Energy use sanity check

[gingerling]

So it turns out my server is using 2kWh electricity a day when idle: https://www.gingerling.co.uk/hexos-running-costs-and-carbon-footprint-part-1/

This is my hardware: https://www.gingerling.co.uk/how-i-chose-hardware-for-my-hexos-nas/

I need to figure out pretty quickly if this is JUST bad hardware of if my install is being busy when it shouldn't be, I have seen 60% memory use + cache 30% regularly when looking at my deck.

Anyone have thoughts?

Anna

 

[PsychoWards]

Hello,

2kWh per Day equals to 84W engery draw, while this isn't exceptionally low it's also nothing out of the extraordinary. 

Some things to consider:

- RAM usage doesn't need lots of energy.

- While higher CPU temps usually means that the CPU is using a couple of Watts more then it would use while being cooler, this is typically not a big issue, since most of the time the CPU should be idling anyway. 

- PSUs have a pretty bad efficiency at low power draw levels, meaning a not insignificant amount of power draw is just from the PSU.

- You have your 3 HDDs spinning which is also consuming some energy. You could spin them down aggressively, but this could result in your drives dying sooner then without, because frequent spin ups are considered to increase wear and kill drives (a drive not coming back after a spin down is a "common" problem) . 

- it's possible that you can activate some more C-States and disable unnecessary on-board devices (Audio, unused SATA-Chips, unused NIC etc.)

And while those reduce your power usage by a couple of W, your not magically gonna have only 10W power draw.

So unfortunately even with disabling everything you can, you are likely still looking at 1-1.5kWh per Day, which equals to what an older fridge is using.

[Sonic]

If you really want to reduce the power consumption of your HexOS server significantly, I’m afraid you’ll need different hardware. As psychowards mentioned, you can tweak some settings, but that won’t save you dozens of watts.

Modern CPUs have much lower idle power consumption. For comparison: I have an AOOSTAR WTR Pro with an AMD chip. It consumes 7 watts when idle and up to 40 watts under full load. But since most servers spend the majority of their time in an idle state, idle power consumption is a key factor in your total energy usage.