Kwa

I’m trying to improve the power consumption of my NAS. The 2 (7200 rpm) HDDs I had were using 15W at idle and 5W when spun down. I’m reading a lot of conflicting information about what is lower power between HDD, SSD and NVMe SSD. Eventually I started looking at SATA SSD (please let me know if this is not the most power efficient)

I found this site that shows a benchmark of different SSDs and their average power consumption. I was about to go with WD Red but then I found a YouTube video saying I shouldn’t go with WD for a NAS.

Can you tell me what brand or model you’re using in your homelab that’s power efficient? Ideally I would like 4TB SSD.

Thanks!

So I have finally built my NAS. I used an N100 CPU because I saw it has low power consumption.

Right now I have 2 NVMe SSDs and 2 HDDs. I have installed proxmox on the 2 SSDs as RAID1. I have not partitioned the HDDs yet, they are just plugged in and powered on.

Just booting into proxmox, without any VMs or containers running, I am pulling 45W from the wall. This looks super high to me, and I’m afraid that starting to use the HDDs and running some VMs may double this…

I don’t have much references, but I have an Odroid with an external self-powered HDD, it is using 5W. I have a raspberry pi 4 with an external HDD, the raspberry is pulling 3W and the HDD 3W.

With these data, I was thinking I wouldn’t go over 20W. 45W is enormous and not something I can run 24/7, kind of a fail for a NAS…

Have I done something wrong or is it just how much it’s supposed to pull?

Edit: I have come across powertop. Using the auto tune, I was able to drop to 33-35W. I have unplugged the HDDs and dropped to 22W. I guess I cannot go lower, this may be because of the PSU or the 2 NVMe

Hey again! I’ve progressed in my NAS project and I’ve chosen to go for a DIY NAS. I can’t wait for the parts to arrive!

Now I’m a bit struggling to choose an OS. I am starting with 2x10To HDD + 1To NVMe SSD. I plan to use 1 HDD for parity and to add more disks later.

I plan to use this server purely as a NAS because I will be getting a second more powerful server some time next year. But in the meantime, this NAS is a big upgrade over my rpi 4, so I will run some containers or VMs.

I don’t want to go with TrueNAS as I don’t want to use ZFS (my RAM is limited and I’m not sure I can add drives with different sizes). I’ve read btrfs is the second best for NAS, so I may use this.

Unraid seemed like the perfect fit. But the more I read about it, the more I wonder if I shouldn’t switch to Proxmox.

What I like about Unraid is the ability to add a disk without worrying about the size. I don’t care much about the applications Unraid provides and since docker-compose is not fully supported, I’m afraid I won’t be able to do things I could have done easily with a docker-compose.yml I also like that’s it’s easy to share a folder. What I don’t like about Unraid is the cache system and the mover. I understand why the system works this way but I’m not a fan.

I’ve asked myself if I needed instant parity for all my data and if I should put everything in the array.

The thing is that for some of my data I don’t care about parity. For instance, I’m good with only backing up my application data and to have parity for the backup. For my tv shows I don’t care about parity nor backup while I want both for my photos.

After some more research, I found mergerfs and snapraid. I feel that they are more flexible and fix the cache/mover issue from Unraid. Although I’m not sure if snapraid can run with only 2 disks.

If I go with Proxmox I think I would use OpenMediaVault to setup shares.

Is anyone using something like this? What are your recommendations?

Thanks!

I’m looking for some recommendations to improve my homelab. But first a bit of history to explain where I’m at and where I’m going. I currently have a super old Odroid C2 and a Raspberry Pi 4B. Everything is working great, but I’m missing two things in this setup: -The ability to transcode -A NAS Now a little bit about me, I’ve been using Linux for more than a decade, so I know how to do stuff, but when it comes to hardware, I have close to zero knowledge… So I was a bit surprised when I plugged 2 external HDDs on my rpi and it shutdown them after a few minutes. I found out that it was a power supply issue, so I did the first thing that came to my mind at this time: I bought another HDD with external power supply, to then find out that having a self powered and an external powered HDD would still fail (although it took longer).

So now I know my mistakes, I should have gone with a NAS instead. I checked the Synology NAS and found out NAS are actually quite expensive. I’m looking for at least 4 bays. I’ve been looking at some DIY NAS, but I’m a bit lost. I found some builds using a Jonsbo N2 that seems cool but at the same time I’m reading the fans are always running at full speed and I’m afraid that the power consumption will skyrocket.

So to sum up, I would like to have a NAS, ideally that can transcode and is low power. In the beginning, I wanted to have a NAS and a mini-PC that can transcode to replace my Odroid C2. But it seems the NAS are far more expensive than the mini PC. What are the recommendations here?

-Synology (Can it transcode?)

-A DIY (Jonsbo with an ITX board that can transcode)

-A DIY (Jonsbo with an ITX board just powerful enough for a NAS) + a mini PC

-Something else?

My budget was 500€, but it seems I won’t be able to do much below 700€