Hi, I am currently running a HP N54L and N40L each with 5 disks but wanted to consolidate both to one box with low TDP CPU. Currently the idle power consumption of the N54L is about 35w with all the drives spun down in unraid. The N40L is about 30w'ish. So the pair is already drawing more than 65w idle. Electricity price here is crazy costly and i wanted to build a new box with ultra low TDP.

 

I have been looking at these options: 

25w TDP: AMD 5150 and AM 5350 platform

10W TDP: Intel J1900, Intel J3455, Intel J4205

6.5w TDP: Intel J3710

 

I really like the 6.5w J3710 which uses 1/5 power of my N54L and yet almost double the cpu passmark. the problem is that the Asrock 3710-ITX mobo only has 1 off PCIE 2.0 at 1 lane. 

The 10w J3455M MicroATX version has 1 x PCIE 2.0 x 16 slot but runs also at 1 lane but it also have another 2 slots of PCIE 2.0 x 1 slots. So the way i see it is 3 off PCIE 2.0 x 1 available to me.

 

Ideally I wanted to stick 13 drives into the box - 10 data disks, 2 parity and 1 cache. This may or may not be possible.

 

Option A - If I go J3710, it comes with 4 x sata ports already and so I if I stick an 8 port card to it I will get max 12 only. 

Option B - If I go J3455, it comes only with 2 x sata ports but I can add 3 x 4 ports sata card to each PCIE 2.0 x 1 slots and I will get 14 sata ports which will serve my purpose.

 

Could I please ask for some opinions on me using an 8 port card on an PCIE 2.0 x 1 slot. I understand all the bandwidth will be shared by all 8 drives but wouldn't this only affect parity building and checking? When the NAS is being read/written, wouldn't unraid be reading and writing from a single disk regardless of whether the bandwidth is shared?

 

Which option is better for above? Option A or B?

 

Appreciate some help.

 

Thanks

To begin with, your power profiles are going to get shot in the behind as soon as you add in a SATA card into the mix.  Nobody has (or probably ever will) designed and built a RAID controller chip set with power conservation in mind!  Performance is the first objective!  You are going to endup needing a PCIE 2.0 X4 slot.  PCIE 2.0 X1 will only really support two modern HD's at a time.  (8 + drives on a PCIE 2.0 X1 will drop parity and rebuilt speeds below 25MB/sec.  You do the math...  Plus both X1 slots will (probably) be sharing the same internal MB bus which will take things even lower if you have a card in each.)

 

Writing also requires the use of two disks--- Parity plus the data disk. 

 

If you really want to reduce that power profile, look at going to 8TB or 10TB drives to see  if you can cut the drive count that way.

Edited August 5, 20178 yr by Frank1940

TDP isn't a particularly good way to select a CPU for unRAID.  TDP represents the maximum amount of heat you should have to dissipate - but that's at full load.  Your server will spend most of its time at idle so it's more important to evaluate idle power consumption.  Intel chips have traditionally had better idle power consumption than AMD.

 

You're on the right track with implementations like the Celeron J's but you should also look at the Intel Atom boards. You might get a better port/slot configuration and the slightly higher TDP will not necessarily translate into higher power consumption figures.

4 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

You are going to endup needing a PCIE 2.0 X4 slot.  PCIE 2.0 X1 will only really support two modern HD's at a time. 

 

Thanks. None of the J3435, 3710, 4205 boards have anything better than 1 lane of PCIE 2.0. So I guess these boards are not going to work.

I did find an ITX board that comes with PCIE 2.0 at 8 lanes. If I stick an 8 port Sata card (such as the Dell Perc H310) to this slot, will I still be seeing a bottleneck?

 

3 hours ago, tdallen said:

You're on the right track with implementations like the Celeron J's but you should also look at the Intel Atom boards.

Thanks. I have been searching but could not find much of these Atom boards available. If you know any particular one could you please advise so I can narrow down the search.

