First Low Power Unraid Build (Advice Needed)

[KevinM]

Hey everyone,

 

I am new to Unraid and would like to build my first new little low power server to mainly use as a NAS.

 

Currently I am just using a FritzNas, which is way too slow and can only handle like 1 or 2 drives, since it runs over a FritzBox router and was never really meant to be used as a NAS. That is why I was always planning to get a real one and came across Unraid years ago, which offers much more than a prebuild NAS like Synology, QNAP etc.

 

My Budget would be around 450€ without Unraid included.

 

My plan for now is to use:

HDDs: 2x2TB WD Blue drives that I already have & use with a USB HDD docking station (and back up with another 2x2TB by using FreeFileSync)

Parity: 1x 2TB or up to 6TB parity drive to be able to replace my old 2TB drives with bigger ones in the future, if needed. (Needs to be bought)

Cache: 1x 500GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD I have laying around as cache drive

 

But of course it should have room to maybe add a second parity and second cache drive for more protection + 1 or 2 more data drives if needed in the future.

 

The system should mainly be used as a NAS and streaming videos to my TV. Besides that I plan to run a few dockers and one VM here and there, so it shouldn't be too slow for that, while consuming the lowest amount of energy that's possible to avoid high cost when running it 24/7 here in Germany.

 

I was already researching builds myself and came across two potential builds:

 

Build 1:

CPU & Mainboard: ASRock J5040-ITX J5040 Gemini lake Refresh

RAM: 32GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4-2666 CL18 SO-Dimm

Case: Fractal Design Node 804

Power Supply: Pico Power Supply / Modular 400 Watt Be Quiet! System Power 9 CM Modular 80+ Bronze

(Kinda scared to use a Pico PSU, that's why I would prefer a normal one, even though it uses a little more power)

HDD: 2TB HDD

 

Planned to be bought later:

SSD: 500GB Samsung 870 Evo (As second cache drive)

PCIe Expansion Card: PCIe to Sata Expansion Card (For more than 4 drives later on)

 

Build 2:

CPU: Intel Core i3 10100

Mainboard: ASRock B560M Pro4

RAM: 16GB G.Skill Aegis DDR4-2666 CL19

Case: Fractal Design Node 804

Power Supply: Modular 400 Watt Be Quiet! System Power 9 CM Modular 80+ Bronze

HDD: 2TB HDD

 

Planned to be bought later:

SSD: 500GB Samsung 870 Evo (As second cache drive)

RAM: Another 16GB (to complete 32GB)

 

The price for both builds is around the same +- 10-20€ and lays within my budget of 450€.

If you have any advice for alternative builds, please feel free to share them.

 

My big question is if the J5040 build is enough and the only way to archieve low power usage or if the more powerful i3 10100 would also be possible with similar power usage, since I have seen people got it down to similar idle usage, when making use of the different c states.

 

I hope people here on this forum with more experience about Unraid builds and low power consumption can help me out with finding a proper solution and I want to thank everyone who is helping out in advance for their advices and help.

 

[chsvfr]

9/10 add on. Just had a boring train ride that gave me time to explore the Unraid forum. Looks like MB based at CPUs like J5040, J4125, J4105 etc has a limited number of PCIE lanes and long story short you shold expect read/write slowdown / penalty if you ecxeed 6 harddrives. So at the end it comes down to your needs and preferred way to design your server. For my main server i prefer to use 2 parity drives and 2 cash drives in mirrow mode. That gives me the redundency I can live with and the write speed I can live with i.e. I can saturate my 1 Gbps ethernet cable. J5040 would not give me the needed number of slots for storage drives ..... but the J5040 is the  perfect match for a 4 drive Unraid server I have for backup that do not use cache drivens. Important to use enough time to explore Unraid forum as there is a lot of good info here.

 

 

I have been looking for a low power solution for some time too and finally decided to buy the Asrock J5040 and see what it would do for me. Did build a test rig with 4 WD RED 3 and 4 TB drives, 650 W PSU, 1 x 120 mm fan and do some Wattage measurements. What I found was:

- Max wattage during startup was ~65 W

- stand by mode with HDD drives spinning ~34 W

- standby mode HDD drives not spinnig ~19 W

- writing data to the array ~40 W

- performing parity check (all drives spinnig) ~40 W

 

I think the J5040 used 15 - 18% of its CPU power to run parity check so it has more than enough CPU calculation power for being a file server. I do not run VMs etc. 

