how much power does your system need?
how much power does your system need?
I wonder if my system is good or bad. My server needs 0.1kWh.
You might have your units confused.
0.1kWh over how much time? Per day? Per hour? Per week?
Watthours refer to total power used to do something, from a starting point to an ending point. It makes no sense to say that a device needs a certain amount of Wh, unless you're talking about something like charging a battery to full.
Power being used by a device, (like a computer) is just watts.
Think of the difference between speed and distance. Watts is how fast power is being used, watt-hours is how much has been used, or will be used.
If you have a 500 watt PC, for example, it uses 500Wh, per hour. Or 12kWh in a day.
Mate, kWh is a measure of electricity volume, like gallons is to liquid. Also, 100 watt hours would be a much more sensical way to say the same thing. What you've said in the title is like saying your server uses 1 gallon of water. It's meaningless without a unit of time. Watts is a measure of current flow (pun intended), similar to a measurement like gallons per minute.
For example, if your server uses 100 watts for an hour it has used 100 watt hours of electricity. If your server uses 100 watts for 100 hours it has used 10000 watts of electricity, aka 10kwh.
My NAS uses about 60 watts at idle, and near 100w when it's working on something. I use an old laptop for a plex server, it probably uses like 50 watts at idle and like 150 or 200 when streaming a 4k movie, I haven't checked tbh. I did just acquire a BEEFY network switch that's going to use 120 watts 24/7 though, so that'll hurt the pocket book for sure. Soon all of my servers should be in the same place, with that network switch, so I'll know exactly how much power it's using.
My server rack has
- 3x Dell R730
- 1x Dell R720
- 2x Cisco Catalyst 3750x (IP Routing license)
- 2x Netgear M4300-12x12f
- 1x Unifi USW-48-Pro
- 1x USW-Agg
- 3x Framework 11th Gen (future cluster)
- 1x Protectli FE4B
All together that draws.... 0.1 kWh.... in 0.327s.
In real time terms, measured at the UPS, I have a running stable state load of 900-1100w depending on what I have at load. I call it my computationally efficient space heater because it generates more heat than is required for my apartment in winter except for the coldest of days. It has a dedicated 120v 15A circuit
9 spinning disks and a couple SSD's - Right around 190 watts, but that also includes my router and 3 PoE WiFi AP's. PoE consumption is reported as 20 watts, and the router should use about 10 watts, so I think the server is about 160 watts.
Electricity here is pretty expensive, about $.33 per kWh, so by my math I'm spending $38/month on this stuff. If I didn't have lots of digital media it'd be worth it to get a VPS probably. $38/month is still cheaper than Netflix, HBO, and all the other junk I'd have to subscribe to.
last I checked with a kill-a-watt I was drawing an average of 2.5kWh after a week of monitoring my whole rack. that was about three years ago and the following was running in my rack.
- r610 dual 1kw PSU
- homebuilt server Gigabyte 750w PSU
- homebuilt Asus gaming rig 650w PSU
- homebuilt Asus retro(xp) gaming/testing rig 350w PSU
- HP laptop as dev env/warmsite ~ 200w PSU
- Amcrest NVR 80w (I guess?)
- HP T610 65w PSU
- Terramaster F5-422 90w PSU
- TP-Link TL-SG2424P 180w PSU
- Brocade ICX6610-48P-E dual dual 1kw PSU
- Misc routers, rpis, poe aps, modems(cable & 5G) ~ 700w combined (cameras not included, brocade powers them directly)
I also have two battery systems split between high priority and low priority infrastructure.
Around 18-20 Watts on idle. It can go up to about 40 W at 100% load.
I have a Intel N100, I'm really happy about performance per watt, to be honest.
My 10 year old ITX NAS build with 4 HDDs used 40W at idle. Just upgraded to an Aoostart WTR Pro with the same 4 HDDs, uses 28W at idle. My power bill currently averages around US$0.13/kWh.
My server with 8 hard drives uses about 60 watts and goes up to around 80 under heavy load. The firewall, switch, access points and modem use another 50-60 watts.
I really need upgrade my server and firewall to something about 10 years newer, it would reduce my power consumption quite a bit and I would have a lot more runtime on UPS.
I'm idling at 120W with eight drives, but I'm currently looking into how to lower it.
My whole setup including 2 PIs and one fully speced out AM4 system with 100TB of drives a Intel Arc and 4x 32gb ecc ram uses between 280W - 420W I live in Germany and pay 25ct per KWh and my whole apartment uses 600w at any given time and approximately 15kwh per day 😭
There are some really efficient systems out there, but power requirements depend a lot on what is run.
A simple website is very different that a photo gallery running content ID for example.
45 to 55 watt.
But I make use of it for backup and firewall. No cloud shit.
Idle: 30 Watts
Starting all docker containers after reboot: 140 Watts
It needs around 28 kWh per month.
Running an old 7th gen Intel, It has a 2070 and a 1080 in it, six mechanical hard drives 3 SSDs. Then I have an eighth gen laptop with a 1070 TI mobile. But the laptop's a camera server so it's always running balls to the wall. Running a unified dream machine pro, 24 port poe, 16 port poe and an 8 port poe
Because of the overall workload and the age of the CPU, it burns about 360 watts continuous.
I can save a few watts by putting the discs to sleep, But I'm in the camp where the spin up and spin down of the discs cost more wear than continuous running.
Edit: cleaned up the slaughter from the dictation, after I cleaned up my physical space from Christmas festivities.
With everything on, 100W but I don't have my NAS on all the time and in that case I pull only 13W since my server is a laptop
Pulling around 200W on average.
- 100W for the server. Xeon E3-1231v3 with 8 spinning disks + HBA, couple of sata SSD’s
- ~80W for the unifi PoE 48 Pro switch. Most of this is PoE power for half a dozen cameras, downstream switches and AP’s, and a couple of raspberry pi’s
- ~20W for protectli vault running Opnsense
- Total usage measured via Eaton UPS
- Subsidised during the day with solar power (Enphase)
- Tracked in home assistant
The PC I'm using as a little NAS usually draws around 75 watt. My jellyfin and general home server draws about 50 watt while idle but can jump up to 150 watt. Most of the components are very old. I know I could get the power usage down significantly by using newer components, but not sure if the electricity use outweighs the cost of sending them to the landfill and creating demand for more newer components to be manufactured.
80-110W
80-100 watts at idle which is most of the time. Two OS drives, two fast drives, two spinners, lots of networking and always syncing with the rest of the cluster.
My server uses about 6-7 kWh a day, but its a dual CPU Xeon running quite a few dockers. Probably the thing that keeps it busiest is being a file server for our family and a Plex server for my extended family (So a lot of the CPU usage is likely transcodes).
50W-ish idle? Ryzen 1700, 2 HDDs, and a GTX 750ti. My next upgrade will hopefully cut this in half.
the boxes i have running 24/7 use about 20w max each, and about half that at idle or 'normal' loads.
I use unraid with 5950x and it wouldn't stop crashing until I disabled c states
So that plus 18 hdds and 2 ssds it sits at 200watts 24/7
My servers (an old desktop overstuffed with drives and an old dell laptop), networking gear and a 50 gal aquarium all run on the same outlet. As long as the aquarium heater is off, the outlet pulls about 200 watts. The aquarium heater spikes that to 400 watts when it kicks in.
