RAID controllers power consumption

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

falagar

New Member
Mar 27, 2016
5
0
1
44
Hi,

I own a standard PC, with linux software RAID-5, running Debian Jessie. I am currently planning to build a virtualization home server.

I am used to ESXi, but it requires a hardware RAID controller (no support for software RAID) and I did not find any real alternative (do not want to go with MS virtualization suite). So I am planning to buy a hardware card, but I'd like to minimize the power consumption of this home server.

Any advice or measurement please ?

Thanks,
 

abstractalgebra

Active Member
Dec 3, 2013
182
26
28
MA, USA
Many raid cards are in the ball park of 10watts. How much do you want to optimize?
For example, the popular and cheap 8 port LSI SAS2008 based IBM M1015 (IDLE: 7 Watt).
 

Rhinox

Member
May 27, 2013
144
26
18
If you want to minimize power consumption, pick some simple raid-level (0,1,10). If you go for anything higher requiring parity-calculations (5/6), controller will be really hot and power-consumption will be much higher...

btw ESXi does not do disk-caching, so pick controller with on-board cache. Cheap controllers like M1015 might sound tempting but without cache they deliver terribly low performance in ESXi (unless you use it for pass-through)...
 

hjfr

Member
Nov 21, 2013
79
20
8
France
Most of real RAID cards (hardware raid 5 card with memory) operating at 12~15W.
This information is on the datasheet.