Power Management on Large Install

[BurntTech]

Hello guys
I'm working on a reduction of power usage. I'm dealing with 700watts (~$50 /mo?) of consumption but that also includes VM Hosts not part of the topic today but i'm going to consolidate those 3 hosts into 1 in future. That would help but for the Freenas I'm already have a long plan to replace this NAS specs below with a SSD NAS inlcuding hardware since our MB Failure. I've read plenty of threads and sadly OP finds out doesn't save them much to use HD standby. I've got a bit more drives then average but also interested in consolidating. Part of the win is to remove some of the power hog 15k sas drives. I can convert some of the datasets to SSD I think with our budget. The media is the one that I fear isn't cost effective to move to SSD. So for an dataset that only has Emby media I would like to standby usage since emby doesn't get used every day.

Note: Don't have specs of new NAS but seems like price point works well on 1TB SSD and migrate 3TB SAS for bit until SSDs are cheaper.

Questions/Topics

• FreeNas Spin Up (Managing Scrubs?)
• Jail Mount of dataset and HD Standby
• If there is a few fileshares but the media share doesn't get used often but if you go direct to a different share do the Media share pool spin up. Or is the issue only come up if someone browses the root ie: \\nas\
• Addon LSI Cards and Standby
• Goal to only have drives fire up once a day on idle possible?
• Any other issues with standby? (I'm aware it costs wear and tare)

Reference (https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-to-let-drives-spin-down.26314/)

FreeNas 11.2-RC1
i7 960 (Stop gap MB died on us)
RAM 16gb
2x breakout SAS to SATA
Dual USB Boot 16gb
8x 15k 600gb SAS (Temp offline for power)
8x 7k 3tb SAS (Media)
3x 7k 3tb SATA system dataset + Emby
4x 120gb SSD (Temp offline)
2x HBA SAS2008 IT Mode (I think its a PERC H310)
0 SAS2008(B2) 20.00.07.00 14.01.00.08 No Image 00:03:00:00
1 SAS2008(B2) 20.00.07.00 14.01.00.08 No Image 00:04:00:00


Thanks!

 

[Chris Moore]

I'm working on a reduction of power usage. I'm dealing with 700watts

you are doing something wrong if that is 700 watts. I have a 48 bay chassis that only pulls 300 and spinning down the hard drives is a bad idea. First, it isn't even supposed to work through a SAS HBA and second it will make the drives die sooner. Better to figure out why the system is drawing so much power. Do you really need those high RPM drives? That is the first thing to get rid of and that ancient CPU; power for performance there is terrible, I have one in a desktop and I don't even turn it on any more because it draws so much power and kicks out so much heat.

FreeNas Spin Up (Managing Scrubs?)

Don't spin the drives down.

Jail Mount of dataset and HD Standby

Don't try to make the hard drives go into any 'standby' mode.

If there is a few fileshares but the media share doesn't get used often but if you go direct to a different share do the Media share pool spin up. Or is the issue only come up if someone browses the root ie: \\nas\

If you have two separate pools you might be able to get one to spin down, and stay down, while you access the other, but it is difficult to get them to stay down. Generally what you end up with is drives that spin up frequently (every 15 minutes) and the constant start / stop kills them early. It doesn't save money when you kill your drives early.

Addon LSI Cards and Standby

They just don't support it, at the firmware level.

Goal to only have drives fire up once a day on idle possible?

Not likely to happen.

Any other issues with standby?

It is a bad idea. I have done it, learned the lesson the hard way. Better to save power by getting newer CPU / system board that is less power hungry and lower RPM drives. I think the ones I have now are 5400 RPM and the more vdevs you have in a pool, the better the aggregate performance is.

What amount of storage are you looking to have and how much performance do you need? Why are you looking at the idea of SSDs for bulk storage?

 

[BurntTech]

There is 3 VMhosts that were noted as part of the 700 watts. 15k drives were for VMs but it was more cost effective to put SSD drives in all of the VMhosts and turn off the 15k drive pool. As for the media pool it might also be more cost effective to retire the 24 drive freenas and host on 1x or 2x 10 TB drives on the single new vmhost that is on 24/7. Only use the freenas disks and MB as a backup and have it shutdown after the offline backups are taken. I could use the power kvm outlet control api to have it power up once every day or so. Your right there isnt any reason to keep these enterprise disk around. The CPU and system is idle unless i'm transcoding a movie. First version of the this freenas was small array of 4 drives and an i3 and emby was located on the nas to reduce network usage for fetching movies. But as time went on systems were added and more disk, it might just be time to consolidate and buy bigger instead of multiple drives.

The reason to state I was going to look at ssd was power usage is more then 1/16th the power in the link below .75w vs 16w
https://www.anandtech.com/show/2739/12