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A comment on 7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel 12th/13th gen.

Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by sandreas on Sunday December 31, 2023 @01:50PM (#38826424)
There is a german forum thread with a google docs document listing different configurations below 30W[1]. Since there are very different requirements, this might be interesting for many homeserver / NAS builders.

For me personally I found my ideal price-performance config to be the following hardware:

  Board: Fujitsu D3417-B2
  CPU: Intel Xeon 1225 V5 (better the also compatible 1275v6, but its way more expensive)
  RAM: 64GB ECC RAM (4x16GB)
  SSD: WD SN850x 2TB (consumer SSD)
  Case: Fractal Design Define Mini C
  Cooling: Big block no name, passively cooled by case fan
  Power: Pico PSU 120W + 120W Leicke power supply
  Remote Administration via Intel AMT + MeshCommander using a DP Dummy Plug
I bought this config used VERY CHEAP and I am running Proxmox - it draws 9.3W idle (without HDDs). There are 6 SATA ports and a PCIe port, if anyone would like to add more space or passthrough a dedicated GPU.

It may be hard to get, but I paid €380,00 in total. Does not work very well for Media Encoding, here you should go for a Core i3 8100 or above. Alternatively you could go for the following changes, but these might be even harder to get for a reasonable price:

  Boards: GIGABYTE C246N-WU2 (ITX), Gigabyte C246-WU4 (mATX), Fujitsu D3517-B (mATX), Fujitsu D3644 (mATX)
  Power: Corsair RM550x (2021 Version)
Cheap used Workstations that are good servers are Dell T30 or Fujitsu Celsius W550. The Fujitsu ones have D3417(-A!) boards (not -B) having proprietary power supplies with 16 power pins (no 24pin ATX but 16pin). There are Adapters on Aliexpress for 24PIN to 16pin (Bojiadafast), but this is a bit risky - I'm validating that atm.

Ryzen possibilities are pretty rare, but there are reports that the AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G with a Asus PRIME B550M-A Board is drawing about 16W Idle.

Hope I could help :-)

[1]: https://goo.gl/z8nt3A

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by ksjskskskkk on Sunday December 31, 2023 @04:20PM (#38827616)
b550m with a amd5 pro from 2023 (will double check models and post on that forum)

i get 9w idle and amd pro cpus have ECC support which is a requirement for me on any real computer. i disable most components on the board. it's bottom tier consumer quality.

best part is when i need to burn many more watts the integrated gpu is pretty decent

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by Jedd on Sunday December 31, 2023 @07:32PM (#38828711)
The same way backups are most rigorously performed by people who've lost data, ECC is a non-negotiable requirement for people who've suffered slow data corruption via silent memory failures.

It surprises me that people are happy with 64GB+ builds of non-ECC, especially for NAS (ie. very long term storage, where corruptions probably wouldn't be noticed for years).

Periodically I look at replacing my small fleet of HP micro Gen8's, which use Xeons, have 4 x 3.5" bays (with proper h/w RAID1), but max out at a frustratingly low 16GB. They're quite robust, but because of their age - and HP - a horse veterinarian approach to component failures is usually indicated.

A Ryzen + ECC whitebox build is massively appealing, but almost everyone's build-out includes caveats like 'check the datasheet of the mobo and CPU' (because series aren't consistent), and about half the time a terrifying disclaimer to the effect of 'ECC is present / enabled in the kernel, but I can't tell if it's actually functioning properly'.

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by sandreas on Sunday December 31, 2023 @09:52PM (#38829423)
This. Additionally, there is the price point of modern AMD "workstationish" systems vs. used Intel "real server" systems. Efficiency together with more performance is great, but if I had to pay double the price for a system that offers lots of performance I won't need anyway I'm not willing to pay the price.

Used Intel Systems are just way cheaper, because nobody seems to want them anymore... Everyone wants a >= 8 core ryzen :-) I personally don't need this for a little Proxmox / NAS kind of system.

However, I'm hoping for frame.work to announce official ECC support[1] on their Notebook boards (pretty likely this will never happen). I would love to just use the coolermaster case with small efficient modern notebook hardware for 600 bucks just because I don't need additional harddisks and I would just buy one to support the company.

