Repurpose old desktop into NAS with low power usage?

[Laughing Man]

Hi all, I want to obtain a NAS however, I rather re-purpose my old desktop rather than buy one for the moment. Partially for the flexibility (I'm relatively comfortable with Linux) and that I can place more drive bays in my desktop than most affordable NAS solutions. However, my primary concern is the the desktop's power usage. How does a DIY NAS compare to the consumer grade NAS for active usage (transferring or streaming a file)? Is it possible to cut down the power usage of the desktop when it's on? I don't remember the exact details of the build but here is a rough guide of the desktop's specs.

• AMD Opteron 185 - Dual core processor. 1.8 Ghz
• 1 GB RAM (2 X 512 MB sticks)
• Motherboard - DFI LanParty UT nF4 Ultra-D
• Power Supply - don't remember. But it was enough to support an overclock.
• Video card - I plan on taking this out
• 2 IDE connected Hard drives (300 GB but they're from 2005 so I might replace them with SATA connected 2 TB drives).

I read that FreeNAS can underclock the CPU for you so would that be sufficient in lowering my power usage? Or would I also have to change out the power supply? There are also three fans in the case but I can unplug them since it won't get as hot when used as a NAS. I figure the CPU should be useful for streaming 720+ to 1080p video files and the motherboard's dual gigabit LAN ports will be used to connect to my gigabit network.

My plans for it:

• Use as a music/video streaming device to a jailbroken Apple TV2, Xbox 360, and our computers
• General NAS storage.

I want the data stored on one hard drive, with me selectively controlling an rsync of directories when I want to the other drive. Is there anyway to selectively power on certain drives without physically connecting and disconnecting the cable? I plan on having one NTFS drive and the other being EXT3.


Or should I just suck it up and buy a consumer grade NAS if I'm really concerned about power usage? Thank you for your help!

 

[Jesse B]

That system you currently have may draw a bit more power than you would like. However it's hard to say. As far as I know, the Opteron 185 does NOT support Cool 'n Quiet, so underclocking and/or undervolting it would definitely save you some power. The fans draw a couple watts each, so they're not going to make a huge difference.

You are able to spin-down drives when they're not being used, which saves power. The downside is that when you want to access that drive, you have to wait for it to spin back up. For an rsync drive, that shouldn't be an issue.
Why do you want an NTFS and and EXT3 drive? I assume this is Windows-share related? You can share your files on the EXT fs using Samba/SMB, which will allow Windows to be able to access the files over the network.

If power is your main concern, and you don't want to cough up the money for a NAS, I'd suggest building one yourself using either an Intel Atom/AMD E-350 based board (which has very low power draw, but isn't the most powerful, not saying it won't be fine for your application), or even the i3-2100T, which has a TDP of only 35W, and would have more processing power.

You have lots of solutions, and I suggest you read a bunch of threads on the forum here. There have been numerous people in the same predicament as yourself, and some of the posts and conversations should help point you in the right direction.

Good luck

 

[jean]

If you go with Freenas 7

I have a AMD 4200 and 6 drives in it. It draw 60 watts on idle with 1 of the disks turning (web server).
Freenas 7 can vary automatiquely my processor speed from 4200 to 700 Mhz.
The processor temp is almost as room temperature when idle.
Just 1 little fan is enough.
Freenas power down each drive after 30 minutes, even those in Raid mode.
You chose when to power down when you format them.
I prefer Freenas 7 because the version 8 is entreprise oriented for now and demand a bigger machine than the version 7.

 

[00Roush]

Overall with the setup you listed my guess is you will not be able to get really low power consumption. I would say at idle you could probably get as low as 50 watts without a video card and underclock/undervolt. My previous file server used a Opteron 165 (1.8 Ghz) and without a video card it idled at around 60 watts. That CPU did support Cool 'n Quiet but it barely made a difference in power consumption. The rest of the setup was a Asus A8R32-MVP motherboard, 2 GB RAM, and 2 320GB WD SE16 hard drives. I generally averaged 80-100 MB/sec for large file transfers. From what I recall power consumption during large file transfers was around 80-90 watts. I don't remember for sure but streaming power usage was probably around 65-70 watts. Overall performance was very good but power consumption was not the best. As was mentioned the newer AM3 AMD setups or the i3 Intel setups are more efficent and can get idle power consumption down into the 30 watt range.

