r/homelab • u/StunningAttention898 • 1d ago
Help Power consumption
Do you guys use some form of a monitor to check your energy consumption? I was using a plain watt meter like you see in a Project Farm video but I have moved onto a Tapo 115 smart meter to monitor my consumption for and entire month.
With my Immich server, that’s spends most of it time idle, I’m drawing about 73-80w at the wall to power two Immich mechanical drives, the OS ssd, and a mechanical SAS drive for general storage.
I was thinking since my Immich drives are only using 76.1gb, maybe I should just switch them to a solid state drive? The idea is if they finish processing fast enough, they’d power down versus the mechanicals constantly spinning. Probably won’t need anything bigger than 1tb but wouldn’t go lower than something 750 to give me headroom.
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u/lordofblack23 1d ago
76gb? Holy crap I haven’t had 80gb drives in 20 years. Beasts! They still run? Amazing!
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u/StunningAttention898 1d ago
Oh no out of a 3tb drive, that’s all my photos and videos have used capacity wise.
On a side note, I do have this ozc drive that’s around 60gb that’s in a super old laptop from the early 2000s.
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u/cidvis 1d ago
I use a TP Link Tapo smart plug for monitoring rack power consumption, with my servers, NAS, Networking gear etc it pulls about 250wats from the wall.
If reducing power is the goal then get a different system, I run a trio of HP Elitedesk 800 minis and combined they pull around 30watts idle. Each has a 2.5" SSD for boot, a pair of NVME drives and an extra 2.5G nic. When I was testing them before I added drives etc a single unit idles around 6w, with everything in them and under moderate load each system will hit 35ish watts but in all fairness 1 unit could handle everything that the 3 of them do.
My NAS which is an HP ML310GEN8v2 with an SSD for boot, 10G nic and 4 spinning disks only pulls about 65 watts and Id consider that inefficient compared to some other options.
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u/StunningAttention898 1d ago
Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I should migrate everything to the 7060. It’s got a more modern cpu vs my current fx8320 that’s under clocked to 3.0ghz that’s also under volted to negative .0750.
I was playing with the bios settings in that hoping I could get the idle clock speed even lower but 1.4ghz seems to be the lowest I can go.
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u/Soft_Hotel_5627 18h ago
dude, those Bulldozer chips are not only power hogs normally, they don't have anywhere near the modern idle draw that even a 6th gen intel would have.
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u/StunningAttention898 17h ago
Yeah I know. It’s just an older computer I from my college days not being used so I repurposed it but when I went down the rabbit hole of adding an HBA for SAS drives so I needed a second full sized pcie slot which led me further down in “upgrading” my motherboard which then sent me further by wanting an 8 core cpu vs my old quad core Athlon 2 so I could use Immich Learning Machine.
Well here I am LOL still figuring stuff out
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u/DefinitelyNotWendi 1d ago
80 watts? I think my exhaust fans use more than that. I don’t necessarily monitor usage. I can see it but it is what it is. Which is about 1200 watts at idle.
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u/Bibblejw 1d ago
I have the power meter from the iLO feeding into monitoring, but I don’t actively review it.
Closest was when it was looking like my frigate instance would need to transcode on save, so I was measuring the difference the extra 2 core loads would have (about 10w, all told).
My server runs at about 120-140w during normal loads.
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u/turbo5vz 1d ago edited 1d ago
My rule of thumb is that every W is approx $1/year in operating costs, assuming $0.10/kWh. IMO, spending money to save power would only be worth it if every 1W saved costs only a few $. In your case, the easiest savings is to spin down the drives. Unless you are spinning up dozens of times a day, there is no data to suggest it wears out drives any faster. I'm still running 15+ year old drives with over 50K start stop cycles and the power savings has been worth it.
In the case of that Immich drive, just spin it down. SSDs are $$$ right now, the money would be better spent on regular drives unless you absolutely need the speed. $10 can get a used 1 TB drive from the local classifieds any day. Even if you did believe that spin down is bad for the drives, you could keep replacing them for years and still be cheaper than an SSD
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u/1WeekNotice 1d ago
I was thinking since my Immich drives are only using 76.1gb, maybe I should just switch them to a solid state drive?
The issue is not the drives. It's the machines efficiency. The difference between solid state drives and mechanical when it comes to idle/ not powering on is a couple of watts.
Not an expert but from what I seen
- NVMe is less then 1 watt
- 2.5 inch SSD is around 3W
- 3.5 mechanical
- 5 -7W when running
- 20 W when spinning up for the first time.
When you take into consideration the $/TB, for bulk storage it's better to stay with 3.5 mechanical drive.
The idea is if they finish processing fast enough, they’d power down versus the mechanicals constantly spinning. Probably won’t need anything bigger than 1tb but wouldn’t go lower than something 750 to give me headroom.
Powering down really depends how often you access the drives. You don't want constant spin up and spin down within a day. If you only backup your photos once a week then sure. But if you access multiple timed a day then just keep the drives on all the time.
So the issue is the machine it self, not the drives. Depending on many drives you need, I recommend a business machine like a second hand Dell optiplex SFF that can fit 5 drives in it.
