I’m in the process of wiring a home before moving in and getting excited about running 10g from my server to the computer. Then I see 25g gear isn’t that much more expensive so I might was well run at least one fiber line. But what kind of three node ceph monster will it take to make use of any of this bandwidth (plus run all my Proxmox VMs and LXCs in HA) and how much heat will I have to deal with. What’s your experience with high speed homelab NAS builds and the electric bill shock that comes later? Epyc 7002 series looks perfect but seems to idle high.
I have a small setup for some self hosted apps and media.
- Beelink Mini S.
- 2 external 5TB drives.
- A USB fan used as an exhaust because the SSD inside gets a bit warm.
I think total power is about 30W.
If you’re just running home automation, you do not need an Epyc 🤣
Get a low power anything to just run what you need.
I just moved my home assistant docker container to a new-to-me Xeon system. It also runs a couple basically idle tasks/containers, so I threw BOINC at it to put it to good use. All wrapped up with Debian 12 on proxmox…
(I needed USB support for zigbee in ha, and synology yanked driver support from dsm with the latest major version, so ‘let’s just use the new machine’…)
I looked at Epyc because I wanted to bandwidth to run u.2 drives at full speed and it wasn’t until Epyc or Threadripper that you could get much more than 40 lanes in a single socket. I’ve got to find another way to saturate 10g and give up on 25g. My home automation is run on a Home Assistant Yellow and works perfectly, for what it does.
Some unsolicited advice then: don’t go LOOKING for reasons to use the absolute max of what your hardware is capable of just because you can. You just end up spending more money 🤑
For real though, just get an N100 or something that does what you need. You don’t need to waste money and power on an Epyc if it just sits idle 99% of the time.
What I need is a 10g storage for my Adobe suite that I can access from my MacBook. I need redundant, fault tolerant storage for my precious data. I need my self hosted services to be high availability. What’s the minimum spec to reach that? I started on the u.2 path when I saw enterprise u.2 drives at similar cost per GB as SATA SSDs but faster and crazy endurance. And when my kid wants to run a Minecraft server with mods for him and his friends, I better have some spare CPU cycles and RAM to keep up.
You could technically do that from like 2x ~$150 used business desktop PCs off ebay, 10th gen Intel CPU models or around there with Core i3/i5 CPUs.
Throw some M.2 SSDs in each one in a mirror array for storage, add a bit of additional RAM if needed and a 10G NIC. Would probably use about 30-40W total for both of them.
Minecraft servers are easy to run, they don’t need much especially on a fairly modern CPU with high single thread performance, and only use maybe 6GB of RAM for a modded one.
You’re not asking for a whole lot out of the hardware, so you could do it cheap if you wanted to.
Get a Drobo if you’re that worried about that kind of access then. Make it simple.
Otherwise anything with two NICs is the same thing.
The load on my UPS is around 100-140 watts. That includes my server, firewall, switch, starlink and a unifi access point. I would love to get that power consumption down. I only get 4-5 hours of runtime on battery. Also, the room it’s in is small and it gets really hot in the summer time.
I run 3900X with a 40Gbit fiber, packed with HDDs and nvmes. The box fluctuates around 90-110W use.
Where do you find the bandwidth to do all that? NVME eats it up and the 40g too.
Thinkcenter tiny, 4 external HDDs, a DAC, a raspi3b+, was like 25W I think.
From the wall I’m pulling 120w
Ryzen 5700G
128GB ram
2tb + 4tb NVMe drive
2 x 20tb HDDs
Unifi Enterprise 24 PoE
Mikrotik RB5009
2 access points
3 cameras
Fiber runs cooler than copper all of my SFP+ are fiber.
I feel almost obliged to ask: what are you running on this monster of a setup?
Mostly for PiHole.
I run a NUC11 so about 10W. 15-20€ per annum assuming a single tariff at 0.17€ per kwh. It can use up to 30W but only during heavy load which may be like 8 hours a week. But electricity is also cheaper during off peak hours so it averages to about that (we have 5 tariffs).
Load is NAS, media server, homeassistant and a usb zigbee router, *arr stack.
Power usage was my main concern and wanted something eco friendly.
I’ve got a 3 node Proxmox/ceph cluster with 10G, plus a separate Nas. They are all rack mount with dual PSU. Add in the necessary switching, and my average load is about 800w. Throw my desktop (also on 10G) into the mix and it runs 1.1kw.
That’s roughly $50-60 extra in electricity costs for me monthly.
I’m afraid of dumping 500+ watts into a (air conditioned) closet. How are you able to saturate the 10g? I had some idea that ceph speed is that of the slowest drive, so even SATA SSDs won’t fill the bucket. I imagine this is due to file redundancy not parity/striping spreading the data. I’d like to stick to lower power consumer gear but ceph looks CPU, RAM, and bandwidth (storage and network) hungry plus low latency.
I ran proxmox/ceph over 1GB on e-waste mini PCs and it was… unreliable. Now my NAS is my HA storage but I’m not thrilled to beat up QLC NAND for hobby VMs.
Would be around 300€ in Germany, on a cheap contract. Limiting myself to one combined NAS/application server atm, with the others turned on only if I want to try sth out.
I recently removed my 25Gbps PCIe dual port cards from my 2 servers because they were using 20W more. My entire rack including 2 UniFi PoE connections uses 90 W now (so 110 W just for having 25 Gpbs).
There is some heat from such cards, but usually it gets transported outside fine. The ones I bought did not come with a fan. I think you cannot operate them without one. The heat sinks get very hot.
My real server (Nextcloud/NAS/several more vm’s) uses 28 Watts on average. In addition, there is one Pi 4B running, and I don’t even know it’s wattage.
I’m planning on replacing the real server with a new one, with lots of cores and approx. 50 Watts then.
Pi4 tend to stick around 5w
5950x in an matx board with 15 x 3.5in drives 1 x sata sad 1 x optane u.2 drive (pulls like 10watts) 1 x Nvidia A2000 1 x Lsi 9305 16i 1 x 2.5gbe intel nic 3 x 140 mm fans at full tilt
Runs at like 120 watts at idle, like 220 watts with a good amount of work and peaks at like 320 watts if I make it do a lot of work
What in the world…
Dafuq you doing over there?
The last time I checked, mine runs at about 5-10 watts usually.
- Intel i7-3770
- 16gb DDR3
- 2 1TB SSDs
Are you sure. I was thinking those specs you would be more in the 50-80 watts range.
Yep, my homeserver spends most of it’s time idling, so power management kicks in.
Now when one of my build VMs are running, it’ll get up to that range, but that’s why I said it runs at 10 watts usually
About 30 watts for a old Lenovo Thinkcentre with a i5-6500T and 8 GB RAM in combination with a DAS and 2x2TB HDD’s. I’m currently waiting for parts for my new server I’m building, a small N100 Mini-ITX board with 4x4TB HDD’s that hopefully has a similar power consumption.
For my main server only… If HP iLO is to be believed, averaging around 130W.
Running: deluge, homarr, jellyfin, lidarr, navidrome, nextcloud, prowlarr, sonarr, whoogle and a minecraft server (VM) on TrueNAS Scale.
As for everything else (my router, switch and DNS/DHCP server, which is a separate machine, you can add another maybe 50W on top of it…
- Fujitsu motherboard
- Intel pentium G5600
- 6 HDD (4 x 4 TB 2 x 8 TB) spinned down
- 2 SSD for proxmox
- 6 CT and no VM for now
it runs at 16W mostly idle
