Power efficient homelab

Pupika03 · December 10, 2023

Hello!

I’m interested to build myself a nas for home use only. As far as I went is that I want to run UnRaid. On that will be Plex, some arr services, nginx proxy manager, homebridge and some miscallenous services. For Plex, it would be nice if I can transcode 4K movies. So GPU maybe?

But my main point is that I want to be as power efficient as I can. Because I live in Europe and the energy price is quite high where I live.

For drives that had in my mind was seagate exos 20tb, for start 2 or 3 hdd. 1 for parity for sure. When one will be near max, I would purchase another one and put it in the system. So in the future it would be nice if I have pcie slot and power left for an lsi card. And 1-2 m.2 ssd for cache.

I don’t have space for a rack, so maybe Fractal Design R7 XL. It has great expandibility options.

Thanks if you read this post and for your help.

Bersella AI · December 11, 2023

I'm running a custom HP 800 G3 SFF build as a server with functionalities including transcoding & pretty high power efficiency:

Case/Motherboard/Power: HP 800 G3 SFF
(Power: 180W with Platinum certified)
Hard drives: Seagate Exos 16TB + SkyHawk 4TB
Boot drive: Lenovo SL700 SSD (128GB)
Note: There are 3 SATA ports, 1 M.2 NVMe port, up to 2 3.5' HDD bays available for storage, and 4 PCIe slots for expansion.
RAM: 2 sticks of 4GB DDR4-2133 (4 slots available)
Processor: Pentium G4600

My considerations include:

Although there would be limited room for expansion to storage, it should be noted that the more drives installed, the more power they would consume. Therefore, it is ideal to grab hard drives with capacity as large as possible.
Also, the Pentium G4600 has a GPU, i.e. HD 630 built in, making it sufficient in transcoding, and the dual-core design can handle most of workloads, even including virtualization, as LIGISTX did by using Core i3-6100, whilst consuming less power than more performant or older ones.
Whether parity is needed depends on the significance of data to be stored. Here I did not prepare any drive for parity, but rather had my critical files synced periodically between these hard drives for redundancy.
This build came with a Platinum-certified power supply, which helps me save a lot of power. With 2 drives spinning, this build consumes only ~20W in idle, and 46~49W when transcoding a 4K movie.

There are also used models from HP, Dell & Lenovo, such as the next-generation HP 800 G4, available in the market with affordable prices & highly efficient power supplies.

You may build another server with a low-power processor like Celeron N5105 or N100, as well as a custom case for more drives, but the costs in power supply would become fairly high in regard of efficiency and/or form factor. Those rated 300~350W with Bronze certified would be the least requirements.

Hope these would help you make decisions more wisely.