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But self-building a NAS is still a problem, and I'm also talking about this [1] article from the same blog: There are NO low power NAS boards. I'm talking abou

by M95D 1y ago

But self-building a NAS is still a problem, and I'm also talking about this [1] article from the same blog: There are NO low power NAS boards. I'm talking about something with an ARM CPU, no video, no audio, lots of memory (or SODIMM slot) and 10+ SATA ports. Sure, anyone can buy a self-powered USB3 hub and add 7 external HDDs to a raspbery, but that level of performance is really really low, not to mention the USB random disconnects. And no, port replicators aren't much better. [1] https://lowendbox.com/blog/are-you-recyling-old-hardware-for-your-diy-the-environment-isnt-thanking-you/ https://lowendbox.com/blog/are-you-recyling-old-hardware-for...

fx1994 1y ago
yup, thats why I alwys end up with microatx board, it just works, it draws power but does the job I need
storus 1y ago
Why don't you look at Topton's N100 boards with 6x SATA, 2.5Gb LAN, PCIe slot for extra SATA ports and Jonsbo N3 NAS case with it? For $300 you'd have a way better NAS than anything Synology offers.
- M95D 1y ago
  I think we have different definitions of what "low power" means.
  - justincormack 1y ago
    What do you want? The N100 is 6W in theory not sure if you can downclock it or how good the power control is. Problem below that is that is mostly mobile phone type CPUs and they dont have much IO. Drives in a NAS are going to consume a bit of power too so its not really clear how low you can go.
    - M95D 1y ago
      I want less power and more storage. I want less than 10W idle for the whole system, maybe except HDDs, but even those will be in sleep much of the time. x86 boards are mostly ATX-powered and I don't think any ATX power source can go that low and still be efficient (not draw 20W while powering a 10W system). And yes, mobile phone CPUs are good enough. I'm using a Turris Omnia now and Marvell 385 is OK, except I have to use an external DAS for hard drives which eats 10 times more than the Omnia with all drives sleeping. If only the chinese didn't try to make good-for-everything-best-at-nothing ARM boards with lots of video outs, audio, discrete NIC and soldered wifi...
      - storus 1y ago
        HDPlex GaN power supply? 1 HDD consumes around 5-7W idle, so with 8 HDDs you get to 40-60W on HDDs alone (all idle); adding 6W with N100 seems like insignificant fraction. The moment you actually use any HDD the consumption per HDD shots up to 8-10W whereas N100 shots up to 14W so you end up with 64-80W from HDDs and 14W from N100. Why would you like to squeeze component that is the least important (CPU) while retaining lots of SATA HDDs as that's your priority? Optimizing the wrong thing? If you wanted to lower power, the easiest way is to replace HDDs with 16TB SATA SSDs, each consuming 0.08-2W. Then CPU might be a bottleneck.
        M95D 1y ago
        There is power management for HDDs, you know... For my typical usage, the hard drives are probably more than 80% in sleep mode. If I had more SATA ports, I could probably add a frequent-access cache on a SSD and then they would be 99% sleeping. The drives I have, ST2000DL003, consume 0.5W in sleep, according to the spec sheet. So all 8 of them would consume ~4W.
        SirMaster 1y ago
        If you care that much about power why are you using 8 tiny 2TB HDDs instead of 1 or 2 big HDDs? You don't need a NAS for 16TB, you just need a RasPi with a 16TB USB HDD connected to it and a second one for backups that you keep mostly offline.
FredFS456 1y ago
There are some new NAS boxes hitting the market (UGreen being one of the brands that are cheaper, but also Minisforum) which have solid hardware but aren't locked down at all. They're just x86 boxes with bog-standard hardware so you can just run whatever OS you want, and they support that use case.
- lostlogin 1y ago
  Thank you. To save some clicks: https://nas.ugreen.com/ https://nas.ugreen.com/ https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro
  - mosselman 1y ago
    Thanks for the links. What do you guys think about security concerns around minisform and ugreen being Chinese companies?
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
      You couldn't pay me to put them on my network. From just a few days ago: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/china-used-three-private-companies-hack-global-telecoms-us-says-rcna227543 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/china-used-three-priva...
