Low power MB & CPU

[Freek Dijkstra]

I'm looking for a new low-power motherboard and CPU for my 11-year old TrueNAS system. The last post with this topic seems >5 years old, and things have changed :). TL;DR:

• Does anyone has experience with the Topton NAS Motherboard (Intel Celeron N5105 or Pentium N6005 CPU, dual M.2 NVMe, six SATA3.0, two DDR4, Mini ITX form factor)?
• For a low-power NAS, would you recommend a mother with soldered-on CPU (SOC), or a separate motherboard and CPU? Is there a significant difference in idle power consumption between the two options?

Background and details:

My current NAS was build in 2012 and has an ASRock E350M1/USB3 motherboard with AMD E350 CPU (2 core 1.6 GHz, 18W TPD, Passmark score 730). Two SSDs for the boot drive, Two 6 TByte HDD on SATA600 for pool #1, and two 8 TByte HDD on SATA600 for pool #2. Everything mirrored for simplicity. For details, see the extensive write-up I made at the time. This was intentionally build as a low power system for two reasons, and those reasons still hold to this day:

Operational cost. Electricity now peaks at €0.40 per kWh, meaning each 1 Watt of idle power costs €3.50 per year. So reducing idle power consumption by 10 Watt saves me €175 in 5 years.
Poor airflow where the machine is located. This NAS is stored in my house, in a place with bad airflow. That's the way it is. This thing is primary for on-premise backups (I only have selective backups in the cloud, while this things is supposed to backup everything)
The system is only used for SMB access. Even for streaming, the data is fetched over SMB, and decoded on the TV set-top-box. I don't get much performance: perhaps 10 MByte/s write over the network, 30 MByte/s read. Yes, pretty bad. But still sufficient for my current needs (mostly backups in the background). `smbd` peaks at near 100% CPU, so that's seems to be the bottleneck. In the near future, I like to (partially) replace my cron job backup with a sync system, likely by installing ownCloud or nextCloud software.

So I'm looking to replace the CPU and motherboard with something slightly more up-to-date. These are my requirements:

• Mini-ITX form factor for the motherboard
• At least four SATA600 connectors and two M.2 slots. Preferably two more SATA600 connectors for a total of six, but I'm happy to use the PCIe slot for a HBA card. In fact, I can re-use the HBA card I already have for four more SATA600 connectors.
• Low power at idle
• Low power while file shares are synced over the network
• GPU in the CPU (any HDMI output will do, as I use a Marmitek HDMI+USB-over-UTP extender for remote access)
• Reasonable warranty and a clear manual

I saw quiet a few wildly diverging recommendations online, including people recommending gaming motherboards for a NAS. The TrueNAS hardware guide was somewhat helpful, but it is not very explicit about the recommended CPU requirements. Understandable, since the answer is probably "it depends". That said, I started by looking at the specs for the TrueNAS Mini E+, Mini X, and Mini X+ and the Topton mini PC "NAS Motherboard", which was highly recommended by Brian Moses. All these systems have a onboard CPU:

• Intel Atom C3558 (16 Watt, benchmark 2417, in Mini E+, Mini X),
• Intel Atom C3758 (25 Watt, benchmark 4750, in Mini X+),
• Intel Celeron N5105 (6-10 Watt, benchmark 4069, in Topton), or
• Intel Pentium N6005 (6-10 Watt, benchmark 5409, alternative in Toptop).

Compare that to my current CPU AMD E350 (16-18 Watt, benchmark 726) (All benchmarks according to https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php), and my preference would be something with a 5000-10000 benchmark, and 10-25 Watt of power, where the most important aspect is the idle power consumption.

With that in mind, I searched a well known Dutch pricewatch & tech news website, and when filtering for the above criteria (Mini-ITX, 4+ SATA, 2+ M.2 ports), I got no (zero!) result for a system with a CPU or SOC onboard. So my next step was to look for the 24 results that has a socket, wondering if a pluggable CPU would be fine too. I expect it a bit more expensive, but that is fine -- my main concern is low power at idle.

Well, when I searched for "low power" CPU that would fit in one of these sockets (Intel 1200, Intel 1700, AM4 or AM5), I was shocked. 35 Watt and even 65 Watt CPU were considered "low power" and the motherboards that came up in the results were on the expensive side -- with metal shielding on all sides. Being used to a simple motherboard for what is effectively a simple task (NAS), this felt like overkill. However, I may be wrong. I'm actually fine with a 65 Watt CPU, as long as the idle power consumption is much less (<5 Watt).

So I'm a bit at loss what to buy now. Looking at the specs, the Topton with Intel Pentium N6005 would be a real good choice. The first downside is the lack of a PCI-express slot, so the 6 SATA600 is all I can I ever get. The second downside is the lack of support. I can't even find a product page. The link in the product listing points to a Alibaba sales website. I can't even find a downloadable manual with the exact specs.

