Power usage
Power usage
I am smarting up my home with lots of ZigBee thingies and decided to add a ZigBee smart monitor to my selfhost setup.
Its a desktop box with a core i7 9th gen, 48gb ram, no monitor.
I used to have 4xSSD 4TB + 2xHDD 6TB. Three RAID1 for a total of 4+4+6=14Tbs.
Power was sitting at 50W.
I restructured my storage: 1 RAID5 with the 4 SSDs (12tb) and removed the 2 HDDs.
Power went down to 38W!
I am amazed.
In the future will run just 1 hdd for storing backups and keep it spinned down 99% of the time.
PS: the above wattage is during transcoding, so with high CPU and disk usage....
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You've saved a whoopping 0.3kWh/day (assuming transcoding 24/7), that's surprisingly little I would say.
It's still a 24% power save. In small numbers it doesn't look like much, but over the course of a year, it adds up.
Sure it's 100kWh in a year, so it's a few bucks per month saved. But in reality it's likely even less than half that saved, because the majority of the time it's probably not under transcoding loads.
At 0.25€/kWh thats 27€ a year.
Not bad, I mean if he's transcoding 24/7!
I am not LOL... But good point.
Power costs vary a lot around the world, depending on where OP lives every little saving can help.
Constantly turning it on/off will probably kill the disk faster than the power savings can make up for it, compared to just having it idle when not actively used.
Consumer harddisks are made to be spinned up and down occasionally. Don't do it every five minutes... But I've been doing it for years and years with my server that spins up the disks once or twice a day, once I access some of my archived files. And it's perfectly fine.
The hdd spin on once every night for backup, then off after a bit by the timeout.
That should not be a critical issue.
Yeah, most PCs get turned on and off like once per day. For example at most offices or at home. That's perfectly within normal use.
I was impressed that HDDs where drawing so much, compared to overall CPU usage...
And its over 20% saving.
Yes, pennies, but nevertheless interesting.
My energy cost is about 0.6€/kWh, so not trivial, but I actually run it on PV, so not really a money factor, more an energy efficient consideration.
Yeah, don't let the bashers get you down: wasting stuff just because it's cheap is how we got here. Measuring your power use is the only way to make informed choices, and sometimes the results are surprising.
Like, I was surprised to find that my audio gear uses exactly the same power whether it's playing or not. The subwoofer alone uses twice as much power as the RPi that feeds it signal. It's maybe 0.02 USD/day (for the sub), but I've got extra smart plugs from a multi-pack, and it's easy enough to put together an automation to power them all down if they've been idle a while.
wasting stuff just because it’s cheap is how we got here
Not really, at least if we're talking about electricity use.
We got here by expanding our standard of living. Most residential electricity use is heating, cooling, and other major appliances, and we're not going to make up for that by cutting a few watts here and there.
Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely in favor of small wins, but it's important to not miss the forest for the trees. For example, don't throw out good hardware just to save a few watts. If your goal is to help with climate change, there are much better ways to spend your time than cutting a few watts here and there.
Fair enough. But even if you don't run on PV and actually do transcode 24/7/365, it's still only 5€/month. They idle at around 1/3 to 1/2 that though, which is arguably better for the disk than being turned on/off all the time, so you still get the bulk of the savings while extending disk lifetime.