 

My main Unraid server is an ASUS A320K + Ryzen 200GE CPU, 10 NAS drives (primarily WD RED), 650 PSU, 4 or 5 120 mm fans. The power consumption I did measure looks like this:

- Max wattage during startup was ~180 W

- stand by mode with drives spinning ~94 W

- standby mode drives not spinnig ~50 W

- writing data to the array ~86 W

 

I also have an old LGA775 based ASUS workstation motherboard with a Q9400 CPU. Ran it with 4 drives, 650 W PSU, 1 x 120 mm fan etc and saw this wattage consumption

- Max wattage during startup was 140 - 160 W

- stand by mode with drives spinning ~95 W

- standby mode drives not spinnig ~75 W

- writing data to the array 110 - 120 W

 

So I am happy with the J5040 low power consumption. Did not do any particular effort trimming it but used it straight out of the box. I did run into one issue ..... had to change a folder name at the UNRAID USB from EUFI- to EUFI i.e. removing "-" in order for it to boot from the USB drive .... but somewhere else that is reported as a "known issue" .... frustrating when you are setting up the server hardware and do not know about this. I am also missing temperature data from the CPU etc but that is most likely me that just have to work more with setting UNRAID up properly.

 

For my purpose then it looks like it is more than CPU powerfull enough for being a file server only.

 

Asrock has "M" version (M-ATX and not ITX) of some of these low power Intel based onboard CPU boards you may consider as they have more PCIE slots than the ITX versions but fewer onboard SATA ports. You can then use small PCIE cards for attaching harddrives i.e. trad-off between 2 or 4 onboard SATA ports or 1 or 3 PCIEs you can use for attaching HDD.

 

Where I live then the "M" versions of the motherboards are slightly cheaper than the ITX boards ...... make your self a PROs and CONs list and move on.

 

Personally I would never use a PICO PSU for something that runs 24 x 7 x 365. I would use a good high quality regular PSU .... but is just me. PICO PSU is small and slick and I see why you are thinking/asking about it but I would vote for a real regular PSU.

 

 

Edited October 9, 2022 by chsvfr

[KevinM]

Thank you very much for your reply and for sharing your experiences with the different builds!

 

Out of all your examples the J5040 looks very promising power consumption wise, especially when the drives are not spinning, since that will have a big impact over time.

All the other ones sadly look like they use way too much for my taste, which would be kinda expensive over a year to run 24/7.

 

I also thought about my build again from time to time and I think my current plan would be to add 2x2TB drives (the ones I currently use) and 1x4TB parity (to be able to replace my 2TB with 4TB ones in the future) + cache drive of unknown size to use the least amout of drives to save more energy.

 

I also had another thought for later to maybe try to reduce it even more to 1x8TB drive and 1xTB parity + cache to save even more energy, but not sure if that would be actually worth it, power consumption wise.

 

But yeah I would probably take the J5040 with the 4 Sata ports, since I don't really plan to add any PCIE cards for now, since it would also be my first build.

I would probably then also get a small real PSU with 350Watts or something small as possible but modular, so I don't have a huge cable mess.

 

Do you or anyone else reading this know, if there are any modern versions of the J5040 already got released or will be released in the future?

Because it is a bit old by now and I wonder if they maybe released new J CPUs and boards like that with better performance maybe.

 

[chsvfr]

Hey Kevin,

 

Did stumble across a Biostar J4125NHU motherboard and found it attractive as it had a real M.2 slot for harddrive(s) as well as a M.2 for wifi .... or so the specs said. Thought in case it did not work out as an Unraid server I could always use it as a low power PC for streaming / watching TV. I did find a 6 SATA port M.2 card and installed it as well as another 4 SATA card contrroller for the one PCIE slot. The board itslef has 2 SATA ports. Unfortunately the MB I recieved did not have the slot for the wifi card and also had no internal header for USB 3 (in case I end up using it as an ordinary Windows PC). Later I figured out from the Biostar web-page that the wifi M.2 is "optional" what ever that means. Where I live the Biostar MB is same price as the Asrock J5040 but harder to find a retailer. 

 

Long story short I did build it into my 10 HDD Unraid server. I used 5 x 120 mm fans at full speed. Disconencted 2 of them and turned the other 3 to minimum flow and that turned out to be enough flow to keep everything cool enough inside the box. Doing parity (all drives spinng) check it uses ~78 W. Writing data to the array then it uses ~45 W (2 cahce drives are active). When at idle with all drives sleeping then it runs at 25 - 28 W. With the large amount of drives I did see slower parity speed at ~108 MB/sec than I had before, which was at ~130 MB/sec. My parity check time went from 17 hours to 22 hours. I do not do parity check that often so from an user perspective somehting I can llive with. As I am using cache drives then writing to the servers seems to be unchanged at 110 - 130 MB/sec i.e. saturating my 1 Gbps inhouse ethernet cable. I run "the data mover" in the midlle of the night so I do not care that it is slightly slower than what I am used to. 

