I’ve noticed that registered ECC memory (RDIMM) is extremely cheap on the used market, so I’m thinking about building a TrueNAS system that can take advantage of it. (Used RDIMM costs a fraction of what used UDIMM does.)
I’m looking for hardware recommendations that meet the following criteria:
Very power efficient – electricity is about 0.40 USD/kWh where I live, so I’m aiming for 70W or less at idle.
CPU / motherboard combo that supports registered ECC (RDIMM) DDR4
Support for at least 64 GB of RDIMM ECC DDR4
10 GbE onboard or the ability to add a 10G NIC
Support for a SATA SSD for the OS (no need for NVMe)
Support for 4 × 18 TB SATA HDDs (Seagate Exos X18). I currently have them in a SAS/SATA backplane enclosure but I’m open to discard that enclosure and connect them directly
I’ve already spent a full day researching, but I haven’t found anything that really fits my requirements. Most of the boards that support RDIMM are older server platforms and seem far too power-hungry for a home NAS.
Does anyone have suggestions for a low-power platform that would work for this?
P.S.: I’m a complete newbie when it comes to building a DIY NAS, so please be gentle with me
Looks like it checks all the blocks–up to 128 GB of RAM in RDIMMs, dual 10 GbE onboard, six SATA onboard (as well as one m.2 which appears to be shared with the first SATA, so you can use either one but not both), IPMI with HTML5 KVM.
The Xeon-D is a pretty low-power part; I can measure mine on the Kill-A-Watt once my RDIMM arrives (which should be today) to get an idle power number.
Note this uses DDR4 RDIMMs, which may not be “super cheap,” but are still pretty cheap for the capacity.
I was looking at that thread as well but discarded the motherboard and Xeon D-1521 as a viable option because the board is over 10 years old and the power consumption of the cpu is like 7x that of a modern processor with similar processing power (like for example a N100). I was hoping to find something more modern/efficient… like a N100 but with support for all my requirements. I would be curious of the wattage used in idle and when doing light tasks (like maybe run nextcloud in a docker or similar).
I’m currently running Nextcloud on a 130 Dollar GMKTec G5 N97, with two users and it is very snappy (OnlyOffice, Deck, Collectives and file sharing etc.)… I thought it must be a pretty light task if it runs that well on a N97, no?
While I’ve been running NAS on this mobo for about a month, I didn’t measure power consumption (because I don’t care that much). My UPS shows ~220W for my entire homelab. So, off the top of my head, it probably eats about 150W at idle (with 6xHDDs, 2xSSDs, 2xM10 optanes as boot drives and the-not-that-power-efficient x520-DA2 with 2 connected DACs).
On the bright side:
It is very cheap. But with 0.40 USD/kWh it can be no matter at all…
Probably supports up to 1TB RAM (with 2200 line CPUs that are not cheap). Not sure whether 128G modules are supported. But 64G ones are supported for sure (so 512G is there).
Plenty of PCIe. Perhaps with bifurcation, but I still didn’t test it.
Thanks for the suggestion. At 150 Watts it would cost me over 500 USD per year just in electricity… I was hoping for something that would use about half as much at idle. Maybe I’m chasing a unicorn lol
The Intel N Processors, while using little power and having an iGPU, lack large RAM and ECC support and PCI lanes to make them good contenders to the Xeon-D and the Atom C35XX/C37XX
“NAS” boards from Aliexpress using an intel N CPU and sporting lots of SATA ports, often use port multipliers and are therefore not suitable for ZFS.
The newer versions of the Xeon-D and Atoms are not power efficient anymore.
So your best bet for a low power NAS are still the 2 mentioned above (maybe Xeon E aswell, since they are derived from mobile CPUs)
I just came across an interesting option that appears to be ridiculously cheap and with a 10G adapter could tick all my needs… What do you think about this board: Gibabyte MJ11-EC1 (very similar to the MJ11-EC0 but without out the pcie slot and 10x cheaper at around 70 USD….). I was ready to spend up to about 1k but this seams a possible contender on first sight.
Nevermind, this board would fit my needs but they are only available as used boards and a very large percentage of users report that they receive defective and rusty boards… too bad.
The 32 GB RDIMM has arrived, so I swapped it for the 8 GB UDIMM I had in place. Power consumption has increased by maybe 1 watt idle.
10 years old though it may be, it meets all your stated requirements. From the sources I’m finding, those X18 drives draw about 5 watts at idle, so four of them make 20W–this system would then idle at 60W, below your 70W limit. It supports DDR4 RDIMMs. It has dual Intel 10G NICs onboard. It has adequate SATA ports for a SATA boot device plus your four spinners.
I’m certainly not the source of all hardware knowledge, but I don’t think you’ll find anything else that takes RDIMMs and could remotely be described as “power-efficient.”
That’s a neat mini itx board, max power consumption is around 45w but can be lower, depending on how you use it, configure it, etc.
Like my d-1537 and the many embedded systems out there, the biggest issue is not being able to swap out the CPU if the use case changes.
For more flexibility, I’d also consider a am4 based motherboard, since the Pro G or GE series processors give you flexibility and very low power consumption.
For example, b550d4id-2l2t, b550d4u-2t, x570d4u-2l2t, x570d4i-nl, x570d4i-2t from Asrock Rack.
As all too often, you’re confusing “TDP” for “actual power use”, where the latter is actually idle power. Xeon D-1500 sips power at idle. (RDIMM, however, uses more than UDIMM.)
So all X10SDV boards would be a good choice.
Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 lacks 10G, and has no easy option to add it.
A2SDi-H-TF (-TP4F) does what you want but does not come cheap.