[1]: https://community.frame.work/t/ecc-error-correcting-code-def...

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by harshreality on Monday January 01, 2024 @01:46AM (#38830125)
Older AGESA (part of the mobo firmware that handles system initialization) versions had a bug that prevented the chipset from recognizing and utilizing ECC ram properly even though the chipsets should support it. Check any motherboard in question for a firmware update which includes at least AGESA 1.0.0.5 patch C.

https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/comments/10lqofy/

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by vardump on Sunday December 31, 2023 @07:46PM (#38828781)
Indeed. ECC is non-negotiable, even for "consumer"-grade servers. Heck, also for workstations. Less/no mystery software malfunctions.
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by bb88 on Sunday December 31, 2023 @06:36PM (#38828445)
This is the setup I was looking for, the ECC support is really a requirement for a NAS.
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by akvadrako on Sunday December 31, 2023 @09:13PM (#38829210)
What type of ECC is a requirement? All DDR5 has on-die ECC but it's hard to get real ECC with error reporting. Since errors are pretty rare (about 1 / year per 100GB) and you sacrifice to get it, seems like a hard choice.
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by amarshall on Sunday December 31, 2023 @09:35PM (#38829329)
On-die ECC is not ECC memory. On-die ECC only corrects certain errors (e.g. not transport errors), and is absolutely necessary with DDR5 else such errors would be intolerably frequent.

True DDR5 ECC memory exists, and is not hard to find—just look for “server” RAM.

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by wtallis on Sunday December 31, 2023 @10:46PM (#38829603)
I wish JEDEC and the memory manufacturers had not decided to present on-die ECC as being a "feature" of DDR5 memory, when it has far more to do with the generation of the fab process than the generation of the memory interface.
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by ksjskskskkk on Monday January 01, 2024 @01:16AM (#38830033)
anecdotal: run the exact same system and tasks on desktops with ddr4 ecc and laptops without ecc ddr5 (they technically have amd pro apu and sodimm sockets, but i can't find the damn memory to buy)

the laptops see two unexplainable crashes per 6 mo.

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by akvadrako on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @10:24AM (#38842545)
There might be options in your country. But in the Netherlands there is very little choice for ECC DDR5. Only a couple model are available of 32GB 5200+ sticks; it's slow, expensive and barely in stock.
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by manmal on Sunday December 31, 2023 @03:31PM (#38827282)
For anybody reading this - I think it’s a great config, but would be careful around pico PSUs in case you want to run a bunch of good old spinning disks. HDDs have a sharp power peak when spinning up, and if you have a couple of them in a RAID, they might do so synchronously, potentially exceeding the envelope.
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by agilob on Sunday December 31, 2023 @04:39PM (#38827731)
to go deeper, depending on a file system, some FS won't let HDDs go to sleep, so they always consume power for max RPM.
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by scns on Sunday December 31, 2023 @07:46PM (#38828784)
> some FS won't let HDDs go to sleep

Which ones?

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by agilob on Monday January 01, 2024 @04:35AM (#38830691)
btrfs and zfs at least, probably most frequently used FSs for RAID
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by PBondurant on Monday January 01, 2024 @06:52AM (#38831225)
I'm running a ZFS NAS with mirrored 2 HDD vdevs. I've set the HDDs to spindown after 20mins using hdparm -S and this works fine under zfs. The drives (Toshiba N300s) take ~15s to spin up when something accesses them, and ime zfs has always handled this gracefully.

This vdev only contains data; it's not running the OS / root.

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by tomatocracy on Monday January 01, 2024 @05:20AM (#38830886)
You can do it with ZFS at least. I have a ZFS setup which idles drives. If I don't access the datasets on the drives, they don't spin up. You do have to be careful with things like auto snapshotting tools though - that will typically wake drives up. I had to script mine to only run on relevant datasets when drives are spun up and also had to edit the tool (sanoid) to prevent it from enumerating the list of snapshots on the idle datasets not being snapshotted.
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by sandreas on Sunday December 31, 2023 @09:58PM (#38829449)
You're right. 6 spinning disks and a discrete GPU won't work with 120W. I would recommend to get the Corsair RM550x 2021 (or similar) when using a NAS with more than 2 disks or a discrete GPU.

