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Building an energy efficient NAS - Which platform should I use?

Hey!

I'm currently planning my first NAS build. My main goal is to keep it energy efficient (electricity in germany generally costs way more then in the US), quiet and easily expandable. The NAS will be used to store the files from all my computers so I don't have to move them all the time. There will be only 1 or 2 devices accessing the NAS at the same time. I'm planning to get 2x4 TB WD RED CMR drives for the beginning. I want to be able to add more drives and HBAs as needed. Raid is currently not planned since I'll make regular backups onto an external HDD. I'll probably end up suing TrueNAS with an VM for pi-hole.

 

But here is the big question: Which platform should I choose to keep the power consumption to a minimum while having enough performance.

 

1. mATX SOC

There are many SOC motherbaords with CPUs like the Intel Celeron J4125N for example. The one I'm looking at (ASrock J4125M) has 1 PCIe 16x as well as two 1x slots, 2 sata, support for 2x DDR4.

It has a very low TDP rating and the passively cooled SOC is also a plus but I'm concerned that it won't be powerful enough. Also at least one HBA would be necesarry.

 

2. 1150 low power Xeon

Basically I have some used 1150 motherbaords at home and I could just throw in a low power Xeon but I expect it to use more power then the other options.

 

3. AM4

My third option would be to get a cheap AM4 motherboard paired with an AM4 Athlon or Ryzen 3. This one would be the most expensive option.

 

Other parts I'm planning to use: MX500 250GB for OS, decent 550W be Quiet PSU I have lying around, some old Cooler Master case which has lots and lots and lots of room for drives with tons of airflow.

 -+-+- This is a reminder to clean the dust filters of your PC! -+-+-

 

Main PC:

Ryzen 5 1600 3.8GHz - RX 570 4GB - 2x8GB DDR4 - ASUS Prime X370-Pro - Shadow Rock 2 - Define S - Seasonic Prime Gold 650W

500GB NVME SSD - 1TB SATA SSD - 1TB HDD - Windows 10 Pro

Dorm PC:

i5 4590 - GTX 960 4GB - 2x4GB DDR3 - ASUS H81M2 - Dark Rock 3 - Define R3 - 250GB SATA SSD - Seasonic S12 430W - Windows 10 Pro - Linux Mint

NAS:

Pentium G4400 - 4GB DDR4 - Fujitsu Esprimo P556 - 250GB SATA SSD - 2 x 4TB NAS HDD - 12V PSU - OpenMediaVault

Laptop:

Dell Latitude E6520 - i5 2430M - 2x4GB DDR3 - 250GB SATA SSD - Windows 10 Pro - Linux Mint

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1 minute ago, GrayTech said:

Hey!

I'm currently planning my first NAS build. My main goal is to keep it energy efficient (electricity in germany generally costs way more then in the US), quiet and easily expandable. The NAS will be used to store the files from all my computers so I don't have to move them all the time. There will be only 1 or 2 devices accessing the NAS at the same time. I'm planning to get 2x4 TB WD RED CMR drives for the beginning. I want to be able to add more drives and HBAs as needed. Raid is currently not planned since I'll make regular backups onto an external HDD. I'll probably end up suing TrueNAS with an VM for pi-hole.

 

But here is the big question: Which platform should I choose to keep the power consumption to a minimum while having enough performance.

 

1. mATX SOC

There are many SOC motherbaords with CPUs like the Intel Celeron J4125N for example. The one I'm looking at (ASrock J4125M) has 1 PCIe 16x as well as two 1x slots, 2 sata, support for 2x DDR4.

It has a very low TDP rating and the passively cooled SOC is also a plus but I'm concerned that it won't be powerful enough. Also at least one HBA would be necesarry.

 

2. 1150 low power Xeon

Basically I have some used 1150 motherbaords at home and I could just throw in a low power Xeon but I expect it to use more power then the other options.

 

3. AM4

My third option would be to get a cheap AM4 motherboard paired with an AM4 Athlon or Ryzen 3. This one would be the most expensive option.

 

Other parts I'm planning to use: MX500 250GB for OS, decent 550W be Quiet PSU I have lying around, some old Cooler Master case which has lots and lots and lots of room for drives with tons of airflow.

have a look at the supermicro boards for embedded atom cpus,

they are extreme efficient and costs are reasonable.

Also, they provide good performance from 4cores to up to 8 cores and more

 

like the A1SAI-2750F

they go for around 200-250

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24 minutes ago, Haraikomono said:

have a look at the supermicro boards for embedded atom cpus,

Sadly most reasonable priced boptions with an quadcore atom only have a limited amount of expansion slots/sata ports. Is there a big difference between Atom and Celeron CPUs for NAS usaage?

 -+-+- This is a reminder to clean the dust filters of your PC! -+-+-

 

Main PC:

Ryzen 5 1600 3.8GHz - RX 570 4GB - 2x8GB DDR4 - ASUS Prime X370-Pro - Shadow Rock 2 - Define S - Seasonic Prime Gold 650W

500GB NVME SSD - 1TB SATA SSD - 1TB HDD - Windows 10 Pro

Dorm PC:

i5 4590 - GTX 960 4GB - 2x4GB DDR3 - ASUS H81M2 - Dark Rock 3 - Define R3 - 250GB SATA SSD - Seasonic S12 430W - Windows 10 Pro - Linux Mint

NAS:

Pentium G4400 - 4GB DDR4 - Fujitsu Esprimo P556 - 250GB SATA SSD - 2 x 4TB NAS HDD - 12V PSU - OpenMediaVault

Laptop:

Dell Latitude E6520 - i5 2430M - 2x4GB DDR3 - 250GB SATA SSD - Windows 10 Pro - Linux Mint

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do you have any plans to use plex or something else that would require you to have a GPU for hardware transcoding?

