Building a Power Efficient Home Server!

21 thoughts on “Building a Power Efficient Home Server!”

• elmuz's Mover script: https://github.com/notthebee/infra/blob/29aacdb50ee28d3728b0fbcd542f2fa4d5396219/roles/filesystems/mergerfs/templates/mergerfs-uncache.j2
  Hardwareluxx forum thread: https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamsten-systeme-30w-idle.1007101/
  Hardwareluxx Google doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI
  Jeff Geerling's Petabyte Pi project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBnomwpF_uY
  LTT's SSD-only NAS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWRvB8fh8T8

  Full build:
  – Supermicro SC833
  – Fujitsu D3402-B11
  – Intel Core i3-6100
  – 32GB DDR4 2133Mhz
  – 1TB Crucial P100 NVMe SSD
  – 1TB SanDisk Extreme SATA SSD
  – 4xWD Red Pro HDD 8TB 7200RPM
  – 4xWD Red Sata SSD 2TB
  – Mellanox ConnectX-3 10Gbe SFP+
  – ASM1166 6xSATA Adapter
  – PicoPSU 160W + Leicke 150W 12V 13A

• Thanks for this video. This is exactly what I'm looking for. Could you provide the link to the spreadsheet? Every motherboard recommended is unavailable.

• I loved this!!! I finally found my people

• do all you guys who recommend this AMD hardware acutally run such hardware? and how do you deal with the mountain of bugs and glitches? i will never ever go back to AMD as long as i can afford Intel and Nvidia…

• What was the link to the power efficiency spreadsheet?

• it's a year later and the world is on ssd – wd red ssd 4tb are absurdly low power – 3-4W active, 50mw idle, no spin up or anything.

• Wolfgang this is the first video of yours I have seen but I am glad to see someone talking about power. I am in the UK and like you it is expensive and I found it confusing how nobody seemed concerned about the costs. I currently use a laptop as my home server, I will purchase a nas for storage to get me off the cloud and properly setup. I think this with the laptop is just about perfect. Low power, and a laptop is powerful enough to transcode 4k on the fly as well with the Intel graphics. Used laptops have some great features and often just don't cost that much at all and are plentiful. In the UK if you buy from cex used, everything has a 2 year warranty as well. Win.

• What kind of OS would one suggest for a server that acts both as a nas, but also as something that is very occasionally remoted in to to act as a desktop/remote PC?

  I'm running windows and using storage spaces, but the more and more I read about it, the more I see that windows storage spaces are very bad..

• I've grabbed a Gigabyte Brix Pro with a core i7 and use it for hyper-v , it draws 23 watts , not bad,.

• Old hardware are indeed very power hungry. My entire setup are pretty much retired corporate hardware that I got for free through connections. My opensense router alone eats up more power than your server. Luckily I haven't gone broke yet since live in one of the US state with the cheapeast electricity and it also eliminates the need for a space heater in my home office during winter.

• Mehg, inefficient. Use a orange pi 5 plus 32gb ram it uses 2 to 5 watts of power. You can make it work with a USB-C powerbank as UPS, passive coling and all the money you save you put on a 4tb nvme ssd. You get a ultra-fast 2×2.5gbit nvme home server with 8 cores and 32gb of ram. Lol.

• I'm discovering this channel by this video and I'm kinda blown by the quality oh what I just saw. Great covering of this subject, well done.

• I have looked at the WD lineup and while they have interesting colors (green for "light computing", blue for "capacity for creators", black for "tuned for gaming" and red for "performance of NAS systems"), there are other colors that people don't usually get in contact with. They also have gold for "reliable performance for enterprise applications" and purple for "high-capacity for 24/7 use". I have invested into a few WD purple drives for my server and I am quite happy with their performance. I also put WD purple SD cards into one of my surveilance cameras and until now, that one has outlasted all the other SD cards that I have.

• My solid state webserver draws 8 watts and has been running for the last 15 years or so.
  It doubles as an ocassional Samba file server.

• It's very interesting, but I live in Russia. I spent more money for elevator.

• Why not install a solar panel to compensate the power usage? Just thinking?

• Finally, a reasonable video that does not focus on cheap old crap to make the build looks cheap.

  Thank you

• I would love a 4 tier cache system that can use a massive amount of cheap old server drives to archive unused data. I'd want frequent backups of important data to the 3rd tier.
  Maybe there could be a solution to use large hdds as the 'ssd' tier and then have a cache (non tiered) in ssds. Basically I don't want to manually move stuff around and have the caching/tiered move or cache data that is frequently access and archive really old data for the sake of power consumption

• Do you have a website where we can check power efficiency on idle of atx PSUs ? I've seen on some reddit that the TX750m might be a little more efficient than the RM550x but I would like more informations before buying.

• Just subscribed because of that Channel name 🔥

• I think for me the Rpi 5 has enough power for working as NAS and plex server with low power consumption.

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