Power Consumption and Xeon D

[acmcool]

Looks like my current Freenas server which is running on E5 1620 V1 consumes .25KW at idle.
I am thinking Xeon D should be a better choice?
I am trying to decide if I should keep this setup or move this one over to Xeon D as well

 

[pyro_]

What other cards do you have running in this setup?
Also how many drives? Do the drives spin down or stay spun up all the time?
What kind of rating on the power supply?
The Xeon d will most likely use less power than the current E5 however these others items could also have a large impact on power use

 

[acmcool]

I have 18 SATA drives
Chassis is SM 847 with SAS2 backplanes
One m1015 Card
One intel 520 SFP card
Power supply is Platinum rated 1200W SQ
Drives mostly idle

 

[Patrick]

First off, your power supply is likely not running at a high-efficiency point with that setup. 0.25kW means it is at around 20% load.

Idle drives are different than spun down drives. Spun down drives will save you big power.

Since you do not have 10Gbase-T and have SFP+, Xeon D would not save you the NIC power and you would not have enough PCIe slots (with what is on the market now) for both the SAS HBA and SFP+ card.

On balance, I am guessing you would save 10-30w max but it would cost a lot.

 

[acmcool]

Thanks Patrick
I will try playing with freenas setting for HDD spin down..
I was gonna hold off for ASRock board with onboard SFP and two pci express slots anyways..
Would the processor and onboard SFP save any more than 10-30W?

 

[Patrick]

Thanks Patrick
I will try playing with freenas setting for HDD spin down..
I was gonna hold off for ASRock board with onboard SFP and two pci express slots anyways..
Would the processor and onboard SFP save any more than 10-30W?

Well, even the V1's were not bad at idle but you would probably save ~10w from the NIC... but it needs to get released.

 

[PigLover]

You'll save more power by getting those 18 SATA drives to spin down when idle than you will by replacing the MB/cpu. Just sayin...

 

[T_Minus]

@PigLover @Patrick - How likely is it that his FreeNAS box would ever be idle enough to spin down the disks if he's using it for VM guest OS storage?

 

[rubylaser]

@PigLover @Patrick - How likely is it that his FreeNAS box would ever be idle enough to spin down the disks if he's using it for VM guest OS storage?

This is a good point. It's not very likely. This is why I normally make an SSD storage pool for my vm disks and then use something like SnapRAID for bulk data as only one disk needs to be spun down to read.

Having disks spun down saves A LOT of power if you have a large number of spindles.

 

[Patrick]

@PigLover @Patrick - How likely is it that his FreeNAS box would ever be idle enough to spin down the disks if he's using it for VM guest OS storage?

Depends on profiles of the VMs, how the SATA drives are configured, and if there is any SSD caching.

 

[hjfr]

Reduce the 18 SATA drives with less drive and more capacity.

 

[acmcool]

How are E5 V3 processors at idle?
Have a good offer on pair ES v3's..
Thinking of ditching Xeon D plans and get these?

 

[Patrick]

V3 is awesome at idle. If you need more RAM/ PCIe storage, that is a good option.