Power consumption of your rig

[jimmysticky]

I'm debating making the switch to unRAID.  I'm aiming for lowest power consumption possible.  Currently running freeNAS, and at 60 watts at idle will all 3 WD green (2TB, 2TB, 1TB) hdd's running.  FreeNAS does not seem to power down and runs all hdd (striped).

 

My rig:

Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3

Sempron 145 cpu

4GB DDR2

Corsiar 80+bronze 430 watt psu.

 

I am assuming that each HDD eats about 10 watts.  So I could expect about 20 watts of saving? Plus, I'm guessing that unRAID might run "easier" with my gear vs freeNAS, which is known to demand a lot out of hardware.

 

Thanks.  Curious to hear what everyone's rig is pulling.

[Frayedknot]

I am running a core i5-2320 with 8 gigs of ram on Unraid version 5.0.5.  I have a couple of fans running to keep the drives nice and cool too.

 

4 WD Green Drives and a WD Black laptop drive for cache.

 

My system will sits at 37 to 42 watt power, which is most of the time.  If i spin them all up and watch it during a extract of a large file from sabnzb it will top out to 65-75 watts.

 

Still amazes me how much this machine does at less power than a light bulb.

 

 

[garycase]

My SuperMicro H7SPA-D525 based system with 6 3TB WD Reds (4TB weren't available when I built it) idles at 20w (actually goes between 19w and 20w on my Kill-a-Watt), and uses a max of 45W when all 6 drives are spinning (e.g. during a parity check).

 

I've been very pleased with the power levels 

[jimmysticky]

Wow, you guys are pulling some nice wattage.  Garycase, especially you!  How'd ya get it so low?  Is it your server equipment?  Or perhaps unRAID just runs lighter?  Did you tweak anything to get it to pull such a low amount of wattage?

[garycase]

It's just a very power-efficient little Atom board.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA-H-D525.cfm

 

Nothing special - I just added memory, plugged in 6 WD Red drives ... and set up an UnRAID flash drive.

 

Actually, I think I could probably shave another couple watts off if I switched power supplies.  I'm currently using a Silverstone 450w SFX unit;  they now make a 300w SFX unit that would be slightly more efficient at those low wattages.    ... and it would probably be even more efficient with a PicoPSU unit -- although I'm not certain it could handle the spin-up current for 6 drives (but I THINK it would).

 

[garycase]

By the way, for running UnRAID as a NAS this little board is perfect => PLENTY of CPU power for everything you need to do.    But if you want to run some of the CPU-intensive add-ons (e.g. Plex) it is NOT a good choice.  You'll want to use something with significantly more "horsepower."

 

For my needs, however, it's absolutely perfect.    If I was building another mini-ITX unit today, I'd use exactly the same board.    Note there's a newer, much more powerful Atom board that also runs at very low power levels -- I thought this was going to be "perfect" for a server that could support much higher CPU demands -- but the early builds with the board are showing quite a few problems, so I'd stay away from it for a while ... wait for a couple of BIOS upgrades to resolve the early learning curve issues.  The board is available in both 4-core and 8-core versions:

 

4-cores:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157419

8-cores:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182855

[Compass]

Same MB as garycase, see sig for build, idles at 40w with all drives spun down, 6 fans running though. My power supply is too big, but got a deal on it and was expecting to go to 12-14 drives a bit quicker than I have. If I could get the fan script to work(no luck yet) and get the fans off when idle I could probably shave a few watts off.

[garycase]

My power supply is too big ...

 

Definitely !!  A 560 watt PSU isn't rated for 80+ operation at any load below 112 watts !!  For a board that draws under 20w at idle, you're likely running at a very low efficiency.  In addition, you're drawing a fair number of watts with 6 fans (WHY are you running 6 fans !!?) ... and your board also draws 1-2 watts more than more, since you have the IPMI version.

 

[Falc410]

I'm a bit disappointed when it comes to power consumption because my i3 2100T idles at around 50W, whereas it was 30W (both times with HDDs spun down) when it ran Windows Home Server 2011. Linux isn't optimized that's clear, and it's not really unRaids fault. But since you switch from Unix to Linux, I estimate that the power consumption of the base system will be the same and only the disks will make a difference.

 

Right now I'm copying a file to my unRaid's cache drive and the other drives are spun up and it takes 70W, whereas the WHS running a Raid 5 used between 50-60W during normal write / read operation. I was hoping to save some energy with unRaid compared to a Raid 5 solution but this only really applies when only one disk is spun up, then I might be just under 50W.

[jowi]

See sig, in idle mode 45W, with all 9 drives spun up, 105W, when running some downloads and using shares etc. about 125W.

 

Running 24/7 for almost 2 years now, spin down time is 2 hours.

[jimmysticky]

I was thinking about running a cache drive too. Does that spin down?

[S80_UK]

Yes - it can be set to a particular spin-down time, just like the other drives.

[jimmysticky]

Great!  Well, I installed the free version and have my two WD2TB green drives formatted.  I think they are spun down.  I did feel a little vibration coming from them.  I did not change the spin-down setting.  I think it defaults to 1 hour.

 

Anyway, this morning it was idling @ 40 watts!  Love it!  Only $2.80 per month, Long Island prices.  But that's always on idle.  I'll check the consumption when streaming data next.