Let's find out just how much power a media server consumes!

[AshleyAshes]

In short, we see a lot of talk about ballpark estimates on the power consumption of various formulations of 24/7 PC, typically media servers.  For my i5 2300 powered media storage/download server running Windows 10 and FlexRAID, with undervolting, I'm able to get it down to 45w idle.  This includes having only it's system drive spinning while all storage drives are spun down and the media server is capable of only spinning up storage drives that contain the requested files.  (Though this is for individual requests, if you want to see a folder, it spins them all up).  With all drives going it's more like 100w.  Other tasks can cause varying loads but the most CPU intensive task this thing does is UnRARing and PARing which even then are still IO intensive than CPU intensive.  However knowing it's idle and 'busy' consumption don't really give me insight into what it costs me.  Since the Kill-A-Watt can not only give you real time data wattage and such it can count the kilowatt hours flowing through it, I decided to start it up at 12:00pm EST today and let it run as long as it can, up until a week and then average out the numbers.  I feel a week will give a nice idea of the machine's long term average consumption in comparison to a few hours since it work loads can vary.

 

Sometimes it's nearly idle all night but for a few automated downloads and torrents.  Other times it's doing it's weekly snapshot generation.  Othertimes it's downloading entire seasons and being bogged down by unRARing and PARing so a short term test isn't very insightful.  I'll update the thread every day or so with numbers so we can see how well it averages out.  ...Also because it'll reset if it loses power and it's summer so super short power blackouts do happen.

 

For those curious, these are the exact specs and details of the system I'm tracking.

 

 

 

[AshleyAshes]

Aaaaaaand... Go!

 

[brwainer]

Spunds like a good plan. In my own home, I have 2x haswell-generation xeon servers, one with 4x 3.5" and 2x2.5" drives, and the other with 4x3.5" and 10x 2.5" drives. Those two "idle" at 15-20% CPU load. The servers plus a switch, three routers, and an ONT are plugged into a PDU which displays amperage, and that is plugged into a UPS which can tell amps and watts. At idle, the whole rack uses 1.2-1.4A, or 145-170W. The servers account for 35W (2x2.5" drives) and 50W (10x2.5" drives). 

 

I just picked up a new (to me) server though that has 2x Opteron 6220 CPUs and 10x4GB FBDIMM memory, during boot it uses 350W and it idles around 250W. The air coming out the rear fan is rather noticably warm.

 

Alongside your power data, please also report the usage of the server. For example, if one day you watch a lot of media, how much did you watch, and was it being transcoded on the server? That will make the power data more interesting. I hope you are going to log the data at least daily, and not just for the full week.

[AshleyAshes]

Just now, brwainer said:

Alongside your power data, please also report the usage of the server. For example, if one day you watch a lot of media, how much did you watch, and was it being transcoded on the server? That will make the power data more interesting. I hope you are going to log the data at least daily, and not just for the full week.

I'll give rough data, but the server does no transcoding, I have powerful HTPCs so there's no Plex, just Kodi reading off SMB shares.  So when the server is serving data it's just doing a simple read function as it serves data up over it's share.

 

Mostly what is does is sit and run some torrents, do some automatic downloads off Usenet using SickRage and SABNZBD, and on te weekends or work evenings it's feeding my HTPCs.

[Pixel5]

the energy cost is exactly why i am not getting a stronger machine to run 24/7 as a server, currently the whole setup with a Synology NAS, a small server for games, router and everything that is connected to the TV on standby uses less than 50W on idle.

 

thats acceptable but still lower would be better as this still means 120€ per years just to have this stuff on idle + whatever it takes when they are processing stuff.

[brwainer]

55 minutes ago, Pixel5 said:

the energy cost is exactly why i am not getting a stronger machine to run 24/7 as a server, currently the whole setup with a Synology NAS, a small server for games, router and everything that is connected to the TV on standby uses less than 50W on idle.

 

thats acceptable but still lower would be better as this still means 120€ per years just to have this stuff on idle + whatever it takes when they are processing stuff.

