Saving electricity with home server

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Artur
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Saving electricity with home server

Post by Artur »

Hello,
I would like to build a home server with Windows 10 Professional. The homeserver should consist of two HDDs that run in RAID 1. To save power, I thought I would add a SSD that serves as a level 2 cache. Is it possible with PrimoCache that the HDDs are in sleep mode most of the time and turn on about once a day and the cache is unloaded? If so, how do I have to set this up? (I am aware that if the SSD is defective, the data is then lost for about a day).
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Support
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Re: Saving electricity with home server

Post by Support »

PrimoCache does not reduce wake-up activity when there are write requests to the HDD. This is to prevent possible issues with the C1 value increasing rapidly on some HDDs. So, sorry, this goal cannot be achieved with PrimoCache.
FlowersEverywhere
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Re: Saving electricity with home server

Post by FlowersEverywhere »

Personally, I hate it when people answer a question with "why would you do that?" or "why don't you do this instead?"

But since you already got an answer to your specific question, and since I was in the same situation a year ago trying to cut energy consumption, have you considered using something like this:

https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B08TC2 ... UTF8&psc=1

Apologies if linking to Amazon is bad form, but this is the exact product I bought, and besides, it seems like it's been discontinued, so it's not exactly advertising.

Last year, I simply went through the data for possible low-watt mini-PCs that I could use to replace an old i7 Mac Mini Server from 2011. This beast sucked 85 watts just for the machine when at full throttle. Add the thunderbolt-to-USB dock and external drives to that, plus the extra internal drive, I was way over 100 watts.

The Intel J4125 CPU machine I linked to above eats 10W at max utilization. And on most parameters, it's as fast as my i7 Mac Mini Server from 2011. I would probably look for something newer, though, and also that particular mini PC can't even power a single 2.5" USB HDD via its USB port, so perhaps there's a better one out there.

Most of these come with Windows if that's what you prefer, but personally I installed Linux Mint on mine. In my experience, I've been unable to get Windows 10 to properly spin down external drives when idle, but in Linux, smartctl is bloody awesome - I can set every parameter, so I have all drives set to spin down after five minutes and use max power management (except for on Seagate drive that seems to ignore all my commands - all WD drives behave well). And I control what gets to spin up those drives, so when they sleep, the stay asleep until I access them. And 2.5" USB drives are extremely power efficient, so if you're okay with a 5-second lag waiting for them to spin up, you wouldn't need the SSD to cache them anyway.

If you wanna go even more extreme - and have a lot of devices... I have this MiniPC plus four 4-port powered USB hubs capable of supplying power to my 16 USB drives, and I got rid of all bundled PSUs and replaced them with an old 200W Dell ATX PSU that it useless for a new desktop build, but extremely power efficient and idles at about half a watt. With my system just downloading torrents using the internally attached 2.5" SATA drive, and the 16 external drives sleeping, I'm somewhere between 5 and 10 watts total usage. And everything is online, just with a 5-second delay for access.
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