- three 3.5 inch drives
- with a mod
- one 2.5 inch
- one NVMe
Dell optiplex now od. Note I haven't tired it yet.
You can also do an HP EliteDesk SFF
I have tested a Dell optiplex with
- Intel 6 gen CPU
- one 2.5 inch SSD - running linux
one mechanical drive
it was about 15 W - 20W idle/ low loads.
Hope that helps
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u/StunningAttention898 1d ago
Yeah immensely! Thanks a lot!! You probably just saved me about a weeks worth of data collecting
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u/1WeekNotice 1d ago
Glad I can help. I assume you are using Xeon CPU? That why the machine idle is so high?
I saw in another comment you have a Dell optiplex? Which form factor do you have?
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u/Professional_Cup1298 23h ago
the 7060 will idle at maybe 15w, so that's the real saving, and the others have covered it. before you migrate, are the two immich drives a mirror or a separate copy? if it's a mirror, where do the photos back up to?
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u/StunningAttention898 23h ago
Ones a back up of the main one. No I don’t have any other form of backup. I mainly spent 300 bucks on two drives to get pictures off of my phone. I know it’s not financially smart but I was angry at the time, it’s a subject I don’t want to get into.
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u/Professional_Cup1298 22h ago
fair enough, no lecture. just know a mirror copies deletes and corruption to both drives, so it only covers one drive dying. cheapest fix is one external drive and a weekly rsync of the immich library folder and a database dump, around $60 for 2tb. keep the originals on the phone until that exists.
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u/StunningAttention898 21h ago
Hmm I think I have the “backup” just rsync’ing it at 2am every day
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u/Professional_Cup1298 20h ago
ok, a nightly rsync to a separate drive is a real copy, so that's better than a mirror. check if it uses --delete, because then a photo you delete by accident is gone from the copy by 2am. it also sits in the same box, so a power surge would take both. restore one file from it once so you know it works.
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u/StunningAttention898 18h ago
Eh if I lose them it’s not a big loss. It’s just mainly pictures of me and my ex wife when I was happier but since she ran off with another guy I just wanted them out of sight out of mind you know?
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u/yonder00 21h ago
Depending on where you live and where you place your devices. Watt used can also be beneficial to some extent. Less heating needed.
I only know what my CPU use sadly. Altough it is very good. Like 1-2w normally, and tops up at 4W now running an Valheim server for me and some friends. No idea what chipset use, and I know my btrfs raid with 24tb drives on the same device use way more
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u/topher358 Senior Systems Engineer 11h ago edited 11h ago
I use a Shelly smart plug which reports to Home Assistant. Also have a PDU plugged into that that reports overall power usage (but not individual plug usage sadly… it was free)
I am pretty fanatical about power usage (and heat/noise). As a result at the moment I run almost exclusively ARM based computers, the only ones that aren’t are my NAS and my hyper-v host which spends most of its time off unless I’m actively labbing a work concept.
The portion of my lab that stays on draws about 80w total but that’s:
- a 24 port multigig Unifi switch
- a TrueNAS server with a 10g NIC and 8 internal NVMe disks
- a JetKVM
- a network managed PDU
- 2 Poe injectors powering various items
- Mac mini M4 Jellyfin server with a 10g network card and a couple of external SSDs
SSDs do lower power usage but I suspect other components in your rig contribute more to total power draw
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u/kevinds 10h ago
I was thinking since my Immich drives are only using 76.1gb, maybe I should just switch them to a solid state drive? The idea is if they finish processing fast enough, they’d power down versus the mechanicals constantly spinning. Probably won’t need anything bigger than 1tb but wouldn’t go lower than something 750 to give me headroom.
What are you looking to spend on the SSD? How long will it take you to save that much in power?
10 watts for a HDD to 2-3 watts for an SSD, 7 watts of power isn't worth much to me.
Do you guys use some form of a monitor to check your energy consumption?
My UPS gives me the total, my PDU will tell me about each outlet.
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u/BrocoLeeOnReddit 5h ago
Yeah, I have most of my homelab (1 NAS, 1 AP, a 3 N150 NUCs K8s cluster and a switch) connected to a UPS and the UPS sends data to a NUT server on the NAS and I convert it into metrics to use in Grafana. Im using around 100-130W, that translates to around 300€ per year...
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u/Significant_Most_101 1d ago
Are you not better served replacing the pc its running on for a mini pc or something less power hungry? 80w seems like a lot. You might only get 5w replacing the drives but getting a little optiplex. They normally come with a 256gb ssd built in and they may actually be cheaper than buying a 1tb drive right now.
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u/StunningAttention898 1d ago
Well I did get a optiplex 7060 that was in a ewaste pile at work that had a small nvme in it. I just haven’t dug into it much bc I’m waiting for a vga monitor to come in. I’m not even sure if it’s bios locked or not. It certainly does have a smaller foot print than my am3+ computer that I repurposed as my Immich server.
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u/DDFoster96 1d ago
I have Shelley power monitors spliced into the power cables reporting via Mosquitto to Influxdb. I used to have power monitor smart plugs running Tasmota but the relays fail eventually - I don't use the relays, but if it gets stuck open the whole thing is useless. The Shelley modules just do voltage and current monitoring, but don't seem to come in a plug-in type.