I would feel the same if my power was the same costs as yours. 50W 24/7 would be $43.80 for the whole year for me.

[scottyseng]

3 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

-snip-

Hmmm, makes me wonder if I should consider building a weaker server as my NAS system. Right now all drives spinning at idle it's around 225-250W according to my UPS. At 24/7 usage, it's around $178 yearly for me. To start it up, it surge pulls 400W then settles down when all drives have started up.

 

My server:

 

[AshleyAshes]

1 hour ago, scottyseng said:

Hmmm, makes me wonder if I should consider building a weaker server as my NAS system. Right now all drives spinning at idle it's around 225-250W according to my UPS. At 24/7 usage, it's around $178 yearly for me. To start it up, it surge pulls 400W then settles down when all drives have started up.

 

My server:

 

Yeah, that is certainly a powerful server. ^_^;;;  I thought my i5 2300 was overkill.   If I was building it again, I'd have stepped back from the i5 2300 and gone for something a bit more efficient like the Ivy Bridge i5-3470T.  However while it'd save some watts, the cost of $70 CAD or so for the i5-3470T would probably take YEARS to offset the power savings.

 

That said, your machine is a bit... Meaner

[scottyseng]

Just now, AshleyAshes said:

Yeah, that is certainly a powerful server. ^_^;;;  I thought my i5 2300 was overkill.   If I was building it again, I'd have stepped back from the i5 2300 and gone for something a bit more efficient like the Ivy Bridge i5-3470T.  However while it'd save some watts, the cost of $70 CAD or so for the i5-3470T would probably take YEARS to offset the power savings.

 

That said, your machine is a bit... Meaner

Yeah, but it's hot in my room. haha.

 

I think I kind of went nuts on CPU...I had the intent of making it render / be a NAS on the side...but I haven't progressed in 3D modeling as much as I wished.

 

That indeed would take some time to offset costs. I don't have any other CPUs laying around. I have my old 2500K, but the cost of another Z77 board isn't worth it to get it going. Maybe I should get a quad core Xeon or something...

[AshleyAshes]

3 minutes ago, scottyseng said:

That indeed would take some time to offset costs. I don't have any other CPUs laying around. I have my old 2500K, but the cost of another Z77 board isn't worth it to get it going. Maybe I should get a quad core Xeon or something...

Yeah, that's the thing, old 'good' mobos can maintain their value well so getting old ones, like Z77 boards are expensive used.  You couold spend less money on a cheap modern board and a little pentium CPU or something

[scottyseng]

Just now, AshleyAshes said:

Yeah, that's the thing, old 'good' mobos can maintain their value well so getting old ones, like Z77 boards are expensive used.  You couold spend less money on a cheap modern board and a little pentium CPU or something

Yeah, I remember my original idea was to get a Core i3 Haswell CPU and just use that...yet somehow I saw that Xeon on ebay and just grabbed it. haha.

[AshleyAshes]

Just now, scottyseng said:

Yeah, I remember my original idea was to get a Core i3 Haswell CPU and just use that...yet somehow I saw that Xeon on ebay and just grabbed it. haha.

I was like 'I have a P67 board, I'll just eBay a CPU for it.  I'll get the slowest mainstream Sandy Bridge quadcore for good measure!'  Then about 20mins after buying it on eBay I asked 'Why didn't I at least get the slowest mainstream IVY BRIDGE instead???'.  But now the i5 2300 isn't 'worth' replacing but on the plus side, home media storage wise, the i5 2300 could last 10 years without seeming 'obsolete'.

 

That said, if i was building NEW today, I'd go for Pentium and some full ATX board with lots of PCIE slots for SATA cards.

[AshleyAshes]

24hrs in and we've consumed 1.5 kwh.

 

This would make the average wattage to be about 62.5w.  Which isn't a bad average.

Tonight over night FlexRAID will run it's weekly parity and snapshot job but there's not toooo much new data this week, the process won't take more than an hour likely.  But I'm curious if it'll bounce things

 

[KuJoe]

At 1.5kWh per day it would cost me $5.87 per month ($70.48 per year) at 730 hours per month. Not bad, but still significantly more expensive than a Synology NAS ($1.27 per month at full load 24x7).