    - dsr_ 1y ago
      Regardless of source: - your NAS should not be allowed to talk to the outside world - you should wipe any pre-installed software and install your own OS
- M95D 1y ago
  Like I said, I'm still waiting for 10+ SATA bays...
- lan321 1y ago
  Add to that Aoostar. It's quite comparable to the Minisforum n5 Pro, a bit cheaper - Max 48GB*2 DDR5 ECC - 8 core PRO 8845HS - 25W with nothing, doing nothing, realistically 50W - 25G combined network - 5 M.2 (3x2 and 2x1 lane) and 6 HDDs - Oculink https://aoostar.com/blogs/news/the-aoostar-wtr-max11bay-is-about-to-meet-you-all https://aoostar.com/blogs/news/the-aoostar-wtr-max11bay-is-a...
iamshs 1y ago
Low power and reliability is why I want to just use my Mac Mini M4 + DAS as storage solution among 15 people. I am not sold on it because Mac Mini has lots of life in it to be solely devoted to this use case.
- lostlogin 1y ago
  I recently got one as a home server. It’s ludicrously power efficient and so powerful. But it’s a battle getting it to behave, with OS fights at every stage. It took me a week of fighting to get it to reliably power up, connect to network shares and then start some containers. How could this be hard?
- TheDong 1y ago
  I wouldn't be sold on it because macOS is a terrible server OS. If it can't run linux, it's not going to make a good storage server on the software side of things.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  Which DAS? I looked at that as an option but didn't narrow down a top pick for Thunderbolt JBOD DAS units.
- M95D 1y ago
  And how much power does the DAS consume?
extraisland 1y ago
I have some quad core celeron board integrated thing. It draws 15watts. I added a PCI-E sata which gave me 6 extra ports. I am sure you can buy better ones. I used a Fractal Node Case that has 6 drive bays. Installed TrueNAS Scale on an SSD. Swapping drives is a pain as I have to take the computer apart. But that is infrequent. So it is fine.
- M95D 1y ago
  15W with or without the PCIe SATA? And it's still 10W too much.
  - interstice 1y ago
    Why 5W?
    - M95D 1y ago
      Electricity prices and not wanting to turn it on and off all the time.
      - horsawlarway 1y ago
        The difference here is pretty much negligible to the vast majority of folks. 10w is... Nothing. There are only very specific cases where it's worth picking hardware on this constraint, and unless you're on a solar powered sail boat or something similarly niche, you probably shouldn't be prioritizing this. In my region, 10w comes out to about 0.90 USD/month. Or roughly 3 pennies a day. Over the entire lifetime of the device (5 years assumed) it's less than 50 USD in power costs. I'll take basically any other quality of life improvement instead...
        M95D 1y ago
        I've done the calculations just now: 10W constant over 10 years would cost me 275 euro. My hard drives (7 ST2000DL003 and one ST2000DL001) are 10-15 years old now. They're all different batches, none failed yet, so I expect it to last at least 5 more years, possibly a lot more. The current NAS setup I have (router + DAS + 2 USB) is around 50W. Over 20years it will cost me ~2800 euro in today's prices. So you see, the electricity is a very significant portion of TCO. In fact, it's more than half, because I bought everything second-hand.
_zoltan_ 1y ago
SATA? In 2025? NVMe all the way.
- mkl 1y ago
  Not for a NAS. Speed is NVMe's benefit, but your network isn't fast enough to take advantage of it, which means you're paying through the nose for very low capacity. 24TB SATA drives are a way better deal for a NAS.
  - _zoltan_ 1y ago
    I run 25Gbps home from my ISP and to my desktop from my NAS I run also 25Gbps.
    - bigstrat2003 1y ago
      You need to understand that you are a very unusual case. Most people can't get 25 Gbps for a connection, it's 1 Gpbs at best. Most people, even most technical people, are not running a 25 Gbps home network. You have specific needs for speed and that's fine, but they are not commonplace and most people will be served just fine with SATA drives.
      - hiq 1y ago
        I agree with you, but we're talking about a device that I'd consider keeping for 10+ years. Actually I have some Synology NAS lost somewhere that I occasionally use, and while I don't trust exposing it to the internet (never have), it still serves files fine. With this expectation it's not absurd to get a NAS that still handles a bit more than the current speeds. Just to add a datapoint: I could also get a 25Gpbs connection in Switzerland. Actually checking that, I'm realizing that I could upgrade without paying more (maybe just a setup fee, less than 50USD).
