Comment by 8fingerlouie
1 day ago
Holy smokes, the NAS in idle consumes more power than my UNAS Pro with 4x8TB HDD and 2X8TB SSD, as well as a Mac mini M1 with a 2TB Samsung T7 SSD, and my 4 access points and 4 protect cameras combined.
For reference, the UNAS Pro comes with 10G networking, and will deliver roughly 500MB/s from a 4 HDD RAID5 array, and close to 1GB/s from the SSDs (which it never gets a chance to do, as I use them for photos/documents).
My entire "network stack", including firewall, switch, everything POE, hue bridge, tado bridge, Homey Pro, UPS, and whatever else, consumes 96W in total, and does pretty much all my family and I need, at reasonable speeds. Our main storage is in the cloud though, so YMMV.
"the NAS in idle consumes more power than my UNAS Pro with 4x8TB HDD and 2X8TB SSD, as well as a Mac mini M1 with a 2TB Samsung T7 SSD, and my 4 access points and 4 protect cameras combined."
I know that's not true. I say this as someone who measures the power consumption of individual components, and even individual rails with a clamp meter. The OP measures an idle power of 67W. He has 6 x 8TB HDDs. These typically consume 5W idling (not spun down). So the OP's NAS without drives is probably around 37W.
A UNAS Pro without drives reportedly consumes 20W with no drives. Adding 4 x 8TB at 5W per drive, means your UNAS Pro config with drives probably idles at 40W (again, drives not spun down). That means you are 17W under his NAS idle power. So you claim your remaining hardware (Mac mini, 4 APs, 4 cameras) run in under 17W... Yeah that's not possible. 17W is peanuts; it's half the power of a phone's fast charger (~30W).
PS: for the OP, an easy way to further reduce power consumption is to replace your 500W PSU with a smaller one, like 250-300W which is still amply over-specced for your build. Because the typical efficiency curve of a PSU drops sharply at very low loads. For example at idle when your NAS pulls 67W from the wall it's very probable it supplies only ~50W to the internal components, so it's running at 10% load and it's only 50/67 = 75% efficient. The smallest load for which the 80 Plus Gold standard requires a minimum efficiency is 20%. If you downgrade to a 250W PSU you are enforcing a minimum 20% load for which the 80 Plus Gold standard requires minimum 87% efficiency. The load at the wall would thus drop to 50/.87 = 57W thereby saving you 10W.
96W is what's reported at the wall including everything. The switch reports 36W PoE consumption The Mac Mini is 5-6W, and the UNAS Pro around 35W with drives (4xHDD, 2xSSD).
So ~75W in total for everything PoE, Mac Mini and UNAS Pro. I was 8.5W over, so remove the Mac Mini from the equation.
The rest of the consumption (21W) is made up of a UDM Pro with a 4TB WD Red, USW Pro Max 16 POE, Hue Bridge, Tado Bridge, Homey Pro, and a Unifi UPS Tower.
and yes, that's at idle (drives spinning). It does rise to 120-130W when everything is doing "something".
"I was 8.5W over"
As I suspected :-) Also note that by measuring "36W POE consumption" you are excluding the AC-DC conversion losses from the switch's PSU which further makes the comparison a bit unfair. IOW your POE equipment draws more than 36W at the wall.
The only fair comparison is looking as only your NAS idling with drives (35W you claim, and I still believe it's closer to 40W) vs the OP's NAS with 4 drives (which should be 57W, or 67W minus 10W for his two extra drives). Then if the OP used a better sized PSU he might cut out another 10W or so (see my "PS" above) then you are comparing your 35W (or 40W) with his 47W which of course is still in your favor and a testament that Ubiquiti did a great job optimizing the UNAS Pro. But this 12W (or 7W) difference hardly matters for someone running a single NAS at their house. This extra power is around $1 or $2 monthly at average US domestic electricity rates.
1 reply →
Once you venture outside of shove files down network pipe territory you'll find you're comparing apples and oranges.
About 10x difference in CPU performance, 4x in RAM, zfs vs btrfs, quicksync, kubernetes/docker etc.
Doesn't make the unify an inferior machine - it just reflects a narrower specialized focus on serving files...and yes does so with lower idle draw.
did you forget the Mac Mini M1 in that comparison ?
My setup, UNAS and Mac Mini M1, with 10Gbps networking, will easily perform as well as the NAS in question, but the Mac Mini only uses 4.6W idle, making it much more efficient.
As for ZFS vs Btrfs, they're about equal unless you're doing some very specific things. For most normal server stuff or NAS stuff, Btrfs is every bit as competent as ZFS. Snapshots, compression, RAID1+, recovery, bitrot detection, they're pretty much equal. ZFS as an advantage with RAIDZ1/2 as Btrfs apparently hasn't managed to make RAID5/6 stable in the past decade. You can however run RAID1 across multiple devices with multiple copies, which is not quite the same, but also not terrible.
The RAM usage of ZFS is also largely a myth. Yes, it will use RAM if available, but that is mostly because it was designed with it's own file cache, which was probably fine on Solaris, and to some extent on FreeBSD, but Linux uses a shared block cache, and instead of files being cached in the shared cache, ZFS will cache them, making it look like it hogs RAM.
I genuinely don't even know what to do with this comment. You're upset that I contrasted two NAS instead you wanted a NAS vs NAS+Other stuff?
I regret commenting at all...
> the NAS in idle consumes more power than my UNAS Pro with 4x8TB HDD and 2X8TB SSD, as well as a Mac mini M1 with a 2TB Samsung T7 SSD, and my 4 access points and 4 protect cameras combined.
Are your drives spun? 70w is a pretty low bar. The nas by itself is probably 40w with drives, Mac mini is another 7-10w (especially at wall) and now we are at 50w, so 20w left for 4 AP and cameras
drives are spinning. 4x8TB WD Red Plus, which uses 3.4W idle, and assuming 20W for the NAS it's at ~34W (measured 35W). Mac Mini uses 4.6W idle (headless). POE consumption (measured by switch) is 37W (I'm aware there's overhead in AC/DC conversion).
All in all the total consumption at the wall is 96W, but as i have written in another comment, i was 7-8W off, meaning the quoted setup of mine uses 7-8W more than the 66.7W OPs NAS idles at.
"Our main storage is in the cloud though, so YMMV." AKA you externalized the costs
Not really.
It's part of the 3-2-1 backup setup, but where other people have their "offsite backup" in the cloud, I keep my working copy there, and have backups at home.
I outsourced operations of it though. I have self hosted for decades, and for the first time in 15-20 years, I'm able to take a vacation and not bring my laptop in case something breaks.
As for main storage, as was probably evident from my comment, I don't have 30TB of cloud storage. We have our important stuff in the cloud, and "everything else" at home, but nothing at home is accessible from the internet unless you're on a VPN.