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, KuJoe said:

At 1.5kWh per day it would cost me $5.87 per month ($70.48 per year) at 730 hours per month. Not bad, but still significantly more expensive than a Synology NAS ($1.27 per month at full load 24x7).

I won't dispute that however my NAS is exceptionally functional to me. Firstly, it can take a LOT of hard drives.  Like, at least 16 3.5" drives and that'd be without tryring to make modifications to add non-standard drive cage confirugations.  Though I admit that each drive would add more power load.  It also runs SickRage, CouchPotato, Sabnzbd, and transmission as well as MySQL which my Kodi machines use to run a shared database between them.  Since the server itself is running Windows 10 Pro itself, it's overall potential for utility is pretty high.  While I'd need to set up some internet usage throtteling to make it work, it could readily run game servers or other things for myself.

 

But for sure, the main thing is that it's ginormous.

[Pixel5]

2 hours ago, KuJoe said:

At 1.5kWh per day it would cost me $5.87 per month ($70.48 per year) at 730 hours per month. Not bad, but still significantly more expensive than a Synology NAS ($1.27 per month at full load 24x7).

damn you got low energy prices, it would be more than twice as much for me.

[scottyseng]

5 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

-snip-

Yeah, I'm curious what the usage would be when all drives are powered up. I don't ever think my drives have ever powered down...haha.

[leadeater]

Well my ethereum mining PC/gaming desktop using 594W while mining .

 

My main server uses 180W-200W and the other servers are powered off while I sort out solar, LGA1366 systems are power hungry so will stay off until that is sorted. >.<.

[AshleyAshes]

4 hours ago, scottyseng said:

Yeah, I'm curious what the usage would be when all drives are powered up. I don't ever think my drives have ever powered down...haha.

With all drives spinning, 90-110w, but that's with the CPU still not being under any load.  I would imagine say, if it was running Plex and transcoding to a couple clients, we could bring that wattage up a good ammount.  However since my HTPCs are made with full fat quad core Intel CPUs, they really don't need transcoding for compatibility, they can just playback anything served by SMB.

[Blake]

2 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

However since my HTPCs are made with full fat quad core Intel CPUs, they really don't need transcoding for compatibility, they can just playback anything served by SMB.

Yep, this is why I like the HP Proliant microservers (even the old N54L versions), Uses ~ 40w idle, 60w at load (and that includes a ubnt edge router lite and 24port edge switch). runs windows server 2012r2, file sharing services couple of other small services (like ubnt controller), and that is about it. I just use Kodi, and let my nVidia Shield (before that it was some windows white box), to the transcoding.

 

I only run into issues with multiple 4k actual rip streams, simply due to the spinning rust of 4 disks not having the IOPS to support it.

[You_are_a_cunt]

I need to get myself a Kill-a-watt ._.

[AshleyAshes]

2 hours ago, revsilverspine said:

I need to get myself a Kill-a-watt ._.

Like $20 USD on Amazon.com for the base model I use.

[You_are_a_cunt]

2 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Like $20 USD on Amazon.com for the base model I use.

It's another $30 to ship it because only Amazon Germany delivers to Romania and something similar around here is $40-50 because reasons

[AshleyAshes]

Just now, revsilverspine said:

It's another $30 to ship it because only Amazon Germany delivers to Romania and something similar around here is $40-50 because reasons

Oh,well, the plug wouldn't be compatible either for Europe, though I'm sure there's european versions available locally.  It's a handy thing in general to have.

[You_are_a_cunt]

1 minute ago, AshleyAshes said:

Oh,well, the plug wouldn't be compatible either for Europe, though I'm sure there's european versions available locally.  It's a handy thing in general to have.

Yeah, I'd sooner invest in a voltage stabilizer to be honest. Most flats around here were built in the 70s and 80s and few home owners upgrade their electrical systems