DIY Low power NAS, is it just a dream?

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Hi,

For a long time I have been trying to develop this idea of building a low power NAS, something like a synology that would be connected 24/7, but with no sucess.

every time I see the consumption for only the CPU I get scared, my ideal consuption shouldn’t be greater than 50W average, probably 20-30 W idle for the complete system.

Is this just a dream?

I could go ARM but I would like the x86 flexibility, I would probably run a couple more services on the NAS, like Docker, I would also like the chance to connect 5 drives for dual redundancy.

It seems the solution is the laptop CPU but I don’t any with so many drives.

does this exists or there are other solutions?

Thanks for the help!

1 Like
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Have you looked at sbc, the raspberry pi 4 sounds perfect for a use case like this

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And the rockpro64 seems even better.

And a x86 system could it do it? Or there isn’t much different on the software available for one or the other.

Perhaps a arm CPU is the way forward, I would to have more options.

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If you’re doing pure file storage ARM can operate just fine (look at the low end synology)

But “low-power” means a variety of things to a variety of people.

Link Here’s a link that shows rough power usage for a WD Red 4tb. (First google result for hard drive power consumption) which shows between ~3-5W.

Do you want low power for heat reasons? operating price reasons? something else?

Prep for some rough n ready napkin math

Power Consumption Calculation

E (kWh/day) = P (W) × t (h/day) / 1000(W/kW)

kWh Calculator Link

Power Rates (listed by state avg)

Link Using this as a basis for calculation of cost.

Begin Napkin

100 W Nas = 876 kwh a year

Assuming you live in HI (highest listed), that costs you (avg price used 29.18c per kwh) = $255.62 (rounded up to nearest cent). This equates to $0.70 a day.

Assuming you live in LA (lowest listed), that costs you (avg price used 7.71c per kwh) = $67.54 (rounded up to nearest cent). This equates to $0.19 a day.

This assumes flat 100w usage 24/7/365. Your idle may be higher or lower depending on configuration/hardware/location/etc. If you spin down disks at idle, this also changes the calculus.

Just be wary of doing something like spending $200 to “save” money on utilities. That power “savings” costs you $0.55 a day (during the first year) in which you will still be paying utilities. Other options include spending more on higher-density disks to reduce power consumption.

End Napkin

Sample Cost Calculation

To give you a sample, I run a (comparatively older than a lot of folks) dual x5670 build with 20 hard drives, 1 ssd cache drive. No spindown, on 24/7/365. Using local (Michigan’s 2019 avg) rate = 15.82c per kwh

Usual “idle” usage = ~315W (as measured by UPS, including all other connected devices) == $436.54 a year === $1.20 a day
Usual “full transcode” (plex optimization of media) ~400W == $554.33 a year === $1.52 a day

Summary

Just be aware if you steer towards something on an alternate architecture for power reasons you may be limited to what you can do with your NAS. In the end it’s up to you to run the numbers and see what is possible with your setup. If you’re going pure NAS it’s a good option, but if you run ANYthing else, you may really want something better than an ARM chip.

Play around with the calculators and see what you come up with! Hopefully this was helpful for you and others.

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The low t is because of both.

More heat means more energy to dissipate that will introduce even more operational cost.

That’s why I’m looking more for the x86, to do more like the high end Synology.

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This seems to be directly opposite of your original post. “Because of both” just means you haven’t defined which is more important.

How many bays? How many apps running? anything special going on? All going to influence the factors.

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I don’t think so, I need to deal with more heat and it normally means more power consumption normally with the the use of fan’s that will increase the cost even more.

Less power → less heat → less money spent in cooling.

in term of bays, my ideal would be 5, two have two drive failure tolerance and still be able to have space and performance.

in apps, I don’t know yet, but probably, 5-6 apps running

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But cooling isn’t what everyone spends the big bucks on so reducing heat to save on cooling products doesn’t seem to stack up.

I think faultine nailed it in his post. I’d suggest thinking long and hard about what your real goals are, for what reason, and how much are you really willing to pay for it (or sacrifice).

Sometimes when you break it down on paper it just doesn’t make economical sense. There’s a reason no one pays for triple pane windows in the south.

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I’ve always wanted to try and make a low power NAS too. I thought about using a SFF computer by attaching a DAS via a SAS PCI-E card.

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There are better people here to explain this but you have to look at it as a performance per watt.

At present I’m still a noob on my Unraid setup…gathering parts and building as I go. I’ve got a Windows 10vm running, dockers (AirConnect, Remmina, Syncthing, Filezilla, Zerotier, and ClamAV) with 6.5tb of hdd storage with parity and 250gb of ssd cache. This runs on a 4c 8t xeon 1240 v2 and the motherboard is a Supermicro X9SCL. My APC ups says I’m running at 138 watts, normally it’s around 112 watts. Basically that’s probably a lot of wattage for no more than I’m running. I could reduce that wattage by higher density drives and probably will at some point in the future when I feel the need. The more I add to this the more power it consumes so at some point yes I’d like to go the other direction to cut down on power draw. You can accomplish some of this by building a machine that does more like say virtualize pfSense, have a Plex server instead of a quicksync box…that alone probably cuts out a good 40 watts roughly for me…but I would rather have separate boxes for those tasks. This doesn’t even get into some of the hidden power costs like running battery backup…I’ve got one that pulls about 50 watts with nothing plugged in…It’s a enterprise grade UPS. I don’t need it but I paid like 10 bucks for it so I’m going to get some use out of it.

