When do you upgrade to save on power?

[beatle]

I've had a R510 for about 3 years. It's a 12-bay that's fully populated with a mish-mash of 2-14TB drives (and a couple of 2.5" SSDs), a single X5670, and 12GB of RAM. It's actually way more power than I need for running Drivepool and Plex (no transcoding), but it's a nice 2U form factor (I have a full rack in my basement) and it was pretty reasonably priced for enterprise gear.

It sucks down an average of 178w. Some of that are the old 7200rpm drives, but a lot is the 10+ year old compute architecture. Electricity is not that expensive here, around 12 cents/kwh or a little more than $15/month, but I'm still motivated to see what my power bill would look like if I went with something more efficient, and what that could cost to get there at least to a break even point.

Maybe I could use a little more SSD space, but I'm not really wanting for more power/expandability at this point.

 

[wildpig1234]

I am guessing that you are not gonna save that much. A lot of that power goes into the 12 disk array which won't change after you upgrade the cpu part.

For servers that have extensive use cycle of cpu and gpu nearing their peak constantly, the upgrade to cpu/gpu would significantly decrease the consumption. If your server doesn't do that then you are not going to save much by upgrading cpu/gpu.

 

[T_Minus]

Keep in mind too it's not even the rated power of that CPU vs. new CPU but the newer generation can use less power in general when the system is not fully in use vs. that generation. IE: You could sell what you have and go with Ivy-bridge setup for cheap, and idle power would be lower. At this point though you can get very affordable E5 v3 generation CPUs and motherboards and get a bit better on power.

With 12 bays populated though most of your power is going to be with the drives so I'm not sure it's worth it to upgrade to save $\power unless the % saved and slight reduced heat is needed too.

 

[beatle]

That was kind of the conclusion I was coming to as well. Do people also consolidate and upgrade drives to save on power? I've been waiting for these old 2-5TB drives to conk out, but they just keep chugging. My last failure was an 8TB WD Red a year ago.

 

[T_Minus]

Yes and No I guess? I have 6x5TB and went to 8x 10TB... I also went from WD RED to HGST Ultrastar \ datacenter drives.... so 5400 to 7200 my power requirement went up, slightly. But I also wanted the small boost in performance for moving larger 4K videos around. I've debated going to 56Gig\Direct connect networking to help move from workstation to NAS, but not there yet as we can just move files at night. My old 5TB drives are retired to in-desktop\workstation storage spaces now.

My NAS history over the last few years has been Netgear 2 Bay, Synology, E5 v3 single CPU, Intel ATOM, E3 v3, Intel 9100F.
My backup NAS is still 5TBx3 rz3 on E3-1220L V2 which is SUPER SUPER Low power iirc around 18w w\out drives.