So the real question is how low of power consumption do you want? I think in general you could probably see a savings of $2 to $5 a month on your electric bill if you used a newer DYI setup or a off the shelf NAS instead of your old setup. That is assuming 24x7 usage. Then again a newer setup or NAS would probably run $200-$500. At that price it would take quite a while for the newer unit to pay for itself in savings.

00Roush

 

[Laughing Man]

That system you currently have may draw a bit more power than you would like. However it's hard to say. As far as I know, the Opteron 185 does NOT support Cool 'n Quiet, so underclocking and/or undervolting it would definitely save you some power. The fans draw a couple watts each, so they're not going to make a huge difference.

You are able to spin-down drives when they're not being used, which saves power. The downside is that when you want to access that drive, you have to wait for it to spin back up. For an rsync drive, that shouldn't be an issue.
Why do you want an NTFS and and EXT3 drive? I assume this is Windows-share related? You can share your files on the EXT fs using Samba/SMB, which will allow Windows to be able to access the files over the network.

If power is your main concern, and you don't want to cough up the money for a NAS, I'd suggest building one yourself using either an Intel Atom/AMD E-350 based board (which has very low power draw, but isn't the most powerful, not saying it won't be fine for your application), or even the i3-2100T, which has a TDP of only 35W, and would have more processing power.

You have lots of solutions, and I suggest you read a bunch of threads on the forum here. There have been numerous people in the same predicament as yourself, and some of the posts and conversations should help point you in the right direction.

Good luck

Thanks. I have three reasons for keeping one drive powered down and in another format. One, as you pointed out Windows. But I was unaware that a Samba share can take care of that problem. The second is redundancy, I rather not risk both drives dieing around the same time.. Although the data is backed up to a USB external drive it'd be nice to have a drive in the NAS that it could easily copy it back from if one drive failed. The last is power usage. I figured keeping one drive powered down until I need to do an rsync copy would help save with power.

I

Overall with the setup you listed my guess is you will not be able to get really low power consumption. I would say at idle you could probably get as low as 50 watts without a video card and underclock/undervolt. My previous file server used a Opteron 165 (1.8 Ghz) and without a video card it idled at around 60 watts. That CPU did support Cool 'n Quiet but it barely made a difference in power consumption. The rest of the setup was a Asus A8R32-MVP motherboard, 2 GB RAM, and 2 320GB WD SE16 hard drives. I generally averaged 80-100 MB/sec for large file transfers. From what I recall power consumption during large file transfers was around 80-90 watts. I don't remember for sure but streaming power usage was probably around 65-70 watts. Overall performance was very good but power consumption was not the best. As was mentioned the newer AM3 AMD setups or the i3 Intel setups are more efficent and can get idle power consumption down into the 30 watt range.

So the real question is how low of power consumption do you want? I think in general you could probably see a savings of $2 to $5 a month on your electric bill if you used a newer DYI setup or a off the shelf NAS instead of your old setup. That is assuming 24x7 usage. Then again a newer setup or NAS would probably run $200-$500. At that price it would take quite a while for the newer unit to pay for itself in savings.

00Roush

Power consumption is a concern however the NAS would be in sleep/suspend (WOL) status when not being actively used. So whenever my fiancee and I are at work or out of the house the NAS would be asleep. It also wouldn't be on unless we actively needed it (retrieving or sending files to it, or streaming a video file to the AppleTV2, 360, or one of our computers). Does idle mean on but not actively being used (IE: not sleep?). I'm not concerned as much about power when it's actively being used. More about power when it should be asleep.

Another consideration is simply plugging in a external 500 GB hard drive into my NETGEAR WNR3500L for music only streaming. And then get rid of the NAS idea by building a desktop that has one or two spare drives for NAS and video streaming purposes (when we're home). Although I don't know what the power usage of leaving an external HDD on most of the time is.

 

[00Roush]

Idle power would be when the computer is on but not doing anything. Sleep power consumption should generally be less than 5 watts. I actually used to use sleep/WOL with my previous server. Worked great and I usually only had about a 10-20 second delay when I needed to access files. I should mention however that I was running Windows XP Professional as the server OS. Not sure how well the WOL functions work in other OSes.

00Roush