Comment by dragontamer

3 days ago

I have to imagine that the best NAS build is simply a 6-core or 8-core standard AMD or Intel with a few HBA controllers and maybe 10Gbit SPF+ fiber or something.

"Old server hardware" for $300 is a bit of a variation, in that you're just buying something from 5 years ago so that its cheaper. But if you want to improve power-efficiency, buy a CPU from today rather than an old one.

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IIRC, the "5 year old used market" for servers is particularly good because many datacenters and companies opt for a ~5-year upgrade cycle. That means 5-year-old equipment is always being sold off at incredible rates.

Any 5-year-old server will obviously have all the features you need for a NAS (likely excellent connectivity, expandibility, BMS, physical space, etc. etc.). Just you have to put up with power-efficiency specs of 5 years ago.

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dragontamer

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asmor  2 days ago

For AMD Zen, they have power consumption overhead on all chiplet designs, even if the chip only has one core complex, the separate IO die makes it hard to get idle power consumption under 30W.

Usually the chips with explicitly integrated GPUs (G-suffix, or laptop chips) are monolithic and can hit 10W or lower.