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this might be an old thread but i have made my own DIY NAS before. Hardware depends.
For instance my udoo x86 with quad intel atom based CPU at high clocks + a mikrotik 24 port 2SFP+ switch + a decent wifi AC AP all consumes less than 30W, including a raspberry pi 2.

My file server however is AMD based. One running older AMD phenom x2 with a lot of older drives and peripherals, and an AMD piledriver with 6 drives. Both my file servers use SFP+ and my AMD piledriver server may consume 100-200W when its on and running (especially during compression), but it also has 4 server fans too. To the home user yes this is much so instead of requiring it to be always on, by having a configurable switch + router i set it to wake on LAN when there is traffic.

The average wasting american consumes 1KWh on average (this is per hour), so 100W is 1/10 of that. In the 3rd world, with our crappy salaries that 1KWh is expensive to us, and typically we consume about 1/4 of that (no AC, and not heating needed as its hot).

You can create a DIY NAS with low power consumption x86 and do far better than synology. I’ve used synology in office and i hate it. The price to what you get just doesnt match what i built. My AMD piledriver compresses files 4x faster than my i7 gaming laptop for zip, both using the same software. For intel ATOM Based your power consumption will be mostly drives for which you can expect to see around 50W or less with a bunch of drives (like 6) and there exists desktop PCs that use intel ATOMs. You can also go the intel pentium route (dual core iseries, not atom based) for a decent amount of power efficiency and get better performance (new intel pentium dual cores with HT beat intel atom quads from synology by a huge margin despite being cheaper if you were to buy from manufacturer).

Network wise you can just add PCIe cards so dont need to get one with the ideal board, just the number of sata slots and PCIe slots you need.

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it does, you save up on PSU. by that it means your power draw is lower which helps immensely even on the PSU.
You still should have some cooling, but the less you need the better. a huge CPU heatsink for instance lets it be cooled with only case fans if you have a decent orientation. HDD heatsinks do exist but they take away space for the HDD to move if mounted, so they work for free floating drives. But lets say you have total fanless and just use heatsinks, You do save a bit of power and improve the lifespan. The PSU does give out heat too.

Old NICs can use power. Some SFP+ modules take 10W just plugged in without a connection. The old intel PCIe 1.0 NICs use a lot of power too <10W compared to PCIe 2.0 ones <5W . So huge savings when you add up all the small bits together.

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That seems interresting I will investigate.

The problem is having the experience and it seems everyone wants is more processing power so ithe information (in terms of power consumption) doesn’t seem obvious, at least for me.

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Can you explain in detail what huge savings equates to?

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A basic 3400G build will idle under 7w, the key is to use an appropriate PSU so that it operates within its efficiency range, it’s also reasonably frugal under load while packing a decent punch if required. If you I tend on doing any transcoding/encoding though, Intel is probably the way to go. Worrying about sub 2w fans on a 50w build so you can run passive isn’t a great idea, HD’s need air flow to stay cool, if you don’t have that, they cook.

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150W vs 30W is considered big. so lets say for a difference of 100W, thats 70KWh less a month. In some places electricity can be expensive. In my crappy country theres a monolopy and odd rates where higher usages are billed double. To give you an example, the average house hold uses 1KWh on average (you can calculate the per month ), now where i am, at that rate, approx half of that is billed double. So lets say you have 10 cents per KWh, it might seem small at the normal rate of $7, but at the double rate, thats a savings of $14, and in the 3rd world that is huge. Multiple that over the course of 2 years.

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processing power depends. an intel atom vs full core intel iseries, obviously the iseries is faster given same cores and clock, but the major difference goes down into number crunching. tasks like compression, code compilation and so on dont require the use of heavy or large units within cores so this is where the savings can come from. A file server running on intel atom is just as responsive as an intel iseries cpu given similar clocks/cores and while the atom may be slower at some tasks, it certainly will perform fine, and if possible better to offload on demand video decoding/encoding to the IGP core on the atom instead of the CPU. Sure while a quad core amd phenom x2 will play an even more taxing video slightly bigger than 4k on the CPU in real time (i used a timelapse made from DSLR not using standard res to catch slow computers proving how slow intel was on the user side). Its more of a question of what performance do you need otherwise no point paying the extra amount. I dont think my video is a daily need for those using dual core intel CPUs between 1-2Ghz portable laptops for microsoft office even though i think those CPUs are too slow for even basic tasks for users.