Moving to All flash pool with lower power consumption

[sovking]

Hi!
My current Truenas home server is made by:

• X10SLM-F motherboard with i3-4160T (3.1 GHz with 35W TDP),
• 32GB ECC RAM,
• a raid-z2 pool of 4 x WD RED 4TB,
• a Samsung PM953 1TB for slog, and a pool for VMs and other fast access data.

The system is working as expected, mostly used for storing family pictures and some movies with some jail for unifi, home assistant, etc: two concurrent users at max.

Due to the soaring energy price, I would like to move to a new configuration based on a very low power consumption truenas server holding most frequent accessed items and a larger secondary truenas system which backup the primary truenas and the various pc we use (2 pc and 2-3 laptops).

My current idea is to setup the primary truenas server with:

• 6-10 TDP CPU, small motherboard without BMC/IPMI,
• 1 dimm of RAM
• one all flash pool (size to be defined, 2TB could be enough)

Then I'll move the current home server to backup role, powering up once a day (or on demand) for backing up the first truenas server and eventually all the pc.

I have some doubt/questions:

• which power consumption should I expect from the flash pool, mosty accessed in read only sometime a day ? ZFS will use the active power states all the time or only when it access the ssds ? If I plan a pool of four SSD, its power usage expected will be "idle power x 4" or "active read x 4" for most of the time ? (I'm asking because ssd idle power is very low, while power for reading and writing can be near to the power used by HDD);
• any suggestion for this type of very low power cpu and motherboard which can support ecc ram ?

Thanks

 

[TheoFou]

Hey ,

Have you managed to figure this out and create a new system with less power consumption?

 

[joeschmuck]

I have just built a no hard drive TrueNAS machine. It has six 4TB NVMe drives (one used for the boot drive of ESXi, since I like ESXi). One spare 4TB NVMe drive, and the other four are mounted on a PCIe card (must have bifurcation support on the motherboard). This system draws 3 to 4 watts of power turned off, so the power supply is using a little bit to power the motherboard (IPMI). When the system is powered on and idle it uses 41 watts of power.

I have all the comforts of a high powered system, the fast CPU, 64GB ECC RAM, IPMI, makes only a little fan noise if you listen hard. The good thing is it uses very little power when idle and you can ramp that up when you need to do something with it.

The downside, it was not cheap. I only built it because I rarely spend money on myself and I just wanted it. I could have saved money if I reused the case, power supply, and other parts, but the big single cost was the 4TB NVMe drives at $200 USD each. That was a very good deal. The other downside is should I need to migrate my pool to another computer, I need four M.2 slots.

You can read more about my build at the link below...

My New All NVMe Virtualized TrueNAS Server - Story and a Guide

PART 1: WHY A ESXi SERVER? I have a personal preference for virtualization and it started a long time ago while using VMWare Workstation, it was easy to operate on my Windoze computer and I'm accustom to it. While this thread is mainly how to select the right components and put together a...

www.truenas.com

Not sure if this is what you are looking for but it may help you out.