NAS and power usage, interesting insights about snapraid.

It's quite amazing the things you can see when you look closely at the power consumption of devices.

 

This for example: Snapraid in action.
 

 

Don't mind the left bar, as there are some other devices on that meter, but basically what you can see there is the snapraid job starting at 4AM, and completing by around 7AM. It runs across 6x 2.5" SMR spinning rust  and a bunch of SSDs nothing special. This is likely just the read, as very little data changed. Is that the spike you can see from the spinup of the HDDs? Time to plan the snapraid job during the day, when I have solar power. Every little bit helps ;-)

 Cool insights anyways. 

The ultimate-ultimate NAS.

Better, cheaper, happier.

The other day in my "ultimate NAS" aricle  I actually had a better idea that gives:

• More performance.
• More bandwidth.
• Lower cost

I was looking at the small size of the case of the Lenovo P320 Tiny and wondering if there was not a SFF case that did allow me to add a 'proper' network adapter.

Which led me to the HP Elitedesk 800 G6, it has a tenth gen i5/i7 and the capability to house 128Gbytes of memory (4 slots of 32Gbytes each. It also has 4 PCIe slots (2x x16 and 2x x1) It also has 2x 4xPCIe m.2 storage slots. The x16 slots are x8 and x4 electrically, so enough but not 'great'. It even has 4 native SATA ports (PCH based). It's slots are half-sized though, perfect for the LSI 9400 series and the connectX-3

Then I looked at my choice of storage cabinet and controller again. If you remember, I was advising a 12Gig SAS adapter, but the enclosure was 'only' 6Gig SAS. Turns out there is a follow-up to the MD1200/MD1220/MD3200/MD3240 range of chassis. The MD1400/MD1420 series (there is also a 3000 series which uses the same chassis, just different controllers. There is also an SC420 chasis by DELL/EMC. At the end of the day, these are the same 'steel' and 'backplane'. 

I actually managed to find it cheaper!

Of course, I needed different controllers too, find them _very_ cheap in the US (it was so cheap I had to buy two, otherwise shipping would have been more expensive than the controllers!):

Luckily, the Power Supplies and Caddies (sleds) are still the same as in the old series.

And rather than using a serial port as an admin interface, you can use USB-A to mini-USB interface.

Also, something else that's interesting. Unlike the MD1200 series, this MD1400 (specifically it's controller) can combine the 4 lane 12gSAS cables, so you can run two cables from your controller to your DAS cabinet, which means 96Gbit of storage bandwidth.

The greatest expenditure was two SFF-8644 to SFF-8644 cables:

Luckily, I can still use the SFF-8644 to SFF-8088 to connect further MD1200 and MD1220 enclosures.

But my migration of 3.5" spinning drives to 2.5" SSDs should save me a lot of power. Currently the whole setup is sitting at around 130W, thats with the MD1220, and a completely filled MD1200 (12x 3.5" drives, dual-port SAS 7200rpm versions. I'm hoping to drop at least 60W once all the storage had been migrated and I can disconnect the MD1200.

 The ULTIMATE NAS.

As avid readers might know, I've been trying to find the ultimate NAS build, be it new or old. 

So far I've tried N6005 boards from AliExpress (with the dreaded i225 network interface, which keeps hanging) HP Microservers (with a limit of 4 dirves), a DL350 G9 (which I hoped would carry 3.5" and 2.5" drives, boy was I wrong.

So I've always searched for way to get a simply unlimited number of drives, for very little money.
This was way out of the question, and still I thought was very limited in terms of number of drives.

I think I have stumbled upon the 'perfect' NAS with some possibilities of running docker containers and 10Gbit ethernet at the same time.

It consists of an MD3220 chassis (24 slots for 2.5" drives), make sure to get it with the SAS controller, it's much cheaper.:

 a SAS cable:

A Lenovo Tiny P340 of the 10th Gen (Intel)

A PCI riser card for the Lenovo Tiny P340 (and slot plate, optional)

A SAS card:

A couple of Drive cages:

A serial cable and USB>Serial converter:

So, as you can imagine, the SAS controller fits into the P340, you just need to cut a nice hole in the slot-plate (measure 2x cut once). Then you connect the serial cable to controller 0, using this site as your guide:
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/fun-with-an-md1200-md1220-sc200-sc220.27487/

Then, using the script suggested, you can reduce the noise output of the fans (down to 10%, and you can even keep an eye on the temperatures, to increase when needed.

At 10% fans I am at 51.8-52.1W with one controller (non-redundant) without any disks. Disks add wattage of course. But if you use 8Tbyte Samsung QVO drives, each one takes 10mW in standby:

In terms of performance, when filled with a number of drives, I am getting around 2Gbytes/sec of throughput which is the maximum the 4x 6-SAS connection can deliver.

I have also purchased one of the new USB-C 10Gbit RTL8159 adapters. In theory, the USB present on the 10th gen i7 should have enough bandwidth to get around 9gbit/sec:

So for just about 1000 Euros you can get a 24-drive NAS, no janky wires, all nicely connected. Good luck finding drives, but at least you can fit SAS drives now too, just no NVME drives yet ;-) 

By the way, if you go for an 7th gen i5 P340, you can have a NAS, that already includes the Intel quicksync video-re-encoding that's so useful for Plex (that brings the price down to around 650 Euros for the whole set (excl drives):

 

I managed to get a P360 i7 10th gen stacked with 2x 1Tbyte of internal drives and 64Gbytes of memory, as I intend to run some docker workloads too.

One optimization I could still imagine is a 'power stealer' where I take the 12V supplied to the drives and power the 19V Lenovo, The i7 10th gen needs around 200W maximum, it could be done:

I also tested the consumption of the MD3220 chassis with one power supply connected and one controller (no disks), that was 34.4W! Not bad for something capable of holding 24 disks

As an update, AI suggested I use a 9400 series LSI card for more power-savings (they should have lower power consumption. I have ordered an 8e example (plus cable, as it uses SFF-6433 instead of an SFF-8088 connector. As it's 8e, I don't have to daisy-chain the 12x3.5" unit I ordered, I can connect it using it's own cable.

I also had a little play around with the controller (which provides +12V (100W)) housing. I actually fits a Lenovo Tiny completely inside it, with space to spare. A framework laptop motherboard also fits easily (as long as you don't want to use all the connectors..

Original:

Complete Lenovo Tiny:

Just the motherboard (happen to have one):

And the framework laptop motherboard:

Framework laptop and LSI controller.

And it's even possible to have 2x 10Gbit USB-c interfaces under the framework laptop motherboard. :-)

Robert.