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Looking to consolidate and reduce power consumption (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by PrettySmallBalls@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum
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I have a "rack" that pulls between 350-400W average 24/7. I'm looking for suggestions to bring the energy consumption down by doing some consolidation. I'm not against putting all my eggs in one server if it saves me on the electricity bill. A lot of what I'm using are old components I grabbed from work over the years, so I didn't go for efficiency when putting it all together. The switches and APs I'm not too interested in changing but I'd expect I can probably do better with the PFSense box and the 2x Z-Books. Currently I have the following,

  • ISP Modem - Bell Gigahub
  • PFSense Router (i5-4570S, 16GB RAM, 2-Port 2.5G QNAP NIC) ~40-50W Average. Configured as PPPoE with a 3Gig connection so it does need a bit of CPU to get the full speed.
  • Home Assistant - Raspberry Pi 4
  • PiHole DNS - Raspberry Pi Zero
  • HP Z-Book G2 (i7-4910MQ/32GB RAM/Quadro K2100M) - Plex Server/VPN/Torrent Box (w/ 5x External 3.5" Drives in enclosures - Up to 7 or 8 1080p Plex Streams (worst case). Usually 5 or 6 of them are Direct Play with 1-2 being Transcodes.
  • HP Z-Book G2 (i7-4810MQ/32GB RAM/Quadro K2100M) - Blue Iris Surveillance Software (w/ 2x External 1TB Drives) - About 20%-35% CPU usage.
  • 1x Mokerlink 5-port 2.5Gig Switch
  • 2x TP-Link TL-SG105 Managed Switches
  • 1x TP-Link TL-1005P 5-Port PoE Switch (Running 4x Reolink RLC520A cameras) ~40W
  • 1x Asus RT-AX88U as Access Point
  • 1x Linksys WRT1900ACS as AP for IoT Devices
  • NAS - Synology DS920+ w/ 4x 4TB Internal Drives and 1x WD External for Backup (Running the following docker containers, PiHole, Bitwarden, Calibre, Calibre-Web, iPerf3, Grafana, Portainer, Prometheus).

Thoughts?

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[–] Cynyr36@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'd replace basically everything with a pair of n100 based things. They'd be faster, better at transcoding, and use less power. I'd you want a bit more grunt or ram, a i3 13100.

You have 12 hard drives, so that's about 130watts (10-15w each). Can you consolidate down to 2 or 3 larger capacity drives?

If you are looking for marginal gains, move pihole and home assistant to containers or tiny vms on one of the other systems.

So i guess my recommendation, one of those chinese n100 firewall boxes, run proxmox, with *sense in a vm and pass through 2 or 3 nics, pihole and HA in containers. Build a i3 13100 based system with 64+gb ddr5, put 2, 3, or 4 large capacity drives along with a pair of ssds for guest storage. Virtualize everything else. My guess is that whole stack would idle at 50w or 60w, and could maybe draw 150w.

You might need more gpu than the igpu in a i3 13100, but a intel A380 would cover that.

[–] PrettySmallBalls@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks a ton for the input. I actually found two Seagate 14TB external drives for $130 off at Best Buy that I'll shuck. I grabbed those because they sounded like a good deal and can replace the five media drives that I have for the Plex Server and the two for the Security Camera Z-Book. I have two RAIDed NVME drives in the Synology that run all of the docker containers so the four drives in the NAS only run a couple times a day for backups of a couple PCs. I'd prefer to keep that for the time being as I don't plan to RAID the two 14TB drives as it would just be media for Plex and the security camera footage so if one fails, it fails.

I found an N100 4-Port 2.5Gig box that as you mentioned I think will run PfSense, HA and Pihole, so that will remove the 50-watt i3 router I'm using now.

I like the idea of an i3-13100 based system. Do you have any suggestions for other components? Mobo, Power Supply etc.? The last PCs I built were in 2007 and 2014 so it has been a while.

[–] Cynyr36@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'll see if i can find it when I'm not on mobile, but there was a list floating around of low power builds. I think it was from a German forum.