FreeNas Hardware Box

[Freesnofla]

Hello friends,

I do have a question concerning the hardware for a FreeNas Box. Right now I run a old Desktop which I restructered, but I think the electricity consumption is really high.
I like to run finally 8 TB and need Plex and owncloud as well. The box runs 24 hours.

What would you recommend?

regards
freenassnofla

 

[crisman]

Hi,

In first place read this: http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/so-you-want-some-hardware-suggestions.12276/

Then you should have an idea on your hardware choice.

 

[PenalunWil]

Have you read all the stickies freesnofla ? They will give you an excellent over view of what hardware you should be looking at. I thoroughly recommend you read and download the links by "cyberjock" and also the build stickies. Other than that you won't get much help until you put a build spec' together and then come back for a crit' on it.
Wil.

 

[Freesnofla]

Well I see the power consumption is maybe my issue. Actually I run a Silverstone Sst-St40nf with 400 Watt.

 

[crisman]

Why do you think the PSU its an issue? 400 w runs fine with 8 to 10 hard drives, what issue you're thinking of?

 

[Freesnofla]

I'd like to run the FreeNas with 17 Watt, but I guess that's not possible.

 

[crisman]

You could run it! only with an Atom low power processor, an USB flash drive for the OS and no hard drives, but you wouldn't have the chance to do something usefull with it!!! :(

 

[Freesnofla]

I see that make no sense then, but what should I calculate with when I run 24/7. How much is the Watt consumption based on 1 day?

 

[crisman]

Just an example, I've a Freenas box with an Intel board S1200KP, Core i3 2100T processor, 16 Gb ECC ram, and 6 WD Red hard drives, and most of the time idles around 40W, you could get a little bit lower if you use an Atom avoton processor but probably only by 5 to 8 w. I don't know the prices for electricity in your country but in Portugal my system running 24/7, the power consumption in one year should be around €45 to €50.

 

[Freesnofla]

40 Watt a day or hour?

 

[cyberjock]

watts is a unit of power per second(technically one joule per one second). So there is no such thing as watts/day. There is watt-hours/day due to how units work.

 

[crisman]

hour.

 

[nopoe]

hour.

Watts per hour is a nonsensical unit. The only thing that I think that could mean is change in power consumption per unit time. Like cyberjock said, watt-hours are a thing, but that's not useful information for this purpose.

 

[diedrichg]

In general most modern drives run around 5W each at idle and around 10W under load.

 

[Freesnofla]

What do you mean by drives the HDD? How much does the motherboard need then

 

[diedrichg]

My reply? Sorry, "drive"=HDD. Most modern HDDs idle in the 5W range and run around 10W under load, give or take a Watt.

 

[Freesnofla]

As far as I understand isn't there any area where I could save some money then. Even if I did a change on my power consumption this will not help that much or would a change to only 300 Watt give any benefit?

 

[Freesnofla]

Actually I do have a flowmeter running and I can see that the power consumption per hour is 77 Watt, I feel that a lot. I'm in doubt now as this is the value when the system is idle. What exactly is the definition idle? For me it means I don't have any streaming or taken copy of files. Is that wrong do I have to change the preferences in the NAS to get it idle?