        _zoltan_ 1y ago
        I'm also with Init7 :)
dvdkon 1y ago
That would be nice, but Synology doesn't offer that either, no? The closest thing available now would probably be a Radxa ROCK 5 ITX+, a motherboard with a Rockchip SoC and two M.2 slots, into which you could put their six-port SATA cards. No idea what that whole setup will draw, though. EDIT: I have to complain about the article you linked. It's certainly true that one should account for power consumption, not just purchase cost, but some crucial mistakes make the article more harmful on the whole. The author cites 84 W power consumption for an i5-4690, and 10 W for a J4125 CPU, but those figures are the TDP. For all we know, those CPUs could idle at around the same wattage, and from my experience they likely do. Having done some measuring myself, I'd say the largest source of power draw in an idle NAS will be the PSU, motherboard, and disks. With any remotely recent Intel CPU, it idles so efficiently as to be negligible in a PC.
- ethersteeds 1y ago
  > That would be nice, but Synology doesn't offer that either, no? I have a Synology DS920+ 4-bay that averaged 20W total including 2 spinning drives with sleep disabled. I agonized about going with the closed product, and in many ways regret it. But at the time there was nothing I could find that came close, even without the drives. And that's before factoring my time administering the DIY option, or that it would be bigger and less ruggedized. I went as far as finding the German low power motherboard forum spreadsheet and contemplating trying to source some of the years old SKUs there. You've gotta believe us when we say that before the n100s arrived, it was a wasteland for low power options. In many ways it still is, although these n100 boards with many SATA are a sea change. Once you set out to define requirements, you pretty quickly get to every ZFS explainer saying that you are a fool to even attempt using less than 32 GB of ECC memory...
whizzter 1y ago
It's better now, been annoyed like you but the Rpi5 comes in a 16gb variant and has a PCI-E port that can be extended to 5x SATA or 2x M2. It's not blazing but probably an improvement over my old Celeron J1800 with 8gb of ram. The Intel N100,etc series of machines seems popular with builders even if the RAM restrictions drives me nuts. I think the major issue seems to be cases actually, there's tons of small cheap AMD machines from manufacturers like BeeLink that trounce most NUC setups for performance, but like the NUC's as soon as there's disc enclosures the price shoots away.
bgnn 1y ago
This sounds like a fun project to do. Maybe I will look into the technical feasibility of this.
SirMaster 1y ago
Why do you need a bunch of SATA ports? Just get a cheap SAS2 PCIe card on eBay. There are definitely low power ARM boards with a PCIe lanes. Typically its NVMe, but you can adapt that to 4x PCIe 3.0 which is a lot of bandwidth for HDDs. Not sure why you need a lot of memory for a NAS though, but they do have boards that have 32GB of memory. What's wrong with this? https://www.amazon.com/Radxa-5B-Connector-Computer-32GB/dp/B0DX6VBDQR https://www.amazon.com/Radxa-5B-Connector-Computer-32GB/dp/B... And connect a card like this to the NVMe PCIe which you can connect 8 SATA HDDs to with SATA breakout cables. https://www.ebay.com/itm/155007176276 https://www.ebay.com/itm/155007176276 If you need more than 8 HDDs you can get a SAS2 expander to connect to the SAS2 card and then you could easily connect 24 HDDs with a 6 port SAS2 expander and breakout cables. Or if you put this small board and card into a server case that has a SAS2 backplane with expander built in, then you can just connect all the disks that way. Another option, not ARM, but still low power and neat. https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-sigma https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-sigma This has Thunderbolt 4 which you can connect to a PCIe slot like this: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2832.html https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2832.html They have a lot of neat stuff, you can get the tiny LattePanda Mu, and dock it in this: https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-mu https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-mu https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2822.html https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2822.html
