Can i just vent my spleen over electricity prices here in the UK and ask other forum members for some constructive advice.

Power costs are horrendous here in the UK (and no doubt elsewhere) to the extent that  i cannot financially afford to run up my Unraid servers for any length of time. Unfortunately i have three Xeon based servers consisting of some 30+disks. Main use is storage and obviously, like others streaming as a nas to my own local devices. This has had to stop as has adding any new content to my machines. Its a pretty sad situation which i'm looking for ideas on how to minimise powering up the lot in one go and still have an effective  subset of my main NAS available in a leaner, meaner form. The drive sizes range from 10TB to 18TB so obviously rolling up to larger drives is really not an option as it would mean shelling out for 20TB drives which just isnt do-able. Just wondering how i can tweak my setup to just have a 'small' nas setup of some 1-2 drives and how its possible to offload any files wanted 'automatically' until watched? I do have cheap rate (sic) overnight electricity but whats a decent, cheap setup to allow up to 4K playback, whether direct or transcoded? Best bare minimum needed anyone? All suggestions gratefully received. Ta!

9 minutes ago, superloopy1 said:

Just wondering how i can tweak my setup to just have a 'small' nas setup of some 1-2 drives

I know some unRAID users keep part of their Plex library (most often watched/favorite/recent content, etc.) on cache-only SSD shares.  No spinning disks required.  With Plex on SSD appdata share and some content (may require some manual maintenance) on SSDs, you never have to spin up hard drives to watch Plex content.

 

Sorry for your electricity cost situation.  Fortunately, I still am paying only about $0.12 - $0.13 per kilowatt hour in my part of the U.S.

Edited October 19, 20223 yr by Hoopster

Couple of thoughts.  One--- Winter is about on us in the Northern Hemisphere and energy being used by your servers is mostly being dissipated as heat.  So put your server in a spot in your home where you can reduce the energy required by your heating system. 

 

Two--- have a look at my two servers.  When they are at rest (no disks spun up, all Dockers stopped, etc), they are using between 40-45 watts.  You could consider going to a modern MB solution that has a more more efficient CPU with fewer cores.  Decide exactly what you really require on a primary NAS server and spec out a system from there.  You might be able to reconfigure things so you could savage the drives from one server to build up reasonable size library on that server.  You could move content at night during the lower cost window.   Transcoding is always the elephant in the room.  But I would be looking to doing the transcoding on a small mini/micro computer running something like KODI.  (After having built these two systems a few years back, I now realize that they both have more CPU horsepower that a basic NAS-- such as I actually run --really needs.  At the time, I thought I was 'future proofing' it...)

 

(I am also in the USA. Presently, I have as wholesale residential contract for $.051 per KWH.   BUT there are delivery, distribution and customer charges to get that energy from the generation plant to my house.  This bring the effective rate up to $.135 per KWH.)

Thanks guys, couple of suggestions there that i could take up. One non-runner is moving my server to take advantage of the Xeon (mega!) haeat output, my wife would kill me if either of my three servers ever became visible around the house , that's why i need to go with a mini-itx based system and only a couple of nvme/ssd drives so an almost silent system. I DO have electricity at slightly higher rate than yours across there overnight so i'm thinking along similar lines and 'moving' lets say a weeks worth of downloads, again everything now has to be on cheap rate electricity, via rsync nightly from a cached pool on my main servers to the small, silent itx system in my lounge. Might work? But, it means i cannot then access any back catalogue stuff, a big downer on the 'wife' front. Seems it cant be done in a 'wife-friendly' manner ... so, it stays as it is, zilch downloads.