Are you in the US?  ASRock and Supermicro are vendors for this type of board.

 

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAB945PW9817

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157475

https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-Mini-A1SRI-2558F-O-Motherboard-Combo/dp/B00HS4NLHA/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&qid=1501949891&sr=8-16&keywords=intel+atom

https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-Atom-C2758-Motherboards-MBD-A1SRI-2758F-O/dp/B00FM4M7TQ/ref=sr_1_23?ie=UTF8&qid=1501949957&sr=8-23&keywords=intel+atom

https://www.amazon.com/ASRock-Motherboard-C2750D4I-COLOR-BOX/dp/B00HIDQG6E

 

These commonly include extra SATA ports beyond what is supported by the basic chipset.  The extra ports come from Marvel controllers, though, which have a rather mixed history recently on unRAID - so maybe they work out for you, maybe not.  The basic 6 should be fine, though.  And these come with an x8 slot for a full SATA controller (which has the benefits of extra slots with the negative of extra power consumption).

 

6 minutes ago, tdallen said:

Are you in the US?  ASRock and Supermicro are vendors for this type of board.

 

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAB945PW9817

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157475

https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-Mini-A1SRI-2558F-O-Motherboard-Combo/dp/B00HS4NLHA/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&qid=1501949891&sr=8-16&keywords=intel+atom

https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-Atom-C2758-Motherboards-MBD-A1SRI-2758F-O/dp/B00FM4M7TQ/ref=sr_1_23?ie=UTF8&qid=1501949957&sr=8-23&keywords=intel+atom

https://www.amazon.com/ASRock-Motherboard-C2750D4I-COLOR-BOX/dp/B00HIDQG6E

 

These commonly include extra SATA ports beyond what is supported by the basic chipset.  The extra ports come from Marvel controllers, though, which have a rather mixed history recently on unRAID - so maybe they work out for you, maybe not.  The basic 6 should be fine, though.  And these come with an x8 slot for a full SATA controller (which has the benefits of extra slots with the negative of extra power consumption).

 

Many thanks tdallen. No not based in US. I am in Australia so a lot harder to source these motherboards. As a side note these are also pretty costly too. Obviously with lesser options we get what we paid for. I will try to search for used ones.

 

Would you think an 8 port sata card will work well with PCIE 2.0 x 16 slot with 8 lanes?

26 minutes ago, fliptoback said:

I did find an ITX board that comes with PCIE 2.0 at 8 lanes. If I stick an 8 port Sata card (such as the Dell Perc H310) to this slot, will I still be seeing a bottleneck?

 

 

No!  I believe that four lanes will handle eight spinners without a bottleneck.  I think you would need eight lanes if you used eight ssd's!  If the MB has two PCIE 2.0X8 slots, you might be able to use two of these cards and not have a problems.  You might want to look through these threads:

   

and

 

1 minute ago, Frank1940 said:

No!  I believe that four lanes will handle eight spinners without a bottleneck.  I think you would need eight lanes if you used eight ssd's!  If the MB has two PCIE 2.0X8 slots, you might be able to use two of these cards and not have a problems.  You might want to look through these threads:

 

Great. The Biostar A68N-5545 with the AMD A8-5545 CPU has a PCIE 2.0 x 8 lanes. 

The Gigabyte GA-AM1M-S2P has the PCIE 2.0 x 4 lanes. This is compatible with the Athlon 5150 5350 cpu.

 

Would both options above works well with the 8 port sata card?

 

Thanks for the links too. I will take a closer look.

7 hours ago, fliptoback said:

Ideally I wanted to stick 13 drives into the box - 10 data disks, 2 parity and 1 cache. This may or may not be possible.

I just noticed that you wanted to use dual parity.  You should read this post:

When I was looking a CPU's, this basically meant that I was looking at processor families that had been introduced after 2014 for Intel and 2015 for AMD.  With my semipron 140, dual parity checked times almost doubled to give a very rough feel.  Even upgrading to a dual core AMD processor (off E-Bay) didn't get the time down that much. 