- M95D 1y ago
  That SAS/SATA controller would consume more power than all the rest of the system.
  - SirMaster 1y ago
    Really? 6.1 Electrical Characteristics The maximum power requirements for the LSI SAS 9200-8i HBA under normal operation are as follows:  PCIe 12.0 V = 0.74 A  Power — Nominal = 7.92 W — Worst Case = 13.20 W Seems like it uses just a little more than 1 large capacity HDD.
    - M95D 1y ago
      It's 2-3 times more than the drives. All 8 HDDs consume 4W in sleep, and they sleep more than 80% of the time (all night, all day while I'm at work, they only start 2-3 hours in the evening).
procaryote 1y ago
There are pci boards that let you hook up 4 sata ports to the pci3 on a raspberry pi 5. The drives will be a large part of the power draw, so if you want low power, going for 2 drives is probably better. That probably gets you into the 20-30 watt range for 10+ sata ports you might as well get an x86 motherboard as it's going to draw lots of power anyway Unless you plan to power down most of the drives most of the time
- M95D 1y ago
  > Unless you plan to power down most of the drives most of the time I do. Read my other comments.
  - procaryote 1y ago
    Yeah, it looks like you have somewhat niche requirements and would need to build your own hardware and software. To run 10+ sata drives you'll either need to take a lot of care they're not spinning up at the same time, or getting used in parallel, or you'll need to dimension your power supply to cope. A beefy power supply will have a higher idle draw making the focus on getting the whole system idle down to 5w pretty hard
- whalesalad 1y ago
  rpi sux for longevity - be prepared to mirror and replace the SD card often
  - procaryote 1y ago
    I've never had this be an issue. If it were an issue, you could probably put just /boot on the sd card and run the system off one of the real disks
proxyon 1y ago
> I'm talking about something with an ARM CPU, Why? There is no evidence that ARM is the only power efficient CPU. i5, i3 and n100 are all power efficient. > no video, no audio Why? Disable onboard video if you care that much. > lots of memory (or SODIMM slot) and 10+ SATA ports This eats power, conflicting with the rest of your requests. > Sure, anyone can buy a self-powered USB3 hub and add 7 external HDDs to a raspbery, but that level of performance is really really low, not to mention the USB random disconnects. And no, port replicators aren't much better. No, that's not what you do for a power efficient NAS. You build an i3, i5 or n100, turn off all unneeded peripherals, and configure bios as needed to your level of desired power consumption. under 10W is achievable.
- M95D 1y ago
  > Why? There is no evidence that ARM is the only power efficient CPU. i5, i3 and n100 are all power efficient. They are, but the motherboard is not, or at least not as much as an ARM board. > Why? Disable onboard video if you care that much. And it would boot... how? AFAIK, no UEFI system is capable of booting headless and very very few BIOS systems were. > No, that's not what you do for a power efficient NAS. You build an i3, i5 or n100, turn off all unneeded peripherals, and configure bios as needed to your level of desired power consumption. under 10W is achievable. I very much doubt that. N100 maybe, just maybe, could go lower than 20W if the power source is very very efficient, but I haven't seen any system with 10+ SATA ports. The commonly suggested solution here, to add a server SAS/SATA controller, would double or triple the idle power.
  - Marsymars 1y ago
    > I very much doubt that. N100 maybe, just maybe, could go lower than 20W if the power source is very very efficient, but I haven't seen any system with 10+ SATA ports. The commonly suggested solution here, to add a server SAS/SATA controller, would double or triple the idle power. The N100 on its own can go quite low - my N305 system idles around 5W. (But laptop, so zero SATA ports.)
nine_k 1y ago
Second-hand Supermicro boards with 6, 8, even 12 SATA ports, 8-16 GB of ECC RAM, a preinstalled CPU, and often a passive radiator are pretty accessible or eBay or suchlike. Of course they are old, but if they did not break after 5-7 years in a server rack, most likely they're not going to break for 10 more years in a less demanding environment at home.
- M95D 1y ago
  Not low power. Electricity over 10 years would cost 10 times more than the board.
aidenn0 1y ago
https://jackharvest.com/ https://jackharvest.com/ has some DIY options.

