Low power Linux server

[JohnnyBeGood]

Hi all,


I would like to build low power Linux server and install Ubuntu on it.
Primary purpose on it to learn about Linux and second one is to store my home Hikvison IP-Camera surveillance footage there and also use for personal picture/video backup.
Now I have small Acer Aspire Revo AR1600 that has 250GB hard drive and runs Elastix on it. Using samba I have allocated only 50GB and as it fills up it deletes older footage automatically.


My goal is to buy NAS rated HD and have bigger storage capabilities.
I did lots of research online and closest and most recent article that I came across is this one
Building your own home server, part #1 | Anteru's blog
I like everything about setup but on last page Building your own home server, part #4 | Anteru's blog it lists that power consumption is 28-29W? I think that's a lot for setup build in 2015, am I wrong?


Any suggestions or recommendations will be greatly appreciated!

 

[Keljian]

30w at idle is about the best you can expect from high speed boxes today, you can get lower with atoms.

 

[JohnnyBeGood]

Thanks for the reply!

Motherboard in that build Supermicro | Products | Motherboards | Atom Boards | A1SAM-2550F
Has Atom C2550 processor.
In other words I won't be able to get anything lower than 30W without sacrificing performance?

 

[Keljian]

Thanks for the reply!

Motherboard in that build Supermicro | Products | Motherboards | Atom Boards | A1SAM-2550F
Has Atom C2550 processor.
In other words I won't be able to get anything lower than 30W without sacrificing performance?

It's very unlikely, unless you are looking to modify or sacrifice power.

I mean you could run ubuntu on a raspberry pi - that'd be lower power but that won't come close to an atom..

To put context on it, a gigabit nic can use up to 15W (usually 5W) and a hard drive will use 5W.

 

[JohnnyBeGood]

Got it.
About gigabit, not sure if you could answer it or not but this MB has 4 gigabit ports, I"m sure in BIOS there should be option to disable 3 unused ones (why need fore more than 1?) does does mean I would save on power consumption or this is the case only they're being used?

 

[canta]

It's very unlikely, unless you are looking to modify or sacrifice power.

I mean you could run ubuntu on a raspberry pi - that'd be lower power but that won't come close to an atom..

To put context on it, a gigabit nic can use up to 15W (usually 5W) and a hard drive will use 5W.

i340 or i350 does not use 5W ... 15W is no realistic (except for old mulitple port card pcie 1.X).
I measured i340 dual port is taking 2-4W . very low consumption.

forget pi or pi2 to run as a server. slow!!!!!

 

[canta]

Got it.
About gigabit, not sure if you could answer it or not but this MB has 4 gigabit ports, I"m sure in BIOS there should be option to disable 3 unused ones (why need fore more than 1?) does does mean I would save on power consumption or this is the case only they're being used?

No power saving, since a single nic chipset that handles all 4 ports. the Bios could do disabling the ports only , but the NIC chipset still serves 4 ports in hardware level.

 

[Keljian]

Well once you think memory 2-5w, hard drive 5w, processor 10-15w, Nic 3w - that's 20w, then add things like power supply losses (15%), fans and such and 30w as a lower margin is realistic

 

[JohnnyBeGood]

Thanks, that helps!
Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing some lower wattage CPU/MB setup before I start looking for all the parts.

 

[Keljian]

You can substantially take the power of the processor down by setting a negative voltage offset, but you must test stability!

 

[JohnnyBeGood]

Thanks for the suggestion! Never heard of it. Seems like it has to do with setting of voltages in BIOS. Hopefully I don't have to be overclocked?

 

[Keljian]

Quite the opposite, you're giving the processor less power than it is requesting. Most processors have a bit of tolerance in them, so setting to -0.1v offset will save 20-30% power with no side effects

You can generally do the same with memory, most 1.5v memory will happily run at 1.42v and most 1.35v memory will happily run at 1.25v - savings in power are more marginal here though, 1-3w or so

 

[JohnnyBeGood]

Thanks for the explanation, I will definitely try that.