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Old (but not too old) Fujitsu mainboards are a great hack to build a computer with low power draw, especially in idle mode. They support relatively recent Intel
by manmal 3y ago
Old (but not too old) Fujitsu mainboards are a great hack to build a computer with low power draw, especially in idle mode. They support relatively recent Intel sockets and 4 SATA ports out of the box, so really ideal for small-ish and very affordable file- and media servers. I‘ve seen in a German forum [1] specialized in this kind of thing that people reproducibly get 5-8W idle with such boards.
At least in the EU, you can get used Fujitsu towers with those power saving boards for cheap. Just take care that you pick one with the higher efficiency power supply (IIRC, that’s the E90+).
Hidden in that forum thread [1] are posts from members who bought a specialized board (€250 last time I looked) that takes idle consumption down to 2W. Can’t remember the name of the manufacturer so I can’t link to it, but if someone were interested, it‘s mentioned throughout the thread.
1: https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamsten-systeme-30w-idle.1007101/page-89#post-29890294 https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamste... - someone claims they reached 4W idle with this Fujitsu board
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoI have an ASUS PN40 that idles at 1.8W (_at the wall_). This is with one SSD and LPDDR3 memory.
- manmal 3y agoYeah the small systems are often very efficient, but you can't really use them for file serving from HDDs. USB (and even eSATA) enclosures are not a suitable replacement for internal SATA ports. Their controllers & firmware are not stable enough for heavy concurrent use and often crash or become non-responsive. Idling an old Xeon or a 12100 at 4W is also a bit more challenging than a 1.1Ghz Celeron.
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoFor the record, the PN40 not only has 1 SATA internal port, it even has an NVME-capable M.2 slot. I make no claims of the power consumption of the latter since I never used it. If you want a shitton of SATA ports you obviously have to go somewhere else but then even the power consumption of the idling SSDs will start to be troublesome (and when in use will likely necessitate another PSU). I also disagree with the assessment of eSATA (since it is basically external SATA), and think the claims of problems with USB to SATA controllers are very exaggerated. They all have terrible power management though; if I had to use one, I'd just cut USB power entirely on idle, which would btw also help with any controller issues.
- manmal 3y agoM.2 SSDs have almost zero idle power draw, if that‘s what you meant? HDDs can spin down and will not draw much in that state. I think it‘s a reasonable assumption for a file server at home that it will spend most of time in spindown. I have seen some problematic reports on external enclosures on Reddit, but maybe they do work fine in many cases.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoMay be almost zero, but it's not zero! I have never tried DRAM-less NVME SSDs, but I have some samsung SATA 840-870 ones (tried several on this range) that consume around 0.2W on the most idle state they support. Considering my budget was 2W, it is not negligible...
- entropicgravity 3y agoI have a PN51 running my TV (as a dumb screen) and it's wonderful. It has a fan but I've never heard it even right close up. I haven't measured the power draw but I've never felt it any hotter than hardly detectable heat.