by M95D 1y ago

fx1994 1y ago

yup, thats why I alwys end up with microatx board, it just works, it draws power but does the job I need

storus 1y ago

Why don't you look at Topton's N100 boards with 6x SATA, 2.5Gb LAN, PCIe slot for extra SATA ports and Jonsbo N3 NAS case with it? For $300 you'd have a way better NAS than anything Synology offers.

M95D 1y ago
I think we have different definitions of what "low power" means.
- justincormack 1y ago
  What do you want? The N100 is 6W in theory not sure if you can downclock it or how good the power control is. Problem below that is that is mostly mobile phone type CPUs and they dont have much IO. Drives in a NAS are going to consume a bit of power too so its not really clear how low you can go.
  - M95D 1y ago
    I want less power and more storage. I want less than 10W idle for the whole system, maybe except HDDs, but even those will be in sleep much of the time. x86 boards are mostly ATX-powered and I don't think any ATX power source can go that low and still be efficient (not draw 20W while powering a 10W system). And yes, mobile phone CPUs are good enough. I'm using a Turris Omnia now and Marvell 385 is OK, except I have to use an external DAS for hard drives which eats 10 times more than the Omnia with all drives sleeping. If only the chinese didn't try to make good-for-everything-best-at-nothing ARM boards with lots of video outs, audio, discrete NIC and soldered wifi...
    - storus 1y ago
      HDPlex GaN power supply? 1 HDD consumes around 5-7W idle, so with 8 HDDs you get to 40-60W on HDDs alone (all idle); adding 6W with N100 seems like insignificant fraction. The moment you actually use any HDD the consumption per HDD shots up to 8-10W whereas N100 shots up to 14W so you end up with 64-80W from HDDs and 14W from N100. Why would you like to squeeze component that is the least important (CPU) while retaining lots of SATA HDDs as that's your priority? Optimizing the wrong thing? If you wanted to lower power, the easiest way is to replace HDDs with 16TB SATA SSDs, each consuming 0.08-2W. Then CPU might be a bottleneck.
      - M95D 1y ago
        There is power management for HDDs, you know... For my typical usage, the hard drives are probably more than 80% in sleep mode. If I had more SATA ports, I could probably add a frequent-access cache on a SSD and then they would be 99% sleeping. The drives I have, ST2000DL003, consume 0.5W in sleep, according to the spec sheet. So all 8 of them would consume ~4W.
        SirMaster 1y ago
        If you care that much about power why are you using 8 tiny 2TB HDDs instead of 1 or 2 big HDDs? You don't need a NAS for 16TB, you just need a RasPi with a 16TB USB HDD connected to it and a second one for backups that you keep mostly offline.

FredFS456 1y ago

There are some new NAS boxes hitting the market (UGreen being one of the brands that are cheaper, but also Minisforum) which have solid hardware but aren't locked down at all. They're just x86 boxes with bog-standard hardware so you can just run whatever OS you want, and they support that use case.

lostlogin 1y ago
Thank you. To save some clicks: https://nas.ugreen.com/ https://nas.ugreen.com/ https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro
- mosselman 1y ago
  Thanks for the links. What do you guys think about security concerns around minisform and ugreen being Chinese companies?
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
    You couldn't pay me to put them on my network. From just a few days ago: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/china-used-three-private-companies-hack-global-telecoms-us-says-rcna227543 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/china-used-three-priva...
  - dsr_ 1y ago
    Regardless of source: - your NAS should not be allowed to talk to the outside world - you should wipe any pre-installed software and install your own OS
M95D 1y ago
Like I said, I'm still waiting for 10+ SATA bays...
lan321 1y ago
Add to that Aoostar. It's quite comparable to the Minisforum n5 Pro, a bit cheaper - Max 48GB*2 DDR5 ECC - 8 core PRO 8845HS - 25W with nothing, doing nothing, realistically 50W - 25G combined network - 5 M.2 (3x2 and 2x1 lane) and 6 HDDs - Oculink https://aoostar.com/blogs/news/the-aoostar-wtr-max11bay-is-about-to-meet-you-all https://aoostar.com/blogs/news/the-aoostar-wtr-max11bay-is-a...

