6 ms·

Something'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

Something'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 achievement, but those 43 watts are really sketchy imho.

bburrito 4y ago
It’s the hard drives that are staying on.
forty 4y ago
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 ;)
- joking 4y ago
  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.
  - trialect 4y ago
    I also have a Synology nas, a DS413 for 10 years now. and I use it like this also for 10 years now. It works great. Only consumes ~4W in deep sleep/system hibernation (the wording depends on from which year you find text mentioning the above nas. Synology decided to reword the function back in some year), and automatically wakes up whenever it is needed. (also not this is not only HDD sleep, it is full system sleep)
  - timrichard 4y ago
    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.
- icybox 4y ago
  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 ...
tomatocracy 4y ago
Assuming the power management for the CPU etc is working, spinning drives likely use c.7-10 watts per drive when idle but not spun down.
bayindirh 4y ago
Probably a combination of wrong configuration of CPU scheduler and not sleeping hard drives. Some of the hard drives do not advertise their sleep capabilities over SATA, and hdparm ignores these drives unless you force for sleep.
- ilyt 4y ago
  And it generally lowers longevity if disks are slept and woken up constantly.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    I have found that a 30 to 60 minute sleep time-out provides the perfect balance for infrequently used disks in terms of silence/power savings and longevity. Interestingly, one of my wireless routers with a USB port had a bug, and allowed a disk to sleep and cause it to wake afterwards. This made the disk overflow its SMART start/stop counter (so it's >65536, possibly double that number), yet the disk is still working at full performance to this day, and shows no performance degradation either. It's a Seagate notebook hard drive converted to an external drive (Seagate Expansion Portable, or something like that).
    - ilyt 4y ago
      I remember having bad experience once one of our guys decided "hey, it's backup server, we can just put some of the greens in it, backups are run all in bulk right?". Think 2/3 out of them died in a year, we preemptively replaced the rest.
      - bayindirh 4y ago
        Greens are not designed for that kind of duty. Also they have variable speed spindles and variable speed seek to keep noise down. My parents' PC has a 1.5TB Green for backups for almost a decade now, and that drive is fine, too. Looks like it's mostly a horses for courses matter.
sandos 4y ago
My desktop PCs have always been idling at more than 50W. Granted, my newest one is from 2011 or so.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  I don't think it has improved much. No one has been benchmarking these metrics for desktop PCs for a decade or so, so they have gotten worse, if anything. I have not yet found any LGA 1700 motherboard were the total idle power would be less than 25W, for example. I find that the power supply inefficiency by itself, even on standby , is usually already 2W -- larger than some of the alternatives discussed here. I have to go to Intel's soldered solutions to find <10W idle consumption (and even <2W). Forget about last decade's desktop AMDs either, they have very high idle power, with the exception of some APUs that may go down to 10W. They may also have custom solutions that idle at significantly less, though.
  - greenicon 4y ago
    Yes, this is a shame. Building a low-idle-power system with desktop components is far harder than it seems, unfortunately.
  - ndriscoll 4y ago
    There's a German forum where they've been crowdsourcing this info for a few years[0]. According to their spreadsheet[1] there's a few systems with 12th gen Intel cpus with <15W system power, and it looks like those are using bigger psus so they might be able to be lowered still with something like a Pico PSU. There are lots of low power LGA 1151 setups so as you say things may be getting worse (or the contributors aren't using new computers yet). I think newer pcie generations have higher power consumption, but I don't know if that's true when you put in a lower generation device into a pcie 5 motherboard for example, or if it affects idle power or just peak. It would be nice if this info were more readily available. [0] https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamsten-systeme-30w-idle.1007101/ https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamste... [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI/htmlview https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzs...
tails4e 4y ago
I have a 5 year old home server I'd love to replace as it idles at 40w, while an old laptop that could do the job idles at 12w. What I'd like to do is merge that and my old NAS, so ideally somethig with a few sata slots, m2 ssd, and low idle power. Any recommendations for this?
- zombielinux 4y ago
  If you find something with thunderbolt, you can get an external controller in there via thunderbolt->pcie. But between that power draw, and the draw of the drives, you'll be bumping close enough to 40w that it'd be a wash. I do this math myself every few months and ultimately, it seems for a large nas/server, 40-50W is about as low as you can idle.
  - tails4e 4y ago
    How large a NAS are you talking? My NAS is two drives in RAID1.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  Maybe a QNAP box? I think they're just PC's, so you can just wipe QNAP's OS and install whatever you want (unlike some other NAS vendors).
hddherman 4y ago
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 12V/19V. ATX PSU-s need to handle 3.3V/5V/12V, which probably plays a role in efficiency at idle.
- vonseel 4y ago
  Europe energy prices :/ Here in Texas it cost maybe $5/month to run a 45 watt little server (pc)…
  - gruturo 4y ago
    Consider yourself lucky - in Germany we're talking 20 EUR/month for a constant 45W load. On the other hand, if you can, please consider using a more energy efficient alternative (and/or ensure you're getting the electricity from green sources) - the planet will warm up regardless of whether the electricity was cheap or expensive.
  - dan1234 4y ago
    45W 24/7 would work out at about £10.50/month in the UK right now (~$12.60). My total household usage averages around 4.5KWh/day so adding that 45W 24/7 server would add about 24% to overall load! It would need to be an important little server to justify the increase.
- guilamu 4y ago
  You're right, using a desktop CPU for a mediacenter is not a good idea. Laptop CPUs are, however, really well optimised for very low consumption when idling and that's what you should be using for a mediacenter. Also, IMHO, ASRock Deskmini would not be a good idea for a media center since it's using desktop CPUs. The idle power draw will not be as good as mini pc with a laptop CPU.
  - 4y ago
adql 4y ago
I'd imagine that MEDIA SERVER that also STORES BACKUPS might just have a bunch of 3.5 inch hard drives in it ?
Saris 4y ago
3.5" HDDs are 5 watts each while idle, if you can spin them down they're much less, but that tough with multiple services constantly accessing data.

