Highly doubt it’s worth it in the long run due to electricity costs alone
Depends.
Toss the GPU/wifi, disable audio, throttle the processor a ton, and set the OS to power saving, and old PCs can be shockingly efficient.
You can slow the RAM down too. You don’t need XMP enabled if you’re just using the PC as a NAS. It can be quite power hungry.
Eh, older RAM doesn’t use much. If it runs close to stock voltage, maybe just set it at stock voltage and bump the speed down a notch, then you get a nice task energy gain from the performance boost.
There was a post a while back of someone trying to eek every single watt out of their computer. Disabling XMP and running the ram at the slowest speed possible saved like 3 watts I think. An impressive savings, but at the cost of HORRIBLE CPU performance. But you do actually need at least a little bit of grunt for a nas.
At work we have some of those atom based NASes and the combination of lack of CPU, and horrendous single channel ram speeds makes them absolutely crawl. One HDD on its own performs the same as this raid 10 array.
Yeah.
In general, ‘big’ CPUs have an advantage because they can run at much, much lower clockspeeds than atoms, yet still be way faster. There are a few exceptions, like Ryzen 3000+ (excluding APUs), which idle notoriously hot thanks to the multi-die setup.
Peripherals and IO will do that. Cores pulling 5-6W while IO die pulls 6-10W
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-5700x/18.html
Same with auto overclocking mobos.
My ASRock sets VSoC to a silly high coltage with EXPO. Set that back down (and fiddle with some other settings/disable the IGP if you can), and it does help a ton.
…But I think AMD’s MCM chips just do idle hotter. My older 4800HS uses dramatically less, even with the IGP on.
And heat your room in the winter!
Add spring + autumn if you live up north.
A desktop running a low usage wouldn’t consume much more than a NAS, as long as you drop the video card (which wouldn’t be running anyways).
Take only that extra and you probably have a few years usage before additional electricty costs overrun NAS cost. Where I live that’s around 5 years for an estimated extra 10W.
as long as you drop the video card
As I wrote below, some motherboards won’t POST without a GPU.
Take only that extra and you probably have a few years usage before additional electricty costs overrun NAS cost. Where I live that’s around 5 years for an estimated extra 10W.
Yeah, and what’s more, if one of those appliance-like NASes breaks down, how do you fix it? With a normal PC you just swap out the defective part.
Most modern boards will. Also there’s integrated graphics on basically every single current CPU. Only AMD on AM4 held out on having iGPUs for so damn long.
OK. Science time. Somewhat arbitrary values used, the point is there is a amortization calculation, you’ll need to calculate your own with accurate input values.
A PC drawing 100W 24/7 uses 877 kWh@0.15 $131.49 per year.
A NAS drawing 25W 24/7 uses 219 kWh@0.15 $32.87 per year
So, in this hypothetical case you “save” about $100/year on power costs running the NAS.
Assuming a capacity equivalent NAS might cost $1200 then you’re better off using the PC you have rather than buying a NAS for 12 years.
This ignores that the heat generated by the devices is desirable in winter so the higher heat output option has additional utility.
In the UK the calculus is quite different, as it’s £0.25/kWh or over double the cost.
Also, an empty Synology 4-bay NAS can be gotten for like £200 second hand. Good enough if you only need file hosting. Mine draws about 10W compared to an old Optiplex that draws around 60W.
With that math using the NAS saves you 1.25 pence per hour. Therefore the NAS pays for itself in around about 2 years.
I bought a two bay Synology for $270, and a 20TB hdd for $260. I did this for multiple reasons. The HDD was on sale so I bought it and kept buying things. Also I couldn’t be buggered to learn everything necessary to set up a homemade NAS. Also also i didn’t have an old PC. My current PC is a Ship of Theseus that I originally bought in 2006.
You’re not wrong about an equivalent NAS to my current pc specs/capacity being more expensive. And yes i did spend $500+ on my NAS And yet I also saved several days worth of study, research, and trial and error by not building my own.
That being said, reducing e-waste by converting old PCs into Jellyfin/Plex streaming machines, NAS devices, or personal servers is a really good idea
I used to think it didn’t matter how electricity is used to generate heat, so I came to the same conclusion you did. Surprisingly, it does matter. Rather than a computer’s resistive heating, it is much more efficient to refrigerate the outdoors and point the refrigerator’s heat sink indoors. This is how a heat pump works. It’s basically awesome.