iamshs 1y ago

Low power and reliability is why I want to just use my Mac Mini M4 + DAS as storage solution among 15 people. I am not sold on it because Mac Mini has lots of life in it to be solely devoted to this use case.

lostlogin 1y ago
I recently got one as a home server. It’s ludicrously power efficient and so powerful. But it’s a battle getting it to behave, with OS fights at every stage. It took me a week of fighting to get it to reliably power up, connect to network shares and then start some containers. How could this be hard?
TheDong 1y ago
I wouldn't be sold on it because macOS is a terrible server OS. If it can't run linux, it's not going to make a good storage server on the software side of things.
Marsymars 1y ago
Which DAS? I looked at that as an option but didn't narrow down a top pick for Thunderbolt JBOD DAS units.
M95D 1y ago
And how much power does the DAS consume?

extraisland 1y ago

I have some quad core celeron board integrated thing. It draws 15watts. I added a PCI-E sata which gave me 6 extra ports. I am sure you can buy better ones. I used a Fractal Node Case that has 6 drive bays. Installed TrueNAS Scale on an SSD. Swapping drives is a pain as I have to take the computer apart. But that is infrequent. So it is fine.

M95D 1y ago
15W with or without the PCIe SATA? And it's still 10W too much.
- interstice 1y ago
  Why 5W?
  - M95D 1y ago
    Electricity prices and not wanting to turn it on and off all the time.
    - horsawlarway 1y ago
      The difference here is pretty much negligible to the vast majority of folks. 10w is... Nothing. There are only very specific cases where it's worth picking hardware on this constraint, and unless you're on a solar powered sail boat or something similarly niche, you probably shouldn't be prioritizing this. In my region, 10w comes out to about 0.90 USD/month. Or roughly 3 pennies a day. Over the entire lifetime of the device (5 years assumed) it's less than 50 USD in power costs. I'll take basically any other quality of life improvement instead...
      - M95D 1y ago
        I've done the calculations just now: 10W constant over 10 years would cost me 275 euro. My hard drives (7 ST2000DL003 and one ST2000DL001) are 10-15 years old now. They're all different batches, none failed yet, so I expect it to last at least 5 more years, possibly a lot more. The current NAS setup I have (router + DAS + 2 USB) is around 50W. Over 20years it will cost me ~2800 euro in today's prices. So you see, the electricity is a very significant portion of TCO. In fact, it's more than half, because I bought everything second-hand.

_zoltan_ 1y ago

SATA? In 2025? NVMe all the way.

mkl 1y ago
Not for a NAS. Speed is NVMe's benefit, but your network isn't fast enough to take advantage of it, which means you're paying through the nose for very low capacity. 24TB SATA drives are a way better deal for a NAS.
- _zoltan_ 1y ago
  I run 25Gbps home from my ISP and to my desktop from my NAS I run also 25Gbps.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    You need to understand that you are a very unusual case. Most people can't get 25 Gbps for a connection, it's 1 Gpbs at best. Most people, even most technical people, are not running a 25 Gbps home network. You have specific needs for speed and that's fine, but they are not commonplace and most people will be served just fine with SATA drives.
    - hiq 1y ago
      I agree with you, but we're talking about a device that I'd consider keeping for 10+ years. Actually I have some Synology NAS lost somewhere that I occasionally use, and while I don't trust exposing it to the internet (never have), it still serves files fine. With this expectation it's not absurd to get a NAS that still handles a bit more than the current speeds. Just to add a datapoint: I could also get a 25Gpbs connection in Switzerland. Actually checking that, I'm realizing that I could upgrade without paying more (maybe just a setup fee, less than 50USD).
      - _zoltan_ 1y ago
        I'm also with Init7 :)

