Right now, I'm running an older SuperMicro server that never spins down the fans. There are 7 fans in there running at 3,500rpm all day long, even when all the drives are spun down. Apparently it's an known issue with the H8DGU board. Now that my electric bill keeps going up and up, I was looking for lower power options.

Does anyone run a higher drive count server that's low power? I'm not even sure what's reasonable when it comes to power draw.

The current server is 4U, has 32 drive bays and is currently running:

2 x AMD Opeteron 6380

64GB Memory

20 x 3.5" drives set to spin up individually and spin down when not in use.

3 x SSDs

NVIDIA Quadro P620

2 x 1400w redundant power supplies

It's primary use is Emby and unless I'm doing a parity check, it rarely spins up more than a couple drives if we are all watching separate movies.

I haven't put a meter on it yet, so I can't even say where I'm at right now, but with all those fans spinning 24/7, it can't be low.

I forgot that my UPS shows usage. I have one power supply plugged into the UPS right now, because oddly the other failed yesterday, and it's showing 385 watts. I have a replacement on order.

Edited June 20Jun 20 by Spyderturbo007

A straightforward way was replace the compute unit, but you may save 100w - 150w endup. Would you willing spent that cost which hard to overcome the electricity bill ?

PS : Recently, I buy Minisforum N5Air, but I am not using it as NAS, I detach the compute unit to replace my main Windows PC ( Intel 9600K ), it run faster and draw half power. It equip 10G and 5G ethernet, Oculink and PCIe slot. May be one day, it will return back be NAS and replace my X299 unraid build and connect 28 disks.