New HomeLab server

[CyklonDX]

I'm personally not familiar with the Dell systems, but RAID-controllers like the PERC H730 are a no-go für ZFS (TrueNAS) you need chipset-integrated ports or an HBA. Maybe you can remove the RAID-card and use the ports of the C246, but I don't know if the board/backplane support this.

The H730 when you boot in uefi, has options to switch to HBA / IT modes. If one really wanted they can still do it in normal raid mode. (Just disable all caches), and create a vd for each disk. Its more hassle when replacing dead disk, but works just as well.

You really live in another world concerning what is "quite the same". A GPU drawing less than 5W idle would be hard to find but 5W can be quite a lot in a reasonably dimensoned home server for the use cases. Remember its only for management. Even modern IPMI draws less. A iGPU draws less than you can measure.
I would recommend something like intel LGA1151. Personally I like the v2 variant of that socket. C242/C246 chipset with i3-9100 is hard to beat for a reasonably priced home server with low power consumption if you want to have ECC. And as a bonus you can get quite some PCIe lanes if you choose the right board. If you don't need ECC there's uncountable options... If you need more CPU (I doubt you will) or more that 128GB RAM, power draw for the base system (CPU, MB, RAM) will at least double but in most cases tripple (still single socket).

when at the end its 10 usd per year or 10 cents, makes little difference to me... according to pci-sig spec L2 power state pcie device should draw between 1-2W when not in use. (In L1 its in microwatts but has increased latency to wake up)

 

[NPS]

The H730 when you boot in uefi, has options to switch to HBA / IT modes. If one really wanted they can still do it in normal raid mode. (Just disable all caches), and create a vd for each disk. Its more hassle when replacing dead disk, but works just as well.

You can, but you don't want to...

when at the end its 10 usd per year or 10 cents, makes little difference to me... according to pci-sig spec L2 power state pcie device should draw between 1-2W when not in use.

5W 24/7 are nearly 20€ per year over here. But that's not the point. The point is that you should get rid of GPUs if you don't have a use case for one. And my point was that 5W can be quite a big part of the whole system if your system is tailored to your needs and not fully overdone.

 

[CyklonDX]

5W 24/7 are nearly 20€ per year over here. But that's not the point. The point is that you should get rid of GPUs if you don't have a use case for one. And my point was that 5W can be quite a big part of the whole system if your system is tailored to your needs and not fully overdone.

Not to be mean, but i don't see it as a problem, since his cpu on idle P states clocks will use around 15-25W. If 5W was so much - why not use platform with intel atom or arm and get micro watts on idle.
(An amd pro WX 2100 will draw micro watts on L1 and 2-5W on L2, there are some nice quadro cards from nv that can also do that.)

The T330 aren't a platform that were meant to be low wattage. On idle he can expect ~85-100W in that configuration without disks.


Also there's a question on time to finish a task.
ex.
Lets say there's a job to read data in ram, and takes 30 sec to complete on platform A

	Performance	Idle Wattage	in use Wattage	Time to Completion
Platform A	3700 M/T	65W	250W	30 sec
Platform B	1200 M/T	40W	100W	90 sec

obviously depends on the usage, (op will do plex transcoding) and this is just example, but if you don't use it 24x7 its better to have more powerbox that can idle at good enough wattage, rather than having a weak low wattage box that will take 100's of times longer to transcode in real life same video. Everything will just take much longer, and in turn will result in more power being used in the end.

(A 4k HDR movie thats 2h long will take around 1h to transcode on decent CPU - you can only guess on low power part -, while on A4000 it will take 15min.)

 

[NPS]

Not to be mean, but i don't see it as a problem, since his cpu on idle P states clocks will use around 15-25W.

The CPU is not the problem. With package C-states below C3 etc. you can build a complete system (office PC) that needs way less than 10W idle. The mentioned Fujitsu/Kontron Boards are such platforms. These are really interesting for home server builds.

The T330 aren't a platform that were meant to be low wattage. On idle he can expect ~85-100W in that configuration without disks.

This is important information and in post #20 I already mentioned that I am not shure if the T330 would be power efficient.

Also there's a question on time to finish a task.

This is of course fully correct! But I wrote: "The point is that you should get rid of GPUs if you don't have a use case for one."