 

i personally found the low power Celerons way too slow so i have gone for an i3 10100 instead, the system idles at like 20W which is fine for me.

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For your use case the SOC atoms are probably fine... assuming you don't want to change use case to needing transcoding for media usage that us. If you might be wanting that then I agree with @Pixel5that a 10 or 11 series CPU with integrated GPU may be better suited.

Please quote my post, or put @paddy-stone if you want me to respond to you.

Spoiler
  • PCs:- 
  • Main PC build  https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/2K6Q7X
  • ASUS x53e  - i7 2670QM / Sony BD writer x8 / Win 10, Elemetary OS, Ubuntu/ Samsung 830 SSD
  • Lenovo G50 - 8Gb RAM - Samsung 860 Evo 250GB SSD - DVD writer
  •  
  • Displays:-
  • Philips 55 OLED 754 model
  • Panasonic 55" 4k TV
  • LG 29" Ultrawide
  • Philips 24" 1080p monitor as backup
  •  
  • Storage/NAS/Servers:-
  • ESXI/test build  https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/4wyR9G
  • Main Server https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/3Qftyk
  • Backup server - HP Proliant Gen 8 4 bay NAS running FreeNAS ZFS striped 3x3TiB WD reds
  • HP ProLiant G6 Server SE316M1 Twin Hex Core Intel Xeon E5645 2.40GHz 48GB RAM
  •  
  • Gaming/Tablets etc:-
  • Xbox One S 500GB + 2TB HDD
  • PS4
  • Nvidia Shield TV
  • Xiaomi/Pocafone F2 pro 8GB/256GB
  • Xiaomi Redmi Note 4

 

  • Unused Hardware currently :-
  • 4670K MSI mobo 16GB ram
  • i7 6700K  b250 mobo
  • Zotac GTX 1060 6GB Amp! edition
  • Zotac GTX 1050 mini

 

 

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24 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

that a 10 or 11 series CPU with integrated GPU may be better suited.

very important detail to look out for is depending on the operating system the new iGPU´s are not supported yet, most notably under linux which most NAS OS´s are based on.

going with 10th gen ensures driver compatibility and give how bad the 11th Gen is nobody is really missing out on anything beside PCI-E gen 4

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I went with a non-X Ryzen CPU for Plex myself. It uses a fraction of the power my Xeon NAS box uses.

 

Any of the 65W TDP CPU/APU's work fine.

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On 5/2/2021 at 4:03 PM, Pixel5 said:

very important detail to look out for is depending on the operating system the new iGPU´s are not supported yet, most notably under linux which most NAS OS´s are based on.

going with 10th gen ensures driver compatibility and give how bad the 11th Gen is nobody is really missing out on anything beside PCI-E gen 4

Yeah, it's a very complicated subject, especially as IMO most NAS users would at some point graduate/upgrade their use case. I haven't actually tried 10th or 11th gen intel myself (yet), but when I do I will most likely be using windows as the OS, mainly because it's less complicated in some aspects of my use case. I am currently using freenas on 2 of my server/nas, but have had to merge my usage with a windows pc, simply because it gets too complicated trying to add in the functionality to freenas itself IMO.... I have spent many hours trying to get it to work in freenas, and having problems, to the point that I simply wanted it to work and resorting to a "dirty" solution.

For that alone, I decided to actually test some of my usage on an intel/windows build instead... and swap some of the programs I used to different ones. So currently testing a jellyfin media server, combined with nzb progs, and may even just resort to having all of this functionality on my main desktop instead of a separate server... it's much less power hungry at idle too so that's where I am leaning at the moment. I will keep my 2 freenas/truenas servers also, as they are serving duty as backup servers etc anyway. And I still like tinkering on them too, learning stuff along the way.

Please quote my post, or put @paddy-stone if you want me to respond to you.

Spoiler
  • PCs:- 
  • Main PC build  https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/2K6Q7X
  • ASUS x53e  - i7 2670QM / Sony BD writer x8 / Win 10, Elemetary OS, Ubuntu/ Samsung 830 SSD
  • Lenovo G50 - 8Gb RAM - Samsung 860 Evo 250GB SSD - DVD writer
  •  
  • Displays:-
  • Philips 55 OLED 754 model
  • Panasonic 55" 4k TV
  • LG 29" Ultrawide
  • Philips 24" 1080p monitor as backup
  •  
  • Storage/NAS/Servers:-
  • ESXI/test build  https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/4wyR9G
  • Main Server https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/3Qftyk
  • Backup server - HP Proliant Gen 8 4 bay NAS running FreeNAS ZFS striped 3x3TiB WD reds
  • HP ProLiant G6 Server SE316M1 Twin Hex Core Intel Xeon E5645 2.40GHz 48GB RAM
  •  
  • Gaming/Tablets etc:-
  • Xbox One S 500GB + 2TB HDD
  • PS4
  • Nvidia Shield TV
  • Xiaomi/Pocafone F2 pro 8GB/256GB
  • Xiaomi Redmi Note 4

 

  • Unused Hardware currently :-
  • 4670K MSI mobo 16GB ram
  • i7 6700K  b250 mobo
  • Zotac GTX 1060 6GB Amp! edition
  • Zotac GTX 1050 mini

 

 

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