So my two questions are:

• Does anyone has experience with the Topton NAS Motherboard (Intel Celeron N5105 or Pentium N6005 CPU, dual M.2 NVMe, six SATA3.0, two DDR4, Mini ITX form factor)? Did you find a downloadable manual with specs (e.g. listing what memory types are supported, I may find it online, but usually this is what a manual is for).
• For a low-power NAS, would you recommend a mother with soldered-on CPU (SOC), or a separate motherboard and CPU? Is there a significant difference in idle power consumption between the two options? Do you have a specific motherboard you recommend?

Thanks!
Freek

 

[Ericloewe]

The last post with this topic seems >5 years old, and things have changed

Surprisingly little, unless you're prepared to shell out big bucks for minor improvements or bigger bucks for a monster system.

GPU in the CPU (any HDMI output will do, as I use a Marmitek HDMI+USB-over-UTP extender for remote access)

You don't need any of that with a proper server board, with IPMI and iKVM.

the Topton mini PC "NAS Motherboard", which was highly recommended by Brian Moses.

That guy's recommendations have improved slightly over the years, but he is still best ignored.

Does anyone has experience with the Topton NAS Motherboard (Intel Celeron N5105 or Pentium N6005 CPU, dual M.2 NVMe, six SATA3.0, two DDR4, Mini ITX form factor)? Did you find a downloadable manual with specs (e.g. listing what memory types are supported, I may find it online, but usually this is what a manual is for).

They're mostly dodgy and the domain of Super China Happy Sun vendors or outright scams.


For your scenario, what makes most sense is something like an Atom C3558. Thing is, two M.2 slots are not common in this segment, for a variety of reasons. It's not clear what you want to do with said slots, but if you only need 4 SATA 6 Gb/s ports, plus a boot device plus a single SSD for something else, a Supermicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F is a good buy. If you really want more expandability, you can upgrade to the same board with C3758 and get up to 12 SATA ports instead of just four (the C3558s have limited connectivity, so you have to pick between the PCIe slot and additional SATA ports; on the C3758 you can get all at once plus extra SATA ports).
If you really need two SSDs connected with PCIe 3.0 x4, you'll need to step up in price, performance and power (idle and max ) to a Broadwell-D system, like the Supermicro X10SDV series.

 

[jgreco]

• For a low-power NAS, would you recommend a mother with soldered-on CPU (SOC), or a separate motherboard and CPU? Is there a significant difference in idle power consumption between the two options? Do you have a specific motherboard you recommend?

Soldering has next to nothing to do with idle power consumption. The SoC options have a natural tendency to be lower power solutions, but as they have iterated generationally there has been pressure for more speed, more cores, often both, which takes more power.

including people recommending gaming motherboards for a NAS.

Yeah, don't do that stupidity. You can find similar or equivalent server boards in most cases, and there's a constant stream of people here showing up with gaming boards and mysterious issues. Server boards will address server considerations such as decent ethernet chipsets, ECC, IPMI, x8 slots instead of stupid assortments of x1 and x16 slots, etc.

 

[Freek Dijkstra]

Thanks @Ericloewe and @jgreco for reading my long post and giving clear answers.

I’m happy to forfeit on the M.2 requirement. The idea was to have the option of a mirrored boot (+ optional ZIL later.) My current SSD boot disks are connected to SATA, so indeed dual M.2 is not required.

I probably saw that Supermicro board, but dismissed it because it was relative hard to find (only 1 shop carries it now), old (from 2017), and fairly expensive (>€400).

I will do a bit more research and let you know the results (may take some time).

In the mean time, any suggestion for a specific motherboard to host a Intel i3 processor (or AMD equivalent) is very welcome. Some of these CPU seem to have a low idle power. I like to dive a bit deeper and compare such option to the Supermicro variant.

And yes, I’m aware that replacing HDDs with SSD will in the long run the best wat to save power, and I may have a look at the PSU as well, given that those will easily have a 10W power consumption without any load. While I measured power consumption of my current setup as a whole, I never checked which of the components contributes most to this load.

 

[Ericloewe]

I probably saw that Supermicro board, but dismissed it because it was relative hard to find (only 1 shop carries it now), old (from 2017), and fairly expensive (>€400).

Things are surprisingly stagnant in the low-power world, but even the C3558 should be quite a decent upgrade coming from an E350. Pricing has been at mostly just below 400 € for a while now, with some fluctuations. See also https://geizhals.eu/supermicro-a2sdi-4c-hln4f-bulk-mbd-a2sdi-4c-hln4f-b-a1710120.html

In the mean time, any suggestion for a specific motherboard to host a Intel i3 processor (or AMD equivalent) is very welcome. Some of these CPU seem to have a low idle power. I like to dive a bit deeper and compare such option to the Supermicro variant.

Not a very fruitful quest, I'm afraid. AMD is especially difficult because they don't officially have a server platform in this category. For Intel, you could get something like an X12STL-IF, but the motherboard with no CPU is 300 bucks on its own. I suspect idle power is worse than the C3000s, but I haven't seen a proper measurement. You do get PCIe 4.0 x16 and a full x4 PCIe 3.0 on the M.2 slot (not that it matters for the boot device) - but only six SATA ports, instead of up to 12 with a C3758.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

The Supermicro A2SDi series come with low power, as many cores as you are willing to pay for up to 16, a ton of connectivity options u to 12x SATA and 1x M.2 NVMe, ECC support ... I run a couple of them and I really don't know any better NAS platform. If more single thread CPU performance is needed, that's a different story, but I virtualised Windows 10 in TrueNAS on such an Atom based system without problems. Only when I started to run virtualised Linux and a Confluence installation on top of that did I switch my A2SDi board for one with a Xeon D.