bburrito 4y ago

It’s the hard drives that are staying on.

forty 4y ago

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 ;)

joking 4y ago
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.
- trialect 4y ago
  I also have a Synology nas, a DS413 for 10 years now. and I use it like this also for 10 years now. It works great. Only consumes ~4W in deep sleep/system hibernation (the wording depends on from which year you find text mentioning the above nas. Synology decided to reword the function back in some year), and automatically wakes up whenever it is needed. (also not this is not only HDD sleep, it is full system sleep)
- timrichard 4y ago
  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.
icybox 4y ago
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 ...

tomatocracy 4y ago

Assuming the power management for the CPU etc is working, spinning drives likely use c.7-10 watts per drive when idle but not spun down.

bayindirh 4y ago

Probably a combination of wrong configuration of CPU scheduler and not sleeping hard drives. Some of the hard drives do not advertise their sleep capabilities over SATA, and hdparm ignores these drives unless you force for sleep.

ilyt 4y ago
And it generally lowers longevity if disks are slept and woken up constantly.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  I have found that a 30 to 60 minute sleep time-out provides the perfect balance for infrequently used disks in terms of silence/power savings and longevity. Interestingly, one of my wireless routers with a USB port had a bug, and allowed a disk to sleep and cause it to wake afterwards. This made the disk overflow its SMART start/stop counter (so it's >65536, possibly double that number), yet the disk is still working at full performance to this day, and shows no performance degradation either. It's a Seagate notebook hard drive converted to an external drive (Seagate Expansion Portable, or something like that).
  - ilyt 4y ago
    I remember having bad experience once one of our guys decided "hey, it's backup server, we can just put some of the greens in it, backups are run all in bulk right?". Think 2/3 out of them died in a year, we preemptively replaced the rest.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      Greens are not designed for that kind of duty. Also they have variable speed spindles and variable speed seek to keep noise down. My parents' PC has a 1.5TB Green for backups for almost a decade now, and that drive is fine, too. Looks like it's mostly a horses for courses matter.