 

For what I use my Unraid server for then the Asrock J5040 or the Biostar J4125NHU seems to be good choices - though it is not server grade equipment ment to run 24/7/365 nor has any future upgrade path. Will see how long time it will last. 

 

Conclusion: The Asrock J5040 / Biostar J4125NHU seems to be OK for an Unraid file server and did cut my power consumption some. The fewer harddrive you choose the better off you are from a power consumption perspective. The J5040/J4125 CPUs from my perspective seems power full enough as a file server CPU.  I think the Asrock J5040 is more "up to date" than the Biostar J4125NHU but cannot document why. Really mis the sata M.2 slot at the Asrock J5040. Do not understand why they did not include. 

 

At the Unraid web-page there is a link to some guys that really made the power consumption "a fine art" and got their servers down in the 5 - 15 W range with sleeping drives handpicked power supply and motherboard etc.  I am happy with bringing my server to the ~25 W range at idle but just know there are more power efficient solutions out there. 

 

[KevinM]

Hey chsvfr,

 

very interesting I think I saw it too once when I checked for all the compact low power boards with J processors, but always sticked with the ones that had 4 Sata connectors. I also saw some low power server boards but they were way to expensive.

 

Yeah, all these boards you sadly can't upgrade, but I guess even when you get a normal mainboard and cpu you probably won't upgrade into the same gen usually, since you should already know beforehand how much performance you will need and stick with that until a new mainboard and cpu gen.

 

I don't know if you saw it, but I already went with the J5040 in a Node 304 case a few days ago and spent the whole weekend setting up my first Unraid server. So far the J5040 seems perfect for what I want to do with the machine, it can run several dockers without no problem it seems, file transfers always hit gigabit speed, even without cache drive used and it is even good enough for running a Windows VM and Plex, while hopefully not using too much energy during idle.

 

You are right about trying to use the least amount of drives as possible that is why I plan to get like 2x 4TB or 8TB drives as data drives.

 

Right now I am running it with 2x2TB data drives 1x4TB parity drive 1x500GB SSD for cache and everything works fine, like dockers and vms are on the cache so the drives spindown when not being used and only the ssd has to run, protecting the hdds from mechanical wear over time.

 

Therefore thank you very much again for your feedback and helping me out deciding for a build.

 

---------------------

For others, who might be researching for low power builds too.

 

My current Unraid build:

Power Supply: Be quiet! Pure Power 11 FM 550 Watt 80+ Gold Modular BN317
Parity Drive: Seagate IronWolf 4TB HDD ST4000VNZ06
Data HDDs: 2TB WD Green (WD20EZRX) & 2TB WD Red (WD20EFRX)
SSD Cache: 500GB Samsung 850 EVO
RAM: Corsair Vengeance SODIMM 16GB (1x16GB) DDR4 2666MHz CL18
Case: Fractal Design Node 304 black
CPU & Mainboard: ASRock J5040-ITX Mini-ITX Mainboard Intel Quad-Core J5040

 

Power consumption:

Idle all drives, except cache spun down: ~12W

Idle all drives, spun up: ~20W

High usage (70%+ CPU usage): around ~30W

 

Temperature:

CPU Idle: ~35°C

100% CPU load: ~75°C

HDDs: ~35°C

Edited November 12, 2022 by KevinM
New data

[zbot]

Just to add to the low power success stories.

 

I have been using the following build for two years and am very happy with it:

• ASRock J5005-ITX Motherboard
• G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 16GB (2 x 8G) DDR4
• Silverstone 300W SFX 80 PSU
• FebSmart PCIE 3.0 SATA III ASM1064 Controller
• WD Blue 3D NAND 250GB SSD
• 6x WD Red Plus HDD (ranging from 8gb to 14gb) 

 

I don't really know if there's an issue with PCI lanes. I have my drives spin down when unused and doubt I ever use more than 2 or 3 drives at a time except for perhaps during parity check, but the parity check won't use the cache so it's still 6 drives max. 

 

I also use a few Docker images including OctoPrint, Deluge, Ubuntu, and Plex with QuickSync hardware acceleration for transcoding. The speed won't blow you away but it's been surprisingly good for everything I've wanted to do with it.

 

I hadn't measured it before today, but power consumption at idle ranges between 20W (disks spun down, Plex and Ubuntu still running) and 60W (all disks spun up). Maybe add an extra watt for the top exhaust rack fan which is separately powered. I'm really surprised that it's this good. I could probably improve it by messing with power states or getting a different PSU.

 

Intel is still making embedded chips in the Pentium and Celeron lines but they all seem to go into netbooks and chromebooks; I haven't seen an all-in-one motherboard with one. I think maybe the J6412/J6413/N6415 is the top of the line for ultra low power.

 

Edited February 14, 2023 by zbot