Then how about an N95/N100 (recent Celeron successor) mini PC, like the ones from Beelink? They don’t draw that much power, but are 2-3x faster than a Raspi, have HW supported video de/encoding and can even run Windows if you needed that.

"that much power" is pretty subjective, is it 2x or 10x a pi? Might be a turnoff for some.

The N100 has a TDP of 6W. I haven't measured power draw of the whole system yet though, I imagine that the mainboard will pull another couple watts at least.

It shines especially in scenarios where the Pi is just a tad too slow. E.g. you can't live transcode 4k videos on a Pi, while the N100 has latest UHD graphics and therefore ships with a decent HW-accelerated H265 en/decoder.

There are a lot of low power media boxes but few servers sadly.

By server i mean multiple network ports and storage ports, space in the case for several spinny discs in addition to the ssds etc.

I doubt any NUC is good for a server by my definition.

Sure there are, there are lots of NAS appliances boxes from the likes of Synology/QNAP/Aliexpress Special that can run double duty as servers built on similar low power CPUs. Some of them even have decent networking options.

The problem is that a lot of the commercial products are woefully underspecc'ed for the price and you outgrow them quickly. Spinning disks also eat a lot of power, relatively speaking, so they kind of eat into the "low power" usecase.

> lots of NAS appliances boxes

Rather roll my own Linux thank you.

> Some of them even have decent networking options.

I think few of them have multiple ethernet ports. Plus there's the matter of how much cpu the built in ethernet eats.

> Rather roll my own Linux thank you.

Most modern NAS have that option. It just doesn’t make that much sense since that would get rid of the (in some cases really good) DSM.

It does if you want more than a storage appliance. I want the option of setting up any linux server software on it if i feel the need. Just a general purpose low power computer.

You should actually look at what's available. You can get a QNAP box with an ARM CPU with lots of drive slots, dual 2.5 gig Ethernet and dual 10 gig SFP+ for like $700, among many more examples. Sure saturating those is gonna eat a ton of cycles and run like shit but... yeah of course it is it's a cheap low power CPU. They suck for the sorts of stuff I wanna do, but this is inherently a market segment that involves compromise and that is probably perfect for some people.

I agree I'd much rather roll my own system (and that's what I did) and I would personally never buy one of those, but it's simply not right to say there are no options available if you want a low power server off the shelf. Some of them are even decent if you wanna pay for it.

Have you seen the board talked about on this thread?

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/topton-nas...

There is a newer board with a J6413/6412 that could also be a candidate if don’t need quite as much processing power.

Reports are that servers with this run under 10W at idle.

Hmm I don't think I dare. But thanks.

> power hungry server running 24/7

Nothing in this article supports this statement. It just says "high power consumption" without measuring, and declares victory without measuring the power saved. The fact is that power scaling has almost erased the difference between "suspended" and just "idle", to such an extent that there might not even be a meaningful difference, or any measurable difference.

My NUC 12 Pro is drawing, at the wall, 2.7W, as best as I can measure. The SoC reports drawing below 200mW. This server is on. The way to get low power states on these is to just make sure your Linux is up to the task and your BIOS works correctly, which is one of the reasons to choose a NUC. The first-party firmware works!

Another important thing for low-power server operation is to either use wifi, or make sure your ethernet is configured correctly for low-power operation. Unless you fix it, gigabit ethernet by default will propagate the link state all the way down to a high power state on the CPU. The NIC will say that it has tight latency requirements because the link is active, and it will configure the PCIe bus to avoid PCI link power management, and it will tell the CPU that it can't go below PC6. To avoid this you have to configure your NIC to ignore link latency requirements. Just unplugging the ethernet is the easier path, and it's faster than gigabit these days.

NOte that the NUCs with power saving and wifi have a serious problem: latency. By default in the various Linux OSen I use, wifi power management is enabled. Often times, repeated pings will jump from 5ms to 100+ms (with a very high variance) and network bandwidth will be extremely poor. Even ssh on a LAN can be unusable!

Sure, but it's a miracle that it can do this at all. It's entering and exiting a sleep state that is very nearly off, in between pings.

My first thought too. Reports can show the power usage for each process. So reduce the power-hungry processes. Or schedule them for lower cost times of day.

Full-size systems often have horrendous power consumption at idle.

Here are some pulling 80W at idle: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17548/the-msi-mpg-z690-carbon...

Here's a threadripper rack server pulling 140W (!!!) at idle: https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-trx40d8-2n2t-review...