What's your Idle Power Consumption? (+ HW recommendations)

[thomas-hn]

I'm struggling with the selection of my new TrueNAS hardware. I already decided that I want to go with a Supermicro board and a Xeon CPU. However, I'm trying to reach an idle power consumption of Mainboard + CPU + HBA + 8x HDD of maximum 130 watts (this is what my current Non-TrueNAS system with an Core i5 + Windows is consuming).

It is really hard to find information about the idle power consumptions, especially for the CPUs.
Therefore, could you please post the idle power consumptions of your "low power" setups, together with the used hardware parts?
Also hardware recommendations regarding mainboard + CPU would be helpful.

 

[Samuel Tai]

38 W idle, 62 W full tilt

Click the blue button for details.

 

[Alecmascot]

65W idle with 6 drives spinning.
30W with no drives connected.

 

[ChrisRJ]

85 W idle, about 110 W under medium load (no separate HBA though with 10 SATA ports on the board)

Update (in case my sig changes, great point @kiriak ):
FreeNAS 11.3U5
Supermicro X9SRi-F with Xeon E5 1620 and 64 GB DDR3 ECC RDIMMs
8 x 16 TB Seagate Exos in RAIDZ2
2 x 64 GB Transcend SSD in mirror as boot drive
Jails: Syncthing
VMs: Debian 11 with ecoDMS

 

[kiriak]

HP Microserver Gen 10 Plus
16 GB ECC RAM
2x 4TB HDDs
2x SSDs (120+240 GB)
2x 32 GB USB flash drives

32 W idle

(because my signature may change)

 

[QonoS]

Wall Socket
> APC UPS
>> VDSL Router
>> Switch 8x Gbit Ports
>> 3x 12TB WD Elements
>> TrueNAS Server (Ryzen 3900X @65W & Boost disabled / ASUS B450 mATX / 48GB ECC 2400MHz / 2x 7.68TB SATA SSDs PM883 / 2x 64GB USB thumb drives / 1x PCIe Card 2x Gbit Ports )

Power consumption measured at wall socket: 110-120 W idle

This might not seem as "low power" setup at first. There are quite some power losses because of power conversions (UPS + all power supplies). The server alone is configured as low power system with some reserves in mind.

Ryzen CPUs can be precisely configured power consumption wise even as low as 25W, maybe even lower. As long as Boost is disabled they are very power efficient.

 

[thomas-hn]

Do we have some more users here with further low power setups and their IDLE power consumption?

 

[QonoS]

Reading this post: https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/xeon-d-1541-too-much-power-consumption.95924/#post-663763
And then this: https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/comments/m55g4p/maybe_its_time_to_bring_powerd_back_to_services/

I was a litte shocked to find out that TrueNAS Core seemingly does not use lower CPU power states. My system always stayed at its base clock of 3800 MHz. Even when it was idle. On my TrueNAS running I watched it live with "powerd -v" and then came to using:

rc.conf :
powerd_enable=YES
powerd_flags="-n adaptive -N"

Now power consumption went from:

Power consumption measured at wall socket: 110-120 W idle

to 95-115W idle.

 

[Pitfrr]

Power consumption:

• Config 1
  • X9SCM, Xeon e2-1220Lv2, 16GB RAM, 6 HDD
  • 52W idle
  • 23W no drives connected
• Config 2
  • AsRock C2750, 32GB RAM, 8 HDD
  • 70W idle
  • 30W no drives connected
  • 48W no drives connected, CPU stress test

 

[HarryMuscle]

Depending on what's most important to you, getting a QNAP NAS unit will probably give you the lowest possible power usage. Most QNAP units can run TrueNAS Scale without issue.

Thanks,
Harry

 

[mihies]

I'm considering ASRock motherboard C3758D4U-2TP with Intel Atom C3758 which is listed as 25W TDP. No idea about real consumption but I assume it should be really low.

