I have been reading alot on the the low power consumption rigs being built or talked about, My question is:

how do determine the idle watts? is that just cpu? no drives running,no fans running?

 

Depends but I would think the fans will be running to some degree.

Drives could be spun down or spun up with no activity.

 

Idle to me is when it's not doing anything and the drives are spun down.

 

My Fujitsu machine idles at 16W, which is pretty much the best I've seen from a 'real' machine.  Only thing I've seen that idles lower is a NUC.

My server #1, listed below, with drives spun down but fans running draws 27w and 54w with drive spun up.

I have been reading alot on the the low power consumption rigs being built or talked about, My question is:

how do determine the idle watts? is that just cpu? no drives running,no fans running?

 

Personally I hook up a kill-a-watt meter and take measurements while all the drives are idle and when all of the drives spun up during a parity check.

 

Since I don't have active fan control, all of the fans are running at constant RPM --- although I did undervolt most of the case fans.

 

Doing this, I found my setup using 80W with the drives spun down and about 145W with the drives cranking.

 

It's going to be interesting to see how much power consumption goes up when I swap out my old AMD Phenom II X4 B96 (95W TPD) with a dual Xeon E5-2670 (2x 115W TDP).  OTOH, the motherboard enough PWM headers for all of my case fans.  So hopefully it'll spin down the fans and save some power. 

 

Anyone know how to configure energy saving features of CPUs in unRAID?  I see power saving options in the motherboard BIOS settings, but, no idea if unRAID overrides or works closely with such features.

 

My previous server with the same hard drives but with, PSU -Corsair CMPSU-400CX • MB - Biostar A760G MB • CPU - Sempron 140, would draw 81w compared to 54w with the new components.