If your PC has 32gb of RAM or more throw it away (in my trash bin) immediately.
Don’t throw away your old PC
Literally first-world problems, right? There’s absolutely no need to tell that to someone that don’t live on a rich country. Old gear always finds some use or is sold/donated away.
And as usual everyone is saying NAS, but talking about servers with a built in NAS.
I’m not saying you can’t run your services on the same machine as your NAS, I’m just confused why every time there’s a conversation about NASs it’s always about what software it can run.
At this point you’re just fighting semantics. Even a commercial NAS is reliant on the software too, like with Synology. They run the disk management but also can run Docker and VMs with their built-in hypervisor.
I started my media server in 2020 with an e-wasted i7 3770 dell tower I snagged out of the ewaste pile. Ran jellyfin, audiobookbay, navidrome, calibre-web and an arr stack with about a dozen users like a champ. Old hardware rules if you don’t use windows
Better to build it from scratch, your desktop PC does not have server-grade hardware. No ECC, no IPMI, not enough SATA ports, etc.
My old PC locks up every 4 to 48 hours. It would make a terrible NAS.
Nah. I dissagree. My dedicated NAS system consumes around 40W idling and is very small sized machine. My old PC would utilize 100W idling and is ATX-sized case. Of course I can use my old PC as a NAS, but these two are different category devices.
I want to reduce wasteful power consumption.
But I also desire ECC for stability and data corruption avoidance, and hardware redundancy for failures (Which have actually happened!!)
Begrudgingly I’m using dell rack mount servers. For the most part they work really well, stupid easy to service, unified remote management, lotssss of room for memory, thick PCIe lane counts, stupid cheap 2nd hand RAM, and stable.
But they waste ~100 watts of power per device though… That stuff ads up, even if we have incredibly cheap power.
Nah nah I disagree. My i7 8700k old PC server runs around 60 watts with 4 hard disks and ~30 running containers. It’s a large machine so that I can easily expand with more drives but I can easily buy a smaller mobo on the used market if I wanted something smaller. Depending on how old your NAS is, and what you are doing with it, PC may be more power efficient.
The main concern with old hardware is probably powerdraw/efficiency, depending on how old your PC is, it might not be the best choice. But remember: companies are getting rid of old hardware fairly quickly, they can be a good choice and might be available for dirt cheap or even free.
I recently replaced my old Synology NAS from 2011 with an old Dell Optiplex 3050 workstation that companies threw away. The system draws almost twice the power (25W) compared to my old synology NAS (which only drew 13W, both with 2 spinning drives), but increase in processing power and flexibility using TrueNAS is very noticable, it allowed me to also replace an old raspberry pi (6W) that only ran pihole.
So overall, my new home-server is close in power draw to the two devices it replaced, but with an immense increase in performance.
My old PC and laptop are too loud to use for anything really. It‘s unfortunate but the noise is too much.
Clean the PC and change the fans. Fans make noise when old.
I somehow doubt that.
My last desktop PC has been retasked as an HTPC. The CPU in it requires a graphics card for the system to POST, it’s currently mounted in a SFF case with barely room for two 2.5" drives, so it would either make for a shitty, difficult to service, bulky for what it does, power inefficient NAS, or I’d have to buy a new case and CPU.
My current machine is in an mATX mini-tower, there’s room for hard disks and the 7700X has integrated graphics so I could haul the GPU out, but it’s still kind of bulky for what you’d get.
So I’m gonna keep my Synology in service for a little while longer, then build a NAS from scratch selecting components that would be good for that purpose.
This is my rig, I already bought 20 30TB disks, how do I proceed?
Your system is a POS.
First choose a version of linux to install on it, then you can proceed.
Atm it’s running Proxmox, but I’ll go bare metal with a fresh install of Hannah Montana Linux, I want to do things proper this time!
I’ve made a decent NAS out of a Raspberry Pi 4. It used USB to SATA converters and old hard drives.
My setup has one 3Tb drive and two 1.5Tb drives. The 1.5Tb drives form a 3Tb drive using RAID and then combines with the 3Tb drive to make redundant storage.
Yes it’s inefficient AF but it’s good enough for full HD streaming so good enough for me.
I’m too stingy to buy better drives.
My NAS draws about 25w (without drives). Show me an old PC with 6 3.5” drive bays that draws 25w.