 

[Alecmascot]

I'm considering ASRock motherboard C3758D4U-2TP with Intel Atom C3758 which is listed as 25W TDP. No idea about real consumption but I assume it should be really low.

assume makes an ass out of u and me

 

[jgreco]

I was a litte shocked to find out that TrueNAS Core seemingly does not use lower CPU power states. My system always stayed at its base clock of 3800 MHz. Even when it was idle.

We just went through this with someone else.

powerd and c states enable on Truenas, how?

Hi all Need some help please. How do i enable powerd now and also how do i also enable the c states power saving? My cpu supports C3 according to the output but the documentation isn't clear from what i can see. Id also like to be able to throttle the cpu back when its idle to save every watt i...

www.truenas.com

He didn't realize that it was already spending 98% of its time in C3 state. powerd is a mid-2000's hack that may not really be all that appropriate for your NAS.

 

[janosch]

Power consumption:

• Config
  • X10SRI-F, Xeon e5-1620v3, 64GB RAM, => Longterm System Load Mean 0.14
  • 8x HDD 3TB; ZFS z3; No deduplication; lz4; 1 CIFS-Share; 5 Users; no Jails; no VM
  • 70W idle
• configuration to be changed to:
  • Xeon e5-1650v4

 

[janosch]

went wrong, should be

configuration to be changed to:

• Xeon e5-1650Lv4

 

[Bikerchris]

Relatively old thread, but thought I would contribute:

Primary server (spec in signature): 120W idle
Secondary Server (spec in signature): 50W idle (That's £100/$125 per year)

I am looking into Primary Server power usage as UK energy prices have risen significantly. So far I've:

• Disabled HyperThreading
• Disabled 2 of the 6 Cores
• Enabled Power States
• Disabled Turbo Mode

The above makes almost no difference. One UPS is used for both Primary and Secondary, so I can't even blame that.

 

[Bikerchris]

Only an additional, I've tried all I can, but I just can't get the power usage down to a reasonable amount. If I put the 8 drives into spin down Level 128 Advanced power management, I can get it down to around 100-110W, which still feels a little too high. So far I'm considering selling the X99-E WS board and replacing it with a SuperMicro X10SRL-F, which I believe will accept the existing CPU and RAM. Selling the current board should pay 2/3's towards the new board.

 

[altoids]

Power consumption:

• Config 1
  • X9SCM, Xeon e2-1220Lv2, 16GB RAM, 6 HDD
  • 52W idle
  • 23W no drives connected
• Config 2
  • AsRock C2750, 32GB RAM, 8 HDD
  • 70W idle
  • 30W no drives connected
  • 48W no drives connected, CPU stress test

I have a similar setup but X9SCL-F and 4 HDDs. I went from 80W to 50W idle going from the 400W 1u hotswap PSUs to a desktop PSU (Antec Earth Watts). But it's not ideal to have the chassis open for the huge PSU, so I gotta ask - what PSU are you using in your build?

Wow, I'm surprised the C2750 is pulling that much... I associate Atoms with better efficiency than Xeons in general.

I picked up an Asrock J4125M (w/ Celeron J4125) in hopes of lowering my idle, but now I'm thinking it's not going to save much.

Also just switched my X9SCL-F + E3-1220 firewall to a J4125 system, went from 60W average to less than 10W.

 

[Pitfrr]

@altoids: I did these measurements some time ago and I don't remember what kind of PSU I had on that set-up... :-(

 

[jgreco]

Wow, I'm surprised the C2750 is pulling that much... I associate Atoms with better efficiency than Xeons in general.

But you're not comparing CPU's here. You're comparing complete systems. The E3's are generally very efficient to begin with, so the watt burn of the rest of the platform plays a significant role. The baseline for each CPU is not going to be a ton of watts, and are probably not more than half a dozen watts apart, if I had to guess. The watts burned under workload aren't that important either, since workload is dependent upon work, and a slower CPU that needs more time to complete a job burns a lower number of watts for a longer period of time to get it done; this can actually be more inefficient.