 

My Media Server (specs below) is idling at 36 watts and that includes three case fans and the PS losses!  Remember that you haven't even thought about what your SATA card, case fans and PS inefficiencies is are going to be.  You may be chasing a red herring in attempting to get to the lowest possible power CPU-MB combination.  You may only end up saving 5-10W and then have sub-par performance.  I just started a non-correcting parity check and the power is now in the 95-108W area.  (Refreshing the GUI screen increases the CPU usage which accounts for the increase from the 95W range!)

7 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

When I was looking a CPU's, this basically meant that I was looking at processor families that had been introduced after 2014 for Intel and 2015 for AMD.  With my semipron 140, dual parity checked times almost doubled to give a very rough feel.  Even upgrading to a dual core AMD processor (off E-Bay) didn't get the time down that much. 

 

My Media Server (specs below) is idling at 36 watts and that includes three case fans and the PS losses!  Remember that you haven't even thought about what your SATA card, case fans and PS inefficiencies is are going to be. 

 

Thanks I have a quick glance of that link. Will look closer tomorrow. I can see that none of the CPUs I have nominated support AVX2. So I need to review my initial requirement again.

 

As for the rest of the component this is what I am intending to get:

1. Dell Perc H310 8-port sata card

2. Fractal design node 804 case. Will add 1 x case fan to it. 

3. Existing Pico 80w PSU with 120w power brick. I have this in a previous build. Alternatively i can also use an existing Seasonic 360W Gold psu that i have as a leftover from another build.

4. WD Red 3TB and 4TB that i will transplant from my current N54L and N40L servers.

 

 

Edited August 5, 20178 yr by fliptoback

1 hour ago, Frank1940 said:

You may only end up saving 5-10W and then have sub-par performance.

Which means the server will be fully spun up much longer, increasing power usage overall. "Low power" chips are useful in enclosures where you can't get rid of heat, but otherwise are generally not more efficient at idle than the same family chip in a normal usage scenario.

2 hours ago, fliptoback said:

As a side note these are also pretty costly too.

Well yes and I'm not sure it's worth the expense, but they fit your requirements quite nicely...  In truth it's hard to justify expensive hardware based solely on power savings.  I pay over $0.21/kwh (expensive in the US) and when I did the math on a much more power efficient build it would have taken *years* to pay back the expense.  For a system that idles most of the time, the actual $ savings of a low power build over a modern standard build just aren't that great.  Just be careful with board selection and don't get a lot of features you don't need.

 

For instance, let's say a low power build idles at 35w.  Running 24 hours a day, that's 306 kwh per year.  A 45w standard build would use 394 kwh per year.  At $0.21/kwh that's a cost difference of $18/year (and as @jonathanm notes, it may not even be that great).  I won't make any assumptions about how important $18/year is to you.  But it's clear that a) it takes a long time to justify spending any extra money on a low power build, and b) at US energy prices it doesn't cost that much more over time to have a fully functional modern 1151 Pentium setup running.

2 hours ago, fliptoback said:

3. Existing Pico 80w PSU with 120w power brick. I have this in a previous build. Alternatively i can also use an existing Seasonic 360W Gold psu that i have as a leftover from another build.

Make sure that this PS has as single 12V buss and NOT two separate 12V busses.  95+% of the 12 volt load in a the typical NAS server is used by the hard drives.  Modern HD's have a current surge of up to two amperes on startup.  You would be looking at a 26 ampere surge on startup and shutdown, and for the start of parity checks.  (If you exceed the ampere rating on any buss for a few milliseconds, the PS will shutdown to protect its electronics!)

5 hours ago, tdallen said:

A 45w standard build would use 394 kwh per year.  At $0.21/kwh that's a cost difference of $18/year (and as @jonathanm notes, it may not even be that great).

