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Power consumption comparison between physical Xpenology and Xpenology via virtualization


everwisher

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I have some spared hardware and I built them into a virtualized xpenology NAS over QEMU with onboard SATA controller passed through, being out of worries about incompatibility because I'm a noob.

 

Now my build is running with an i7-8700t ES cpu, 32g ddr3-1866 ram, z170-mod MB, a WD SN750 SSD for the host (with two lvs used as simulated RAID1 ssd cahe for DSM), and four ST8000DM004 8TB 5.4krpm hard drives. On average my system consumes 70~90W power.

 

I wonder if I turn this machine into a physical host based on DSM, is there gonna be a cut in the power consumption on account of potentially better managed hard drive spinning down or something?

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I don't think so. I am running DSM baremetal on an i3-8100 and as far as I know the hardware choices is where you can save energy most easily. Meaning you can lower comsumption mostly by choosing a power efficient CPU and put only drives in your NAS you need, because every HDD needs power as well. You could however undervolt your CPU slightly if the motherboard allows it. I hooked a power consumption measuring device (MyStrom wifi) between my NAS and my wall socket. It is a pretty cool device which offers an API to grab the current power draw and can be integrated in Netdata (if you are into that).

 

I attached a screenshot of the power consumption, however keep in mind that my MainNAS is quipped currently with a combination of 14 HDDs/SSDs.

Bildschirmfoto 2021-03-11 um 19.53.44.png

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On 3/9/2021 at 11:54 AM, everwisher said:

Now my build is running with an i7-8700t ES cpu, 32g ddr3-1866 ram, z170-mod MB, a WD SN750 SSD for the host (with two lvs used as simulated RAID1 ssd cahe for DSM), and four ST8000DM004 8TB 5.4krpm hard drives. On average my system consumes 70~90W power.

as the cpu only has a tdp of 25w it sound a little high, not sure what the ram consumes but you can tra with just half of it, dsm would work with 4 or 8GB good enough

if you pass through  a whole controller then dsm should be able to use disk hibernation for the disks

also i'm not convinced a baremetal would that good as afaik its not throttling down the cpu at all, there are some scripts that can help

https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/19846-cpu-frequency-scaling-for-ds918/

 

i'd expect a properly working hypervisor to being able throttle the cpu for lower consumption when there is no load

you would also loose you r/w cache in a baremetal enviroment

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Thanks for reply. I tried to undervolt my cpu from the MB uefi, only ending up in black screen and compulsory BIOS recovery. I'll work on it to see if this issue has something to do with an es cpu.

On 3/12/2021 at 2:57 AM, smileyworld said:

I don't think so. I am running DSM baremetal on an i3-8100 and as far as I know the hardware choices is where you can save energy most easily. Meaning you can lower comsumption mostly by choosing a power efficient CPU and put only drives in your NAS you need, because every HDD needs power as well. You could however undervolt your CPU slightly if the motherboard allows it. I hooked a power consumption measuring device (MyStrom wifi) between my NAS and my wall socket. It is a pretty cool device which offers an API to grab the current power draw and can be integrated in Netdata (if you are into that).

 

I attached a screenshot of the power consumption, however keep in mind that my MainNAS is quipped currently with a combination of 14 HDDs/SSDs.

Bildschirmfoto 2021-03-11 um 19.53.44.png

 

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Your CPU supports 25 TDP-down and I think @IG-88assumed you actived it since you want to lower power consumption.

 

27 minutes ago, everwisher said:

Thanks for reply. I tried to undervolt my cpu from the MB uefi, only ending up in black screen and compulsory BIOS recovery. I'll work on it to see if this issue has something to do with an es cpu.

 

 

IF your Mainboard supports undervolting you need to be carefully. I reduced my voltage in 10 mv steps until it got my system unstable when CPU stress testing and added 40 mv to this value. E.g. 1,1 volt is default value, 910mv is where it gets unstable and you set it to 950. This method assumes you have a fix Vcore. But in theory it also works with adaptive or offset.

 

BTW I forgot to mention that my NAS runs lots of docker containers and one of them is folding at home, which needs about 40% CPU processing power. This adds 20-40 Watt. Without the container my MainNAS only consumes 85 Watt average.

 

 

 

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