Just trash the 43w while idle monstrosity and put Plex on your Raspberry Pi 4. Use an external drive and it will power on and off automatically. I see absolutely no need for the second, much more inefficient server.
Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
161–170 of 230 posts
Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raspberry Pis (and similar devices) already work great as low-power servers. The big issue is the home server community being overly focused on creating "battle stations" that look cool and run 40 different Docker containers rather than simple low-power solutions.
You can very quickly run up against resource constraints with a raspberry pi.
You can also run against resource constraints with a smartphone.
Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a HP Microserver N40L with 4 spinning disks. Last time I measured, I'm pretty sure it was consuming around 40W. I guess CPUs have gotten better in the last 10 years ;)
I have a synology nas and is unable to stop the spinning disks. A shame, every other thing in it is nice, but could have beter optimizations, as the disk are the most of its energy consumption.
You can set the power options so that it can shut down after a period of inactivity. Mine has 8 HDDs. According to my power meter plug, it uses 70W when all are spinning, 30W when the drives are spun down, and about 3W when "off" (configured to WOL). When I need to use the NAS for a while, I usually bring it up via an SSH app on my phone, which connects to my always-on Raspberry Pi that can send the magic packet. I use the wol package in Arch.
Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
#164€0.49 / kWh is an insanely high price for electricity. Here in the US in Cali, $0.32 / kWh is considered a steep price. I've heard the price in Oregon is $̶0̶.̶0̶2̶ ̶/̶ ̶k̶W̶h̶ $0.20 / kWh. What gives.. why can't electricity be delivered less expensively / more economically in Germany? Edit: Thanks for the corrections regarding Oregon, makes me feel a little better about the situations elsewhere. :)
Germany made the silly decision in 2011 to shut down their existing nuclear reactors, and build more natural gas plants to import cheap, natural gas from Russia. Then after Russia's second invasion of Ukraine last year, the gas got cut off. Overall, it was a pretty bad idea that most people should have saw coming since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone who runs a large datacenter probably already does this or something equivalent, either to save money or to service more customers with the same amount of hardware. Possibly, but few cloud providers actually do live migration[0] since it's risky to pause a VM for typically less than 1 second, but up to 5 seconds. 0: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/live-migrati...
I was actually thinking about elastic AWS instances when I wrote that. IIRC they're meant to be spun up and then shut down as a service's demand varies. VPS providers are already overprovisioned anyway, so they have less idle hardware to begin with.
Isn't that really expensive? Far more expensive than just keeping a cluster running 24x7? I think the much bigger cost here is shelf space and the hardware, and so the retail price isn't impact much by the cost of power.
For the record I like the concept and hope it becomes a lot cheaper over time.
Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
#166If you want to push energy efficiency the Raspberry 2 (old ARM v7 version) is the best device at 1W idle / 2W full load, it saturates the SD card. One step up is Raspberry 4 for heavier workloads/networking at 3W idle / 6W full load, and after that 8-core Atom at 15W idle / 25W full load. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, 100Mb/s, vs 1Gb/s vs 10Gb/s makes a lot of difference. IMO 1Gb/s is the only reasonable spe…
> 256GB DDR5 uses 80W!
WTF?!
Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
#167Something's not right. I own both a passively cooled 2016 Mini PC OLOEY Intel Core i7-7500U (as a home media center) and a 2023 Minisforum UM690 (for work and it's amazing btw), and they both use about 7 watts when idling (screen off). How op is using 43 watts for an idling media center is just beyond me, he must be using a 1978 Intel 8086, right? Anyhow, 4 watts is still far better than 7 watts and this is a great a…
I have a HP Microserver N40L with 4 spinning disks. Last time I measured, I'm pretty sure it was consuming around 40W. I guess CPUs have gotten better in the last 10 years ;)
I'm running it's older cousin - N36L with 4 Drives. The CPU in that one is Athlon II Neo N36L with 12W TDP, 3.5" spinning drives are 7-10W per drive. So 40W is very reasonable.
Op should just run more services on his server, but that probably won't be 43W at idle, when the box would actually be doing something ...
Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
#168I use an old Intel Macbook to selfhost this kind of services. The idle draw is around 2W and you get a free UPS if your battery is still working. The sleep management on macOS is really well done and you don't even need a magic packet to wake the computer. You can configure `pmset` to wake on modem access (ring).
Did the same with 16GB i7 Dell E7420 laptop (2013), it draws 4W when idle, can spin up two cores instantly and fairly quickly transcode video with iGPU or host multiple Minecraft worlds. No way phone or RPi can get these params.
Same here but with an XPS 13 model. Power usage from laptop chips is great for home servers. They're still really fast when needed compared to a Raspberry Pi, and typically come with 256gb or even 512 of built in fast SSD storage.
The battery in mine is old, but with the screen off it still lasts several hours as a sort of UPS.
Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
#169I use an old Intel Macbook to selfhost this kind of services. The idle draw is around 2W and you get a free UPS if your battery is still working. The sleep management on macOS is really well done and you don't even need a magic packet to wake the computer. You can configure `pmset` to wake on modem access (ring).
Thanks for the idea. Currently i have a Raspberry Pi3 with an external USB-SATA 1TB disk connected which is on 24/7 doing stuff like PiHole, Navidrome, etc. I wonder if putting that all on a fairly new laptop with all the energy savings enabled would actually be more energy efficient.
Even on a fairly old one (my "home server laptop" is 8 years old) it's really close in terms of power usage. And the laptop is much faster than the Raspberry and usually comes with fast SSD storage built in.
Re: Saving Energy: Home Server That Automatically Suspends to RAM and Wakes Up Again
#170Something's not right. I own both a passively cooled 2016 Mini PC OLOEY Intel Core i7-7500U (as a home media center) and a 2023 Minisforum UM690 (for work and it's amazing btw), and they both use about 7 watts when idling (screen off). How op is using 43 watts for an idling media center is just beyond me, he must be using a 1978 Intel 8086, right? Anyhow, 4 watts is still far better than 7 watts and this is a great a…
I've found that most desktop PC-s have idle power usage around 35-50W. That was the main motivation to look for alternative solutions like ASRock Deskmini, or the Dell/HP/Lenovo TinyMiniMicro form factor machines. Mini PC-s tend to have great idle power usage compared to big towers, which is probably down to the selection of the CPU, components on the motherboard and the power supply which usually has to only output…
> I've found that most desktop PC-s have idle power usage around 35-50W.
My desktop server uses 50W at idle. ASRock Z390 motherboard, Pentium G5400, 32GB RAM, no GPU. There are 15HDDs, but 50W is with all of them spun down. It hits 120W will all disks spun up and CPU under load. I've come to the conclusion it's the motherboard, because the parts individually shouldn't draw that much power.