This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/unraid by /u/minektur on 2023-09-18 19:55:42.

TL;DR: 125 Watts idle 24/7 down to 35 Watts idle. 3 main factors: AM4 proc with much lower TDP, built in gpu (G variant) vs discrete GPU and remove 2 HOT-running SAS drives.

A while back I built an unraid box for my home - I had a spare AMD ryzen 1600x + motherboard + ram. I got a good deal on someone’s hitachi 6TB SAS drives, and I eventually got a couple of 1TB WD Blue drives for mirrored cache/pool. I put a random GPU - some kind of gaming hand-me-down, and then ended up putting a LOT of cooling in because those SAS drives run hotter than the sun.

All in all, it has worked well for a couple of years - I use it as an occasional time-machine backup target, I have a bunch of random files - years of directories full of junk, with a directory inside that named “old laptop” that has a bunch of junk and a directory inside that named “oldmac”, with a bunch of junk and a directory inside that … etc. I have random archived email PST files from 15 years ago, personal projects, lots of unorganized junk.

I ran a few VMs - a minecraft server for my son, a couple of different linux VMs I use for random things, a few docker apps etc.

My son no longer uses the minecraft server, I use it very little, and all the time this thing is sitting there burning 125 Watts of power. I got the itch to do something about it.

I got a amd-athlon-200ge - it’s about the lowest power AM4 cpu you can get - 2 core, 4 thread, 35W TDP. I took out half the ram (and later put it back -didn’t make much diff). I got a deal on a couple of 2TB nvme drives - one on the MB and one in a PCI riser. I spent a good long time deleting a little of my saved junk data - at least the multiple copies of MAME roms in different sub folders, and similar stuff - I have some super-high-res scans of a pinball machine playfield and plastics that I had 4 different copies of stashed in different places… etc. anyway, I got it down to under 4TB total.

I did a lot of musical chairs with data onto the two nvme drives,then removed the cache and SAS drives, put the cache drives as part of the array, moved things around again, and put one of the NVME drives as my parity drive, and now…

35 Watts idle, peaking at around 50 when I generate cpu and disk load.

The Athlon proc i switched to is a G variant, so no need to have a gpu any more. The whole thing is in a smaller case, is quieter, and it still runs my vms just fine. It’s not THAT much slower on running random python stuff and running the VMs off nvme actually makes the disk IO faster.

Under load the old system would do 250+ Watts -> 50 Watts maxed. (admittedly, much less getting done)