Hi!,
I'm new to Unraid and testing it. My current needs are a NAS and a couple of VMs in one box, as well as my main Windows gaming rig. The gaming rig can be virtual or physical.
Now, I have tested 2 different approaches and checked their power consumption, and here are the findings:
- Unraid (bare metal) + drive spin down + Windows rig VMs OFF: 66 Watts (sustained after a few minutes idle)
- Unraid (bare metal) + drive spin down + Windows rig VMs ON: 90 Watts (sustained after a few minutes idle)
- Windows (bare metal) + drive spin down + VMs off: 46 Watts (sustained after a few minutes idle. While working on the PC it's aroung 55)
The Windows VM has a Nvidia RTX 3070 passthrough. It took me some tweaking but now it's not using any apparent power if the VM is off.
The lowest I achieved with Unraid was 66W after a little tweaking in the BIOS. Before that it was 77 normally.
So, basically, bare metal Unraid uses 66 Watts while bare metal Windows 11 Pro uses less than 50. Reading the forums I understand that 66W is actually a good measure, but with the prices of electricity being crazy in Europe right now, I want to lower it. And the thing is, I KNOW this computer can run at 46W because that's what Windows uses!
What can I do to make Unraid use the same power as Windows? I'm guessing Windows drivers are better optimised than those in Unraid, so this may be impossible.
If I'm unable to lower it I may use bare metal Windows with Hyper-v and virtualize my NAS in it, but then that NAS can't be Unraid since it's not supported in Hyper-v
Any thoughts? Attached is the diagnostics just in case.
Thank you!
unraid-diagnostics-20220105-1828.zip