 

Thanks our energy rates are somewhat higher and by my calc the difference in energy per year is not $18 but $20 BUT your logic is spot on and you are absolutely right in that the savings is not phenomenal. I guess I am just hoping to get a most efficient unraid box as possible but it looks like it is not cost effective payback wise.

 

However, if I can reduce that 35w idle to say 15w or from my current 65w to 15w magically, i would save $103 per year. But you are right. This may or may not happen. 

 

5 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

Make sure that this PS has as single 12V buss and NOT two separate 12V busses.  95+% of the 12 volt load in a the typical NAS server is used by the hard drives.  Modern HD's have a current surge of up to two amperes on startup.  You would be looking at a 26 ampere surge on startup and shutdown, and for the start of parity checks.  (If you exceed the ampere rating on any buss for a few milliseconds, the PS will shutdown to protect its electronics!)

 

Thanks. I am keen to understand if you are referring to the Seasonic gold or the Pico or both. On the seasonic one the faceplate says +12V 30A. I guess this means it is 1 x 12v bus?

 

 

Edited August 6, 20178 yr by fliptoback

1 hour ago, fliptoback said:

Thanks. I am keen to understand if you are referring to the Seasonic gold or the Pico or both. On the seasonic one the faceplate says +12V 30A. I guess this means it is 1 x 12v bus?

 Yes to the Seasonic being a single rail supply.  I have not even heard of the name Pico in reference to a power supply.  By your description of it, it almost sounds like a PS for laptop type applications.  I suspected that the Seasonic might be single rail supply because they always have a premium price compared to other PS's with the same power rating.  (Dual rail supplies are the rule for the really cheap supplies as the electronic component costs are lower.) 

23 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

 Yes to the Seasonic being a single rail supply.  I have not even heard of the name Pico in reference to a power supply.  By your description of it, it almost sounds like a PS for laptop type applications.  I suspected that the Seasonic might be single rail supply because they always have a premium price compared to other PS's with the same power rating.  (Dual rail supplies are the rule for the really cheap supplies as the electronic component costs are lower.) 

 

Thanks for that. I have now googled and try to understand the influence of startup current of the WD Red. This is what I find:

https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-800002.pdf

 

It says the WD Red series has a 1.75A 12V peak current. There is also another document from WD that says with the correct jumpers on the hdd, the drives can be set to reduced spinup current or to set to staggered start. I don't think unraid support these so will not consider this option further.

 

So with 1.75A x say 12 drives, we are talking 21A which according to the +12V/30A capabilities of the Seasonic, I am guessing it is a go?

For the pico ps which is a minature power supply, don't think this is beefy enough so will not consider the pico further for my build.

Edited August 6, 20178 yr by fliptoback

You are actually lucky to have found a number for the WD Reds.  Many times I have not been able to locate a startup current, only running current.  Let's 12 Drives X 1.75A/Drive  X 12V  =  252VA  =  252W.  That Seasonic has a 360W rating so there is another 108W available for everything else.  With your desire for 'everything else' to be under 65W, sounds like that would work!

4 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

You are actually lucky to have found a number for the WD Reds.  Many times I have not been able to locate a startup current, only running current.  Let's 12 Drives X 1.75A/Drive  X 12V  =  252VA  =  252W.  That Seasonic has a 360W rating so there is another 108W available for everything else.  With your desire for 'everything else' to be under 65W, sounds like that would work!

 

Cheers Frank. Looks like I am off to a good start. 

 

I just need to find a suitable motherboard that allows me to run the PCIE 2.0 at at least 4 lanes and get a compatible sata card.

I am aware that this is an old topic, but maybe someone will find this motherboard interesting...

 

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/HCIPC-M42S-6-HCM18NVR3-13SATA-Ports-2-Giga-LAN-1-COM-8-USB2-0-VGA-HDMI/32574624109.html