dvdkon 1y ago

That would be nice, but Synology doesn't offer that either, no? The closest thing available now would probably be a Radxa ROCK 5 ITX+, a motherboard with a Rockchip SoC and two M.2 slots, into which you could put their six-port SATA cards. No idea what that whole setup will draw, though. EDIT: I have to complain about the article you linked. It's certainly true that one should account for power consumption, not just purchase cost, but some crucial mistakes make the article more harmful on the whole. The author cites 84 W power consumption for an i5-4690, and 10 W for a J4125 CPU, but those figures are the TDP. For all we know, those CPUs could idle at around the same wattage, and from my experience they likely do. Having done some measuring myself, I'd say the largest source of power draw in an idle NAS will be the PSU, motherboard, and disks. With any remotely recent Intel CPU, it idles so efficiently as to be negligible in a PC.

ethersteeds 1y ago
> That would be nice, but Synology doesn't offer that either, no? I have a Synology DS920+ 4-bay that averaged 20W total including 2 spinning drives with sleep disabled. I agonized about going with the closed product, and in many ways regret it. But at the time there was nothing I could find that came close, even without the drives. And that's before factoring my time administering the DIY option, or that it would be bigger and less ruggedized. I went as far as finding the German low power motherboard forum spreadsheet and contemplating trying to source some of the years old SKUs there. You've gotta believe us when we say that before the n100s arrived, it was a wasteland for low power options. In many ways it still is, although these n100 boards with many SATA are a sea change. Once you set out to define requirements, you pretty quickly get to every ZFS explainer saying that you are a fool to even attempt using less than 32 GB of ECC memory...

whizzter 1y ago

It's better now, been annoyed like you but the Rpi5 comes in a 16gb variant and has a PCI-E port that can be extended to 5x SATA or 2x M2. It's not blazing but probably an improvement over my old Celeron J1800 with 8gb of ram. The Intel N100,etc series of machines seems popular with builders even if the RAM restrictions drives me nuts. I think the major issue seems to be cases actually, there's tons of small cheap AMD machines from manufacturers like BeeLink that trounce most NUC setups for performance, but like the NUC's as soon as there's disc enclosures the price shoots away.

bgnn 1y ago

This sounds like a fun project to do. Maybe I will look into the technical feasibility of this.

SirMaster 1y ago

Why do you need a bunch of SATA ports? Just get a cheap SAS2 PCIe card on eBay. There are definitely low power ARM boards with a PCIe lanes. Typically its NVMe, but you can adapt that to 4x PCIe 3.0 which is a lot of bandwidth for HDDs. Not sure why you need a lot of memory for a NAS though, but they do have boards that have 32GB of memory. What's wrong with this? https://www.amazon.com/Radxa-5B-Connector-Computer-32GB/dp/B0DX6VBDQR https://www.amazon.com/Radxa-5B-Connector-Computer-32GB/dp/B... And connect a card like this to the NVMe PCIe which you can connect 8 SATA HDDs to with SATA breakout cables. https://www.ebay.com/itm/155007176276 https://www.ebay.com/itm/155007176276 If you need more than 8 HDDs you can get a SAS2 expander to connect to the SAS2 card and then you could easily connect 24 HDDs with a 6 port SAS2 expander and breakout cables. Or if you put this small board and card into a server case that has a SAS2 backplane with expander built in, then you can just connect all the disks that way. Another option, not ARM, but still low power and neat. https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-sigma https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-sigma This has Thunderbolt 4 which you can connect to a PCIe slot like this: https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2832.html https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2832.html They have a lot of neat stuff, you can get the tiny LattePanda Mu, and dock it in this: https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-mu https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-mu https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2822.html https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2822.html