 

[awasb]

What saves hell of a lot „standby power“ is choosing low power drives. I want IPMI (ca. 8W) and ECC RAM. The CPU … no matter which one … will power down to a fraction of the base frequency. That‘s nothing in the end. But running 4x 3.5“ drives with 10platters each will consume 20-25W upwards in standby. I‘m running 10 low power (=2.5“) drives in my home nas. They take 9W _total_ idling along. This home system is a a2sdi-8C with 128GB RAM, 2 PCIe/NVMe M.2 sticks and 3 fans.

Without drives it hovers around 30W +/-. With the zpool attached and idling it’s 38-39W.

With just a 5x 3.5“ disk Z2 it would be almost double the amount.

 

[Whattteva]

I’m happy to forfeit on the M.2 requirement. The idea was to have the option of a mirrored boot (+ optional ZIL later.) My current SSD boot disks are connected to SATA, so indeed dual M.2 is not required.

Not sure why you'd want mirrored boot unless you have 100% uptime requirement. Saving your config + reinstalling + restoring your config takes like... 5-10 mins at most? TrueNAS was designed as an appliance (firmware) for exactly this very reason.

Moreover, a proper mirrored boot for HA typically will require HW RAID anyway, which your low power board likely will not have.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

I'm now starting to lookim for a low-power system for storing 4K video from 10+ security cameras in a remote location, so 100% reliability is required and mirrored OS drives makes sense, though isn't life-ending.

 

[Davvo]

This video might help.

 

[Etorix]

N5105 and N6005 provide 8 PCIe lanes and 2 SATA. That's not much to make a NAS…

In mini-ITX, look at A2SDi boards (likely new) or X10SDV (Xeon D-1500, available second-hand… with some patience). These are low power and make nice little NAS. While these boards are not cheap, the complete package with DDR4 RDIMM is very competitive.

 

[AlainD]

Things are surprisingly stagnant in the low-power world, but even the C3558 should be quite a decent upgrade coming from an E350. Pricing has been at mostly just below 400 € for a while now, with some fluctuations. See also https://geizhals.eu/supermicro-a2sdi-4c-hln4f-bulk-mbd-a2sdi-4c-hln4f-b-a1710120.html
...

Thanks. Unfortunally only 8 SATA ports with the 2C and 4C.

I suppose that the 4x LAN ports are not much use for a backup server?

 

[awasb]

Depends on the number of clients. Over here with 6 machines sending backups, the 4 ports (acting as a LACP LAG) and multi channel smb the upgrade was quite noticeable.

 

[Etorix]

Thanks. Unfortunally only 8 SATA ports with the 2C and 4C.

Indeed, 12 SATA comes with the 8-core C3758. But the initial list of requirements specifies 6 ports…

 

[2twisty]

What kind of "weird issues" have you seen with AMD gaming boards? I am running 2 of them, and I have seen nothing that could be attributed to the motherboard. My NIC is an intel 10G PCIe, and I run my drives on an LSI HBA.

If I had access to a Ryzen-based server board, I'd do it, but those animals don't exist, except for some weird chinesium, and I wouldn't trust those anyway.

 

[jgreco]

What kind of "weird issues" have you seen with AMD gaming boards?

Has little to do with AMD. It's the market tier. Realtek or Atheros ethernet issues, missized PCIe slots especially x16 that don't support bifurcation or x1 that are useless, failure to boot without a video card, failure to boot without a keyboard, failure to boot without secure boot, failure to support legacy boot, overclocked boards, over- or under-voltaged boards, SATA channels that appear on discrete ports XOR M.2 ports, lack of ECC, etc.

 

[2twisty]

Yeah -- I solved all those problems by choosing AMD (ECC supported) and with add-in cards. One thing I do miss is the lack of IPMI, but since this is a homelab, I'm willing to accept a few deficiencies.

I would NEVER do this in an enterprise context, though.

 

[Morris]

Before going through all of this, consider spinning down your disks when inactive. 5 W per disk adds up fast.

May the gods of stiction issues remember that we are taking about modern drives that are designed to spin down to save power.

 

[Davvo]

Before going through all of this, consider spinning down your disks when inactive. 5 W per disk adds up fast.

May the gods of stiction issues remember that we are taking about modern drives that are designed to spin down to save power.

They are not designed to do so, though they can.

 

[Morris]

They are not designed to do so, though they can.

LOL, modern hard drives no longer land the head on the platter when spinning down. Instead they rest the heads over the edge of the platter avoiding damaging them. They are designed for over 300,000 spin cycles.

Once apron a time spinning down hard drives was a risk as the heads landed on the landing area of the platter. There are other risks that have been mitigated.