Power reduction help, on/off or completly new build?

[Netex135]

Hello I would like to know you opinion on how to make my "new" FreeNas build consume a reasonable amount of power. (I'm 16 so I don't pay for the power but I hate waste and turning my room into a furnace)
I'm going use it primarily for backups twice a week so I don't need it on all the time but I heard that powering on and off causes the drives to where out faster. And it would be nice to have imitate access to my files.
Right now my NAS is in a dell 690 which is 10+ years old, and so uses power hungry components, and my first option is making a auto-shutdown CRON job and using wake on lan commands to make it turn on.
Specs:
8*1gb DDR2 FB dimms
1*X3xxx xeon
1*4tb WD 5400 rpm Blue
1*4tb 7200 rpm HGST Deckstar
1*propitiatory dell PSU

My other option is buying a new CPU, motherboard, and ram (I have a case and a bronze power supply) and leaving it on 24/7
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/GyPcVY

So what will be the best course of action? And does turning of a FreeNAS build flash the ram's parity data?

 

[joeschmuck]

You hit the nail on the head, it's an older system and these are power hungry. There isn't much you could do about this unless the Dell system does support some power saving features. You should go into the system BIOS and ensure these features are turned on. These would let the CPU go into a lesser power state during idle time. Do a Google search for something like "cpu power states bios" and read.

As for a new system... While I understand that you are 16 and desire a cheap storage device, the parts you picked for a FreeNAS system are substandard. They should work fine however no ECC RAM support is a bad thing for a ZFS file system, if the data is important. But this system would generate a lot less heat. Make sure your power supply has both the 24 pin Motherboard power connector (some older ones are 20 pin) and the 8 pin CPU connector (may be two 4 pin connectors). Also ensure you run MemTest86 on the RAM for at least 48 hours to ensure there are no issues. As I said, non-ECC RAM is not a good thing for ZFS and if there is a memory problem, it will be reflected by corrupt data.

And does turning of a FreeNAS build flash the ram's parity data?

I don't understand this question.

 

[danb35]

Good lord, that thing is a space heater. It really isn't a problem to power cycle the thing a couple of times a week, but your hardware is going to burn a lot of watts and be really slow. I'd encourage you to set your sights just a little higher than your proposed build and look at one of these instead. It's a ready-to-go server, just add disks and at least 4 GB more RAM (though I'd encourage another 8 GB). It's built with modern components, and should be both much faster, and much more energy-efficient, than your current system.