Power Efficient Server (<40W)

[R0M1]

Hello,
I want to build a homelab, but it can only consume 40W.
It must be a tower server and it must have at least 6 SATA ports and 2 PCIe ports.

I host docker (vaultwarden, pihole, reverse proxy, openvpn, duckdns), some websites, TrueNAS and game servers (Minecraft & GTA5).

It can consume more than 40W but only when loaded, like when I start a game server. But I want it to consume no more than 40W while there is only Docker, TrueNAS and some sites Web that works. I have a budget of €1500 (~$1600).

 

What do you recommend to me?

[manikyath]

there's some flaws in your reasoning.

 

first, i want to get my usual rant out the way: anything that is to be accessed by the public or anyone beyond people you'd have over for dinner belongs in a datacenter.

 

having that said, let's pick apart the rest.

 

first things first; 40 watt idle is extremely vague, i have;

- a 4770k based server with 4 hard drives and 5 SSD's, a hardware raid controller, and a quad nic

- an epyc 7313p with two simple GPU's for IOMMU, a 4-controller usb card, and a big arrangement of fans

- a laser printer

- an old 10-gig switch that gets really hot even with active cooling, so i presume it's power hungry

 

all connected to the same UPS, neither server is idle at the moment, and the UPS is reading 155 watts.

40 watts isnt a limit.

 

but let's explore the 40 watt limit anyways. where does this limit come from? what do you want to achieve by staying within this limit?

 

past that, you might want to expand on the reasoning behind the SATA and PCIe requirements, and what exactly your operating system plans are? i'm presuming truenas on the bare metal, some number of storage drives, and everything else ran on top of that?

[HanZie82]

11 minutes ago, manikyath said:

first things first; 40 watt idle is extremely vague, -snip some text-
all connected to the same UPS, neither server is idle at the moment, and the UPS is reading 155 watts.

40 watts isnt a limit.

huh, this sounds like a contradiction to me.
Why is 40W vague, while you are able to just blurt out your own number? (Clearly he wants the number to not go above 40 on said UPS)

 

 

40 minutes ago, R0M1 said:

Hello,
I want to build a homelab, but it can only consume 40W.
It must be a tower server and it must have at least 6 SATA ports and 2 PCIe ports.

I host docker (vaultwarden, pihole, reverse proxy, openvpn, duckdns), some websites, TrueNAS and game servers (Minecraft & GTA5).

It can consume more than 40W but only when loaded, like when I start a game server. But I want it to consume no more than 40W while there is only Docker, TrueNAS and some sites Web that works. I have a budget of €1500 (~$1600).

 

What do you recommend to me?

An idle under 40W would surely be possible.
But i just doubt having such idle consumption with the other wants.
I dont think you will have an easy time finding devices that have said SATA and PCIe and also low idle power consumption.
Even worse if those SATA connections are used for mechanical HDDs as those can range from 5W-15W idle consumption a piece!

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, HanZie82 said:

Why is 40W vague, while you are able to just blurt out your own number? (Clearly he wants the number to not go above 40 on said UPS)

because 40 watts at idle isnt a particularly low number, it's vague in the view of "it isnt a goal that makes sense without a framing of what OP wants to achieve".

 

especially because OP states that:

45 minutes ago, R0M1 said:

It can consume more than 40W but only when loaded,

[R0M1]

I need a server that consumes less than 40W at rest but can support proxmox (VM Docker, VM NAS (TrueNAS or OMV), VM Games (Minecraft, GTAV) and certain websites).
I don't care if it draws more than 40W when loaded, like when I start a game server, but I don't want it to draw more than 40W when the server is idle. Sorry if my English is bad, I'm French.

[HanZie82]

22 hours ago, manikyath said:

because 40 watts at idle isnt a particularly low number, it's vague in the view of "it isnt a goal that makes sense without a framing of what OP wants to achieve".

 

especially because OP states that:

Got it, thanks for explaining!

[Bersella AI]

21 hours ago, R0M1 said:

I need a server that consumes less than 40W at rest but can support proxmox (VM Docker, VM NAS (TrueNAS or OMV), VM Games (Minecraft, GTAV) and certain websites).
I don't care if it draws more than 40W when loaded, like when I start a game server, but I don't want it to draw more than 40W when the server is idle. Sorry if my English is bad, I'm French.

Given your possible use cases, I doubt such power target could even be achieved in idle. For example, it seems that up to 6 SATA drives (HDD or SSD) & up to 2 PCIe devices would be installed onto such machines. Assume that each drive (HDD) would crunch ~6W in idle, and each PCIe card would crunch ~5W, then we would get ~46W of power draw -- not even counting other stuff!

 

I could not figure out what your actual requisitions were for storage or PCIe devices, but for such use cases, a pair of M.2 SSD (>=2TB) could be considered as they would draw a couple of watts (<2W) in idle, and when paired with a power-efficient platform such as Ryzen 5700X / B550 board (w/ 2.5 Gig NIC embedded) without any other devices, they would undoubtedly meet such constrained power envelope.