Almost Made a Less Power Hungry NAS

[joeschmuck]

So I started looking at my NAS and thinking it's just pulling way too much power at idle (73 watts), and it really is. Or how much power is being pulled during a scrub (138 watts). It's pulling 78 watts on average or 56.16 kWh per month. You know that all sounds like a lot of power so I started looking into a new system which would be a bit less power hungry.

I started looking into buying a nice Supermicro MB and Xeon CPU and I was drooling so bad. I would "try" to reuse my Kingston ECC RAM but plan for the worse of course. Not factoring in the RAM, I was looking at about a $370 purchase, less for good sales and I'm always willing to wait a while and shop around.

Then I started to think about it, how much does it really cost me to run my FreeNAS and how long would it take me to recoup the $370 purchase price.

Well after figuring out what my electricity costs as an average for the most expensive months of the year, my cost comes to approx. 11 cents per kWh. This means that my power hungry NAS costs me 21 cents a day or $6.18 a month to operate.

So now comes the disappointing part :(, disappointing because I talked myself out of a new system.

It would take me roughly 10.8 years to recoup just the cost of that $370 system strictly when determining electrical power draw. My spreadsheet allowed me to plug in different variables and unless my electricity cost an arm and leg, well.

So now I will not replace my NAS hardware based on the argument that it's worth it from an electrical savings perspective, because it isn't.

 

[anodos]

So I started looking at my NAS and thinking it's just pulling way too much power at idle (73 watts), and it really is. Or how much power is being pulled during a scrub (138 watts). It's pulling 78 watts on average or 56.16 kWh per month. You know that all sounds like a lot of power so I started looking into a new system which would be a bit less power hungry.

I started looking into buying a nice Supermicro MB and Xeon CPU and I was drooling so bad. I would "try" to reuse my Kingston ECC RAM but plan for the worse of course. Not factoring in the RAM, I was looking at about a $370 purchase, less for good sales and I'm always willing to wait a while and shop around.

Then I started to think about it, how much does it really cost me to run my FreeNAS and how long would it take me to recoup the $370 purchase price.

Well after figuring out what my electricity costs as an average for the most expensive months of the year, my cost comes to approx. 11 cents per kWh. This means that my power hungry NAS costs me 21 cents a day or $6.18 a month to operate.

So now comes the disappointing part :(, disappointing because I talked myself out of a new system.

It would take me roughly 10.8 years to recoup just the cost of that $370 system strictly when determining electrical power draw. My spreadsheet allowed me to plug in different variables and unless my electricity cost an arm and leg, well.

So now I will not replace my NAS hardware based on the argument that it's worth it from an electrical savings perspective, because it isn't.

Those are the sorts of calculations I'll never let my wife see.

 

[BigDave]

$12.09 per month @ based on cost of 11.2 cents per kWh (says my little Kill-a-Watt meter).
My PSU is plugged into the meter at the wall, and my Freenas machine and the pfSense box
are running off the PSU. I was thinking that's not so bad, until reading your post Mark

 

[joeschmuck]

Well @BigDave you are running a bit more hardware than I am so it's not too bad. If you removed the pfSense box and that HBA, bet it would drop below my consumption level. My AMD CPU is not the most efficient, that's my big power user.

Also, if you haven't tweaked your tunables to allow your CPU into some of the lower power levels, well you might be able to take advantage of that.

 

[cyberjock]

Well, depending on where you live in the world, the costs will change too.

For example, if you live in Canada, the "waste" heat from your computer simply complements your heating system in the house. It may be more expensive paying to run your computer on a per-BTU basis versus using a central heating system that runs on natural gas, but that's getting very deep into things and is harder to calculate because things like the efficiency of your heating system play a bigger role.

On the other hand, if you live in the deserts of Arizona, your "waste" heat from your computer is costing you double. Once by the computer and again by your A/C to remove it. More than likely all but a couple of months of the year will your A/C be cycling on and off as the room gets a little toasty from the computer.

 

[joeschmuck]

All those are true statements however if your system has that high of a heat load, odds are you are pulling some serious power with a lot of hard drives which isn't what my posting was about of course, I was focusing on the MB/CPU combo. I still like the Supermicro boards and odds are I'll pick one up regardless of the calculations, I just want it.

And to be honest, when I started the calculations I only took into account how long it would take to pay off the new investment alone which was almost 5 years, but then I had to calculate the energy usage difference because that is the real cost recovery time and that put it out to almost 11 years. Of course these values change based on the cost of a kWh of power, the current power draw and the new power draw. I could save more if I only sleep my drives, well unless one of the drives fails just because I'm now spinning it up and down frequently. Right now my drives hit their warranty mark in October and they have been spinning pretty much the entire time, well 4 of them, I added 2 a few months later to create my final pool which I'm very happy with for now.

