Power Efficient Home Server

[awodev]

I am looking to build a new home server in a short while. I have been looking at a lot of articles, videos and read a lot of threads about this, but often I have one issue about all this. Often what I read or watch are outdated or it's focus is not on power efficiency.

 

Since I'm a student (technical university), I do not have too much money to cover a very high electricity bill. I have money to build the server, and I don't want to make it too cheap; I need it to just work!

I have a few requirements though. My first thought was to just by a Synology NAS, but I don't really think it has enough power.

My top priority is that it can run Plex Server smoothly with maybe 2-3 simultaneous clients and work as a NAS, and then I need a simple webserver. If it has enough power though, I would like to also run a domain controller on it (Windows Server), but it is not too important.

My top priorities of the server is that it has a low running cost (low power use) and it is fairly silent, as it has to stay in the living room. 

I think I'm going to use 3 drives (1 SSD and 2 WD Red 4Tb). I don't really need much more than that.

Since I haven't built a server myself before, I hope that someone with a bit more experience can help me build this power efficient home server. Thanks.

EDIT:
I forgot to mention that the server will be replacing my 2 raspberry pi's. Ofc. this isn't an important factor, but more to show that, I don't need an insane server, it just have to upgrade my current server environment. RPI3 are just not powerful enough for simultaneous plex streams.

[mariushm]

One option ... very cheap and reasonably powerful. 

 

Asrock QC5000M : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157616

Motherboard with CPU soldered to it and passive heatsink and onboard graphics - about $55

Add a regular ATX power supply and a stick of DDR3 memory and some storage and you're done. Note though that being a very basic AM1 "class" based system it only has the 2 sata ports coming from the sata controller built in the cpu. If you want more, you'd have to add a Sata controller in one of the pci-e ports.

Performance wise, the cpu compares with a core 2 duo e7500 or e6600 but keep in mind that unlike those, it uses very little power, less than 25w for cpu+video

 

Other interesting options ... a bit more expensive but ITX and can be powered completely from a 18-19v laptop adapter brick so it saves you the money you'd pay on a separate atx power supply and make your system almost passive

 

50$ : ASRock AM1H-ITX http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157491&ignorebbr=1

Add a 25-40$ socket AM1 processor which comes in box with cooler and memory and you're done. You can use a regular atx power supply or you can use a plain 65w laptop adapter to power it and there's also cheap ITX cases available (though be careful, some itx cases don't have room for 2 classical hard drives).

 

This version has 4 sata ports, but if you use a laptop adapter the voltages (5v and 12v) are produced by the motherboard so they only provide a cable with two sata power connectors and you're supposed to use only two hard drives because the onboard dc-dc converter may not be able to power more than 2 regular hard drives. But a SSD won't put that much extra load on the board, so you could make a sort of power extension to use the SSD as well

 

There's also an Intel based solution with a processor that's pretty much as powerful as the above (but with crappier onboard graphics), but comes in the pack with a 65w laptop adapter brick, overall the price is reasonable..

Yeah, it's this one : Asrock J3160DC-ITX  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157714

This works only with DC input and has 4 sata connectors and apparently can drive all four from laptop adapter, since there's no atx power connector. It also has mini-PCI to plug a cheap wireless card for example, and works with laptop style memory.

 

 

 

[Guest]

Me does not understand plex server...

 

As for webservers... I sometimes play with USBwebserver. It has Apache, php and mysql, and can fit/be run from, an USB stick. It really doesn't need much.  I started playing with it with my AMD Athlon 64 bit X2 4200+ @ 2.2 ghz. First played with it, with just 1 gb of ram. It ran really good for my usage. (small forum, small site, up to 10 clients browsing a phpbb forum at a time, some open dir file sharing...) It was really nice and lightweight.

 

As I said, don't know much about plex servers, and wiki didn't tell me much (in my native language) But in my opinion, setting up a few open dirs or some small viewing/uploading pages with a webserver like I mentioned, would fit your needs... And if that's the case, you can just go for really low end, low power usage computer parts. Can be really old too...

[fjdhdhcyfhf]

Xeons have L on the SKU for low power

i3, i5, & i7 has T on the SKU for low power

The intel go as low as 25-35W TDP which is as good as you can get before you go down to the 6W Celeron range. i dont think the 6W processors would be powerful enough, although they would be more powerful than your raspberry pi. As far as i know: these 6W CPUs can only be found in cheap crappy laptops and m-itx desktop board. The m-ITX only has 2 sata ports and again might not be powerful enough for your 3 plex clients.

 

I have a home server that is 65W TDP. If I could do it again I would spend more money and get a low power xeon with ECC RAM. Mine is a cheap AMD A4. I dont think it will serve 3 clients on plex but then i havnt used it for multimedia.

[fjdhdhcyfhf]

7 minutes ago, mariushm said:

One option ... very cheap and reasonably powerful. 

 

very useful thank you. The shops are only selling two intel Celeron based m-ITX models in my country atm.

[Phate.exe]

Something along the lines of the the Plex server in my sig would suit your needs quite well.

 

I was going to put something together based on an intel Avoton chip, then was offered an unused thinkserver with no drives for stupidly cheap.  It wasn't exactly what I was looking for (I had ideas about a server that used less power than the drives I had in it), but ended up working out perfectly, and cost me less than half as much as the avoton setup would.

 

It's reasonably compact, super quiet, and the 2c/4t i3-3220 that's in it uses very little power but still has enough grunt to run a couple of 1080p transcodes without breaking a sweat.

 

I installed Mint xfce, set up Samba to allow me to access the media directories in the 2TB drive from my gaming desktop and my laptop, and otherwise I don't actually physically interact with it at all.  Treat it as a NAS when copying files over, open up plex in a web browser to refresh/search for more content, then I'm off.

 

I'll probably end up ditching the ECC ram in exchange for the 8gb of Crucial DDR3 that I have in a drawer, and stuffing it completely full of cheap Ultrastars as I update my library with higher resolution files.