I personally don't need more than 10TB space, so 2 10TB Seagate EXOS in ZFS mirror would just work fine with 120W as long as you don't run Prime95 the whole time. You might go up to Pico PSU 150 then.

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by tomatocracy on Monday January 01, 2024 @05:11AM (#38830860)
Even if you have no issues with spinup, insufficient power can result in silent data corruption, which can be quite frustrating to diagnose (even if ZFS will help you see it). The difference between a picoPSU and a decent "real" PSU in terms of power consumption at the wall is maybe a couple of watts in my experience - not worth the risk for most people.
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by sandreas on Monday January 01, 2024 @06:34AM (#38831158)
Is there a source for this?
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by tomatocracy on Monday January 01, 2024 @01:13PM (#38833879)
Not sure. I experienced this personally using a picoPSU with spinning drives on one machine - no issues with spinup but silent data corruption on writes (which then got picked up by ZFS). Switching to a traditional PSU cured the problem.
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by sandreas on Monday January 01, 2024 @04:47PM (#38835628)
Ok, I have running multiple machines with PicoPSU and never experienced this. In my opinion it is a pretty reliable consumer device.

However, thank you for pointing that out. I did not know that.

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by justsomehnguy on Monday January 01, 2024 @01:34PM (#38834108)
Can't say anything about picoPSU, except writing anything on RAID involves all the drives to seek and write and without a a solid power reserve you can receive a momentary dip of voltage which can lead for a malformed write, but back in mid-late 2000s I've seen enough HDDs failing and corrupting data which miracluosly behaved when moved to another machine or when you replaced PSU (with a decent one, not another $15 chinesium).

A lot of bad reputation of WD from that time is actually from the shitty PSUs, not the drives themselves.

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by sandreas on Monday January 01, 2024 @04:48PM (#38835637)
Well, that's really interesting. If I ever experience these issues somewhere, I know where to start...
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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by LargoLasskhyfv on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @06:06PM (#38861047)
In times long gone there's been a setting.

Staggered spin-up it was called.

Turned on one disk after another.

So the PSU didn't bother, or stalled.

Done.

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by kogepathic on Sunday December 31, 2023 @08:23PM (#38828977)
> The Fujitsu ones have D3417(-A!) boards (not -B) having proprietary power supplies with 16 power pins (no 24pin ATX but 16pin). There are Adapters on Aliexpress for 24PIN to 16pin (Bojiadafast), but this is a bit risky - I'm validating that atm.

They work just fine. The pinout is well known [1]. You can also adapt a normal ATX PSU if you boost 5VSB to 11V.

Fujitsu boards are great, and very inexpensive to purchase in the EU. Someone has even reverse engineered the license for the KVM features of their remote management (iRMC S4/S5) [2]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200923042644/https://sector.bi...

[2] https://watchmysys.com/blog/2023/01/fujitsu-irmc-s4-license/

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by sandreas on Sunday December 31, 2023 @09:32PM (#38829309)
Oh this is pretty interesting, thank you very much. You mean that the Bojiadafast adapters work fine?

If so, I wonder if there is a hit in efficiency because of the required step-up / step-down converters in that adapter.

However, on my board there seems to be an unsoldered 24pin connector, that could be just used as is with a little soldering, but since it is on-hold my replacement system if my ...-B variant dies, I'm not willing to risk too many experiments :-)

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by kogepathic on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @06:31PM (#38848614)
> You mean that the Bojiadafast adapters work fine?

I have no experience with this particular vendor/brand but the adapters are not complex. If you're concerned, verify that it has 11VSB before you plug it into the motherboard. Otherwise it's entirely passive (passing through PS_ON#, PWR_OK, and 12V)

> If so, I wonder if there is a hit in efficiency because of the required step-up / step-down converters in that adapter.

It should be quite nominal. The boost converters have a very high efficiency (>85%) and standby power is typically below 10W max.

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Re:7 watts idle – building a low powered server/NAS on Intel... by sandreas on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @02:43AM (#38851687)
Cool thank you... I also thought about soldering a 2$ female 24pin plug to the spot where it is on the (-B) variant... seems that they just left the plug out but the connections are there.

We'll see :-)

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