 

[Ericloewe]

Well, depending on where you live in the world, the costs will change too.

For example, if you live in Canada, the "waste" heat from your computer simply complements your heating system in the house. It may be more expensive paying to run your computer on a per-BTU basis versus using a central heating system that runs on natural gas, but that's getting very deep into things and is harder to calculate because things like the efficiency of your heating system play a bigger role.

On the other hand, if you live in the deserts of Arizona, your "waste" heat from your computer is costing you double. Once by the computer and again by your A/C to remove it. More than likely all but a couple of months of the year will your A/C be cycling on and off as the room gets a little toasty from the computer.

Dual Core 2 Xeons with FBDIMMs in the winter, Xeon E3 in the summer. :D

(That solution was not entirely serious. Don't go spending money on FBDIMMs to lower your heating bill.)

 

[BigDave]

If you removed the pfSense box and that HBA, bet it would drop below my consumption level.

I might try that little test. To drop the HBA in my current set-up (X9SCM-F) and plug in my 6 drives, I'll have to
lose the SATA DOM and revert back to a USB boot device. Before doing that, I'm gonna take the pfSense box off the UPS
and get a reading for just the FreeNAS server alone. Then after plugging my drives directly to the mobo, I'll have
a accurate picture of the cost diff.
I'll make a current backup first, just to be on the safe side. I'll let y'all know how it goes.

 

[joeschmuck]

Interested to hear about the results.

 

[BigDave]

$12.09 per month @ based on cost of 11.2 cents per kWh (says my little Kill-a-Watt meter).
My PSU is plugged into the meter at the wall, and my Freenas machine and the pfSense box
are running off the PSU.

To start this power evaluation, I first shut down my pfSense box and unplugged it from the UPS.

Now with the FreeNAS machine alone running off the PSU, the Kill-a-Watt meter dropped the estimated monthly cost down to $6.77

This tells me that the pfSense is costing an estimated $5.32 per month, it is high for sure, but thats cause it's on really old AMD hardware.

I then shut down the FreeNAS and removed the SATA DOM boot device, uninstalled the HBA and plugged all six drives directly
to the motherboards SATA ports, I then installed FreeNAS on a Patriot Supersonic XT 32GB USB.

I went into the bios and set the four PWM fans in my box to "optimal" setting instead of the normal "full speed" to help cut more power.

Upon re-boot, the pool came back online without a hitch, so I waited for the machine to settle back to an idle state before reading the meter at the wall.

Now at an idle state, my meter reads the monthly cost of $4.91, so getting rid of the HBA and turning the fan speed down, lowered
my monthly power costs a whopping $1.86

 

[gpsguy]

Now, treat yourself to a steak and a Lone Star at the end of the year. ;)

... so getting rid of the HBA and turning the fan speed down, lowered my monthly power costs a whopping $1.86

 

[BigDave]

Now, treat yourself to a steak and a Lone Star at the end of the year. ;)

Yuck! LONE STAR? IMHO that would be a waste of a good piece of steak.
Shiner Bock, now that is much better! The little brewery in Shiner, Texas
makes other fine beers as well.

 

[joeschmuck]

Now at an idle state, my meter reads the monthly cost of $4.91, so getting rid of the HBA and turning the fan speed down, lowered
my monthly power costs a whopping $1.86

I know we are not talking much money but still when you are trying to build a system which has great performance and to be energy efficient, now that is still an impressive savings. So I imagine you reinstalled the HBA and DOM since the power savings was negligible overall and you would prefer the performance of the HBA (I know I would).

I wonder if a pfSense box could be made out of an RPI, I believe they are working on an ARM version of it now. That is a very low power draw device and you could recoup the costs in a few months assuming it would support that task.

Yea, Lone Star Steakhouse around my neck of the woods is crap, worst steak I've ever had, wouldn't ever go back. Not sure how much $20 would get you, I guess if you didn't leave a tip. At least with the beer idea, you could get a few.

 

[BigDave]

I know we are not talking much money but still when you are trying to build a system which has great performance and to be energy efficient, now that is still an impressive savings. So I imagine you reinstalled the HBA and DOM since the power savings was negligible overall and you would prefer the performance of the HBA (I know I would).

I wonder if a pfSense box could be made out of an RPI, I believe they are working on an ARM version of it now. That is a very low power draw device and you could recoup the costs in a few months assuming it would support that task.