M95D 1y ago
That SAS/SATA controller would consume more power than all the rest of the system.
- SirMaster 1y ago
  Really? 6.1 Electrical Characteristics The maximum power requirements for the LSI SAS 9200-8i HBA under normal operation are as follows:  PCIe 12.0 V = 0.74 A  Power — Nominal = 7.92 W — Worst Case = 13.20 W Seems like it uses just a little more than 1 large capacity HDD.
  - M95D 1y ago
    It's 2-3 times more than the drives. All 8 HDDs consume 4W in sleep, and they sleep more than 80% of the time (all night, all day while I'm at work, they only start 2-3 hours in the evening).

procaryote 1y ago

There are pci boards that let you hook up 4 sata ports to the pci3 on a raspberry pi 5. The drives will be a large part of the power draw, so if you want low power, going for 2 drives is probably better. That probably gets you into the 20-30 watt range for 10+ sata ports you might as well get an x86 motherboard as it's going to draw lots of power anyway Unless you plan to power down most of the drives most of the time

M95D 1y ago
> Unless you plan to power down most of the drives most of the time I do. Read my other comments.
- procaryote 1y ago
  Yeah, it looks like you have somewhat niche requirements and would need to build your own hardware and software. To run 10+ sata drives you'll either need to take a lot of care they're not spinning up at the same time, or getting used in parallel, or you'll need to dimension your power supply to cope. A beefy power supply will have a higher idle draw making the focus on getting the whole system idle down to 5w pretty hard
whalesalad 1y ago
rpi sux for longevity - be prepared to mirror and replace the SD card often
- procaryote 1y ago
  I've never had this be an issue. If it were an issue, you could probably put just /boot on the sd card and run the system off one of the real disks

proxyon 1y ago

> I'm talking about something with an ARM CPU, Why? There is no evidence that ARM is the only power efficient CPU. i5, i3 and n100 are all power efficient. > no video, no audio Why? Disable onboard video if you care that much. > lots of memory (or SODIMM slot) and 10+ SATA ports This eats power, conflicting with the rest of your requests. > Sure, anyone can buy a self-powered USB3 hub and add 7 external HDDs to a raspbery, but that level of performance is really really low, not to mention the USB random disconnects. And no, port replicators aren't much better. No, that's not what you do for a power efficient NAS. You build an i3, i5 or n100, turn off all unneeded peripherals, and configure bios as needed to your level of desired power consumption. under 10W is achievable.

M95D 1y ago
> Why? There is no evidence that ARM is the only power efficient CPU. i5, i3 and n100 are all power efficient. They are, but the motherboard is not, or at least not as much as an ARM board. > Why? Disable onboard video if you care that much. And it would boot... how? AFAIK, no UEFI system is capable of booting headless and very very few BIOS systems were. > No, that's not what you do for a power efficient NAS. You build an i3, i5 or n100, turn off all unneeded peripherals, and configure bios as needed to your level of desired power consumption. under 10W is achievable. I very much doubt that. N100 maybe, just maybe, could go lower than 20W if the power source is very very efficient, but I haven't seen any system with 10+ SATA ports. The commonly suggested solution here, to add a server SAS/SATA controller, would double or triple the idle power.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  > I very much doubt that. N100 maybe, just maybe, could go lower than 20W if the power source is very very efficient, but I haven't seen any system with 10+ SATA ports. The commonly suggested solution here, to add a server SAS/SATA controller, would double or triple the idle power. The N100 on its own can go quite low - my N305 system idles around 5W. (But laptop, so zero SATA ports.)

nine_k 1y ago

Second-hand Supermicro boards with 6, 8, even 12 SATA ports, 8-16 GB of ECC RAM, a preinstalled CPU, and often a passive radiator are pretty accessible or eBay or suchlike. Of course they are old, but if they did not break after 5-7 years in a server rack, most likely they're not going to break for 10 more years in a less demanding environment at home.

M95D 1y ago
Not low power. Electricity over 10 years would cost 10 times more than the board.

aidenn0 1y ago

https://jackharvest.com/ https://jackharvest.com/ has some DIY options.