try it out. I was doing about 35w with 3x 2.5" USB drives and have been doing around 8w on the Mini so far with just 1 drive. My only problem rn is docker sucks in MacOS, so I gotta try spinning up a linux VM.

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Yep, something like UTM would do the job

[@cameronmaher2209]

Amd CPUs have a lot of fixes in kernel 6

[@frytk4]

mikrotik routeros is byyyehhhhh xD totally agree

[@wackogames]

People actually start to put 4090 cards in their home labs more frequently now due to ML an AI tools becoming more popular, for example Stable Diffusion for image generation, rope and deepfake for videos. They all need a lot(!) of VRAM and cloud GPU instance offerings are expensive due to high demand.

[@jjones2582]

Have you experimented with the new "efficiency core" CPUs to see if they are actually power efficient at idle?

[@diazrocks]

In my opnion i dont think you need CMR drives for Unraid. ZFS hates SMR sure and i think the whole CMR debacle centered around rebuilding parity in RAID & RAIDZ. since Unraid does not use parity in traditional RAID, i dont think buying cheap SMR is necessary. SMR has nasty writes, but can be fixed with ssd cache in Unraid. please do correct me if im wrong.

[@rahula1550]

Can i expect any kubernetes cluster in home server kinda video?

[@AnthonyBove]

I design and build High Performance, Sustainable, Net Zero Homes. I’m looking into wiring as much of the house as possible with 48v DC. I need power distribution, but i figure putting smart controls into it just makes sense. Your work you discuss in this video falls in line with a Passive House principle of reducing energy consumption. Is there a way i can contact you directly?

[@rudzon]

My power consumption is not tied to cost. It is tied to battery capacity which I have in the house. I experience power outages frequently for 0-5 hours a day.