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.
My pi costs probably around 20 a year lol.
I’m running my smart home entirely from a single NUC running proxmox with VMs and LXCs for my services. It’s pulling ~7W on average
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 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.
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’…)
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.
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?
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
Let’s see…
My servers (tiny/mini/micros) in total are about… 600W or so. Two NASs, about 15-20W a piece.
I spend a out $150/mo in electricity, but my hot water/HVAC/etc are the big power draw. I’d say about $40-50/mo is what I’m spending on powering the servers in my office.
Definitely puts off some heat, but that’s partially because it’s all in one rack, and I’ve got a bunch of other work hardware in there. It’s about 2 degrees warmer in my office than the rest of my home, but I also have air cycling all the time since it’s a single unit HVAC and I need to keep the air moving to keep it all the right temp in the other rooms anyway (AC will come on more often otherwise, even without my rack).
15w Raspberry pi 4 + HDDs
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.
Thinkcenter tiny, 4 external HDDs, a DAC, a raspi3b+, was like 25W I think.
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.
I use a Ryzen 5900x, RTX 3080, 2x 10Gbit sfp+ NIC, 128GB ECC RAM, and only 2x 20TB drives at the moment.
For my gateway, I have an Intel N6005 box, I have a managed 2.5/10Gbit switch, and I have a wifi AP.
I have a ton of Proxmox VMs and containers.
All that hovers between 140W to 180W
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.
- 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
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.