Yea, Lone Star Steakhouse around my neck of the woods is crap, worst steak I've ever had, wouldn't ever go back. Not sure how much $20 would get you, I guess if you didn't leave a tip. At least with the beer idea, you could get a few.

When building this server, I never had the drives connected to the cougar point chipset. My thoughts were always
to future expansion, so I went with the HBA from the get go. I also wanted the challenge and experience of flashing
the card along with the documented performance increase. Some time over this weekend, I'll benchmark the speed
difference between stock SATA and HBA and will post results here.

As far as the power draw of my current pfSense box is concerned, I'm leaning heavily towards one of these.

The Lone Star reference made earlier was in regards to a low cost Texas beer brand. ;)

 

[joeschmuck]

The Lone Star reference made earlier was in regards to a low cost Texas beer brand. ;)

Guess you gotta live there.

Ouch! That is an expensive firewall box. I was looking at those before I made my posting. I think I need to read up more on Firewalls and why I'd need to have something like that. I currently use my Asus RT-AC68W router and then a software firewall on my computers. Of course the FreeNAS system nor the smart phones don't have specific firewall software on it but it's only exposed to my LAN side so I'm hoping they are protected. If there is something I should read to open my eyes, I'd appreciate a reference.

EDIT: I think from what I recall, the HBA will allow you to Scrub and Resilver much faster, as for bandwidth over the LAN, I'd think the LAN would be the bottleneck right now.

 

[BigDave]

Guess you gotta live there.

Ouch! That is an expensive firewall box. I was looking at those before I made my posting. I think I need to read up more on Firewalls and why I'd need to have something like that. I currently use my Asus RT-AC68W router and then a software firewall on my computers. Of course the FreeNAS system nor the smart phones don't have specific firewall software on it but it's only exposed to my LAN side so I'm hoping they are protected. If there is something I should read to open my eyes, I'd appreciate a reference.

EDIT: I think from what I recall, the HBA will allow you to Scrub and Resilver much faster, as for bandwidth over the LAN, I'd think the LAN would be the bottleneck right now.

Shiner Bock is now distributed in over 40 states, don't know if Virginia is one of them. If it is, try the Bock (dark)
brew with food, it's excellent.

I have my eye on that particular model for the two optional ports for future considerations of remote server
access via VPN ( it's a long way off, so much for a plumber to learn). You can get the low power benefits
from one of their lesser models for a simple home network, but I'm all about overkill and pay little attention
to cost. Computers are my one and only hobby/vice, so $ spent is mostly about pleasure and education.

Slower scrub speeds (taking place over night) would have little negative effect, as my users are asleep at 3am
As far as resilvers go (knocks on wood), I've yet to experience a drive failure, other than a self induced test
back when I first started with a two drive mirror;)

I started playing with pfSense, the very same way I began with FreeNAS (old re-purposed hardware) and
have a partially filled thimble full of knowledge. I'm the last noob you should take advice from:)

 

[joeschmuck]

I have read up on pfSense and I have my FreeNAS test computer, it's a bit overkill but it's in my computer room collecting dust while waiting on FreeNAS 10 so I'm going to try an experiment, build it as a pfSense box and place it between my current router and LAN and then take out my router and try it. I'm not sure how well it will work, if at all, while behind my current router but it may work fine. I also have two WAN IP addresses so I can use the second one (which I use for an FTP server on the web) to test it out there. Of course I would never continue to use my test computer as a firewall but if things are not well protected with my router or I just seem to like the protection I could gain, I'll look into some more appropriate hardware. Looks like an Atom based CPU would work too.

It also looks like the RPI has been used as a firewall and intrusion detection system so based on my results, maybe I'll look into taking my RPI which I don't use anymore and making something useful out of it.

 

[BigDave]

I just happen to have an Intel 4port PCIe X4 NIC collecting dust here, as a loner if you need it.
Just say the word and I'll get it in the mail to ya. I don't know what brand of onboard NIC
your board has, but the BSD based pfSense is similar to FreeNAS and loves Intel NIC.
Have fun!

 

[joeschmuck]

I appreciate the offer, I have two Intel NICs, one already in the machine, just need to install the second one. I just cut the CD so I'm about to kick this off. Not sure how much I'll get accomplished before I hear some bitching from the family that the internet is down and then that it's time to go somewhere. We will see.

 

[BigDave]

I appreciate the offer, I have two Intel NICs, one already in the machine, just need to install the second one. I just cut the CD so I'm about to kick this off. Not sure how much I'll get accomplished before I hear some *****ing from the family that the internet is down and then that it's time to go somewhere. We will see.

I probably don't need to tell YOU this but save your router's config file in case you have to set it back to default settings if things go rough...