August 18, 20196 yr I'm in the early stages of building an unRAID server, or piecing one together. I'm mainly concerned about a 2nd local storage of photo/video media (Commercial photographer) and then a Plex server as of right now. I run yearly hard drives as external backups currently. I have 8 drives coming off of a local raid that would go straight into the unRAID build, and would add another 8 down the road to start. Is there an online site/calculate that is able to calculate the idle running cost of various configurations? I'm under the assumption Plex will need a bit more performance, is worth setting up a 2nd unRAID as the bulk of the drives dont need the speed? I'm mainly trying to get hard numbers on the yearly cost I'm looking at. Any feedback would be appreciated.
August 18, 20196 yr It depends. Look at my two servers. The Test Bed Server idles at 47W and hits 71W when all the drives are spun up. If I start a non-correcting parity check it increases to 81W with peaks of 85W. The Media Server idles at 36W and hits 72W when all the drives are spun up. (Note that both of these servers are using an i3 Intel processors in different CPU 'families'.) Plex is considered to be a CPU hog and requires about 2000 PassMarks for each 1080p stream when transcoding video. As I recall, the i3 can handle about one transcoding a 1080p stream easily and possibly two if conditions are optimal . And when it is doing so the power consumption will increase. So you want to minimize the power consumption, pick an CPU/MB combination for each server that has just enough horsepower to do the job that you need it to do. Pick a recent CPU family that is optimized for power consumption. Pick a CPU that has built-in graphics capability to avoid the overhead of a separate video card. You will probably pay a bit more in purchase costs and you may be forced to upgrade the CPU if what you want to use the server for changes in the future.
August 18, 20196 yr Only for server's already running: https://technicalramblings.com/blog/monitoring-your-ups-stats-and-cost-with-influxdb-and-grafana-on-unraid-2019-edition/ Part of the problem that I find with most kWh calculators though is that for simplicity sake they only allow for a single price. Whereas I live in a jurisdiction that has 3 different pricing for kWh depending upon the day and time of day.
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