sandos 4y ago

My desktop PCs have always been idling at more than 50W. Granted, my newest one is from 2011 or so.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
I don't think it has improved much. No one has been benchmarking these metrics for desktop PCs for a decade or so, so they have gotten worse, if anything. I have not yet found any LGA 1700 motherboard were the total idle power would be less than 25W, for example. I find that the power supply inefficiency by itself, even on standby , is usually already 2W -- larger than some of the alternatives discussed here. I have to go to Intel's soldered solutions to find <10W idle consumption (and even <2W). Forget about last decade's desktop AMDs either, they have very high idle power, with the exception of some APUs that may go down to 10W. They may also have custom solutions that idle at significantly less, though.
- greenicon 4y ago
  Yes, this is a shame. Building a low-idle-power system with desktop components is far harder than it seems, unfortunately.
- ndriscoll 4y ago
  There's a German forum where they've been crowdsourcing this info for a few years[0]. According to their spreadsheet[1] there's a few systems with 12th gen Intel cpus with <15W system power, and it looks like those are using bigger psus so they might be able to be lowered still with something like a Pico PSU. There are lots of low power LGA 1151 setups so as you say things may be getting worse (or the contributors aren't using new computers yet). I think newer pcie generations have higher power consumption, but I don't know if that's true when you put in a lower generation device into a pcie 5 motherboard for example, or if it affects idle power or just peak. It would be nice if this info were more readily available. [0] https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamsten-systeme-30w-idle.1007101/ https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamste... [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI/htmlview https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzs...

tails4e 4y ago

I have a 5 year old home server I'd love to replace as it idles at 40w, while an old laptop that could do the job idles at 12w. What I'd like to do is merge that and my old NAS, so ideally somethig with a few sata slots, m2 ssd, and low idle power. Any recommendations for this?

zombielinux 4y ago
If you find something with thunderbolt, you can get an external controller in there via thunderbolt->pcie. But between that power draw, and the draw of the drives, you'll be bumping close enough to 40w that it'd be a wash. I do this math myself every few months and ultimately, it seems for a large nas/server, 40-50W is about as low as you can idle.
- tails4e 4y ago
  How large a NAS are you talking? My NAS is two drives in RAID1.
Tijdreiziger 4y ago
Maybe a QNAP box? I think they're just PC's, so you can just wipe QNAP's OS and install whatever you want (unlike some other NAS vendors).

hddherman 4y ago

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 12V/19V. ATX PSU-s need to handle 3.3V/5V/12V, which probably plays a role in efficiency at idle.

vonseel 4y ago
Europe energy prices :/ Here in Texas it cost maybe $5/month to run a 45 watt little server (pc)…
- gruturo 4y ago
  Consider yourself lucky - in Germany we're talking 20 EUR/month for a constant 45W load. On the other hand, if you can, please consider using a more energy efficient alternative (and/or ensure you're getting the electricity from green sources) - the planet will warm up regardless of whether the electricity was cheap or expensive.
- dan1234 4y ago
  45W 24/7 would work out at about £10.50/month in the UK right now (~$12.60). My total household usage averages around 4.5KWh/day so adding that 45W 24/7 server would add about 24% to overall load! It would need to be an important little server to justify the increase.
guilamu 4y ago
You're right, using a desktop CPU for a mediacenter is not a good idea. Laptop CPUs are, however, really well optimised for very low consumption when idling and that's what you should be using for a mediacenter. Also, IMHO, ASRock Deskmini would not be a good idea for a media center since it's using desktop CPUs. The idle power draw will not be as good as mini pc with a laptop CPU.
- 4y ago

adql 4y ago

I'd imagine that MEDIA SERVER that also STORES BACKUPS might just have a bunch of 3.5 inch hard drives in it ?

Saris 4y ago

3.5" HDDs are 5 watts each while idle, if you can spin them down they're much less, but that tough with multiple services constantly accessing data.