50 watt home server

[Spekham2013]

Hello. I want to build my own home server. I have a limit of 100 watt. I thought of using a picopsu with i3 6100t. I plan on running esxi with freenas and ubuntu server. What do you guys recommend for pc parts?

thanks

[Darel321]

to limit power consumption I would try the banana pi, if thats enough to run whatever you want to do.. I dunno about servers but that thing is quite powerfull

[mikat]

esxi on 100 watts? you're gonna have a hard time i think

[EricX2]

Stupid question, why do you only have 100 watts to work with?

[SLAYR]

12 hours ago, EricX2 said:

Stupid question, why do you only have 100 watts to work with?

It is most likely the capacity of the pico psu.

 

If you plan on running freenas on it each drive is probabbly going to take 10-15w, so I would recommend a regular atx psu as the pico psus will most likely only have 1 sata power connector.

[mariushm]

I'd suggest you go get an AM1 board with DC in jack to power it directly from a 18-19v laptop adapter. You save money by not buying a picoPSU this way and you also get a passively cooled adapter (the picopsu would be HOT and still have to get power from somewhere).

Here's such an example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157491

It works with either DC In or regular ATX connector ( note though that in theory you can only power two sata hard drives when using the DC In jack, or at least that's what the manual says and there's only one cable that takes power from the motherboard and creates two sata power connectors).

It also has mini pci-e so you could plug a cheap wireless card there if you want to, and you have a pci-e x4 (x16 physically, x4 electrical) if you want to add an additional sata controller or something.

 

You can pair it with a AMD 5350 for about 40$ and you'll get a decent performance.. about 60-70% of that i3 6100t I would say: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113364

It's quad core in a TDP of only 25w, while the i3 6100t has a 35w tdp, and the amd has better graphics built in.

With a stick of memory and a hard drive, you won't go over 50w.  A 65w laptop adapter would be enough and safe.

 

May want to search for other motherboards with DC In connector, there could be such boards for other sockets which don't have as many limitations as socket AM1 (single channel ram, only x4 electrical lanes on pci-e slot etc) - they're kind of rare but they're out there.

 

[Mark77]

Celeron G1610T (Ivy Bridge dual-core), Enermax 365W PSU, Intel 6-series motherboard (Asus P8H67M-Evo), 4gb DDR3L, Crucial M500, and an old Lite-On DVD player -- I built such a system recently, and I couldn't figure out any combination of use cases that made it consume more than 60W per my Watts Up? Pro .NET meter.  It idled at a little under 40W.  It would've been lower if not for my 15-year-old ATX PSU which certainly isn't the most efficient (ATX soft-off, it sucks back 5W!).

 

Such a machine can run ESXI and Ubuntu on that.  I don't see why you couldn't do the same within a 100W power budget with an i3 and a couple hard drives.  If your board is like my Asus Cougar Point with the Ivy Bridge CPU, it will have an option in it to limit/derate the CPU if you need to keep it beneath 100W. 

 

 

[Spekham2013]

On 19 June 2016 at 5:20 PM, EricX2 said:

Stupid question, why do you only have 100 watts to work with?

high power cost. 0,25 cents per kWh. And i also want to keep it low for now

[AshleyAshes]

I have a Sandy bridge i5 2300 NAS that idles at 45w.  Though it breaches 100w no problem if it has to spin up all the drives.