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Lemmings, what's your self hosted server power usage?

I'll just come out and say it: 50W. I know, I know an order of magnitude above what's actually needed to host websites, media center and image gallery.

But it is a computer I had on-hand and which would be turned on a quarter of the day anyway. And these 50W also warm my home, although this is less efficient than the heat pump, of course.

What's your usage? What do you host?

Bizarroland , (edited )

Mine is roughly 300 watts, much of which is from using an old computer as a NAS separate from my server server.

However, I put the whole thing in the basement next to my heat pump water heater which sucks the heat out of the air and puts it into my water, so I am ameliorating the expense by at least recapturing some of the *waste heat.

packetloss ,
@packetloss@lemmy.world avatar

370W average.
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/0a7be344-ec71-4fcd-85ad-688a7f7afb96.png

3 x Lenovo x3650 M5 (Proxmox Nodes)

  • 1 x Xeon E5-2697A v4
  • 128GB DDR4 ECC
  • 2 x 960GB sATA SSD
  • 3 x 900GB SAS3 10K RPM HDD
  • 1 x nVidia Quadro M2000

TP Link TL-SG3428X switch

Raspberry Pi 3B+ (physical Pi-hole server)

Generic Mini PC Intel N3150 (OpenVPN client)

Dell Optiplex (OPNSense firewall)

  • Intel i5 4590
  • 8GB
Scipitie ,

Is that 370watt across all of them or per fat server? I ask because three m5 sound like a lot of power drain!.

And thanks for sharing!

packetloss ,
@packetloss@lemmy.world avatar

That's for everything listed above. This is measured straight from my UPS which everything is connected to.

ironhydroxide ,

~600W.
2 machines:
Dell 730 8 disks running multiple Minecraft servers.
Supermicro 16 disks in raid 10 running multiple VM for various functions.
All on a 6kva ups (overkill I know)

Luckily I have a large solar array.

navi ,

My R710 is begging to be replaced.

walden ,

Good timing for this thread. I just finished consolidating 2 computers worth of fun into 1 newer computer that can do it all. I sold my wife on the idea with electricity as the reasoning.

In the end, it uses 30 watts less, which is not as much as I had hoped. That's about $5 a month.

180 watts with an i5-13400, 9 spinning disks, 1 M.2 SSD, no extra GPU, 24 port switch (powers 3 AP's), modem, Mikrotik router, and a large UPS. I wonder if the UPS uses any power as a trickle charge for the batteries.

slazer2au ,

What are your electricity prices that 30w costs €5/m

buzziebee ,

Spain would probably be around that much if my calculations are correct.

walden ,

30w x 24 hr./day *30 days/mo. = 21.6 kWh. I pay about $.25/kWh, so $5.40.

Strit ,
@Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show avatar

Mine is around 10W average.

It runs:

  • Websites
  • my blog
  • Jellyfin
  • Home assistant
  • Nextcloud

And a few other things.

ssdfsdf3488sd ,

50 watts is maybe halfof one of my 10 gig switches...

owen ,

Damn son, what're you runnung?

ssdfsdf3488sd ,

dell powerconnect 8164's and arista 7050tx's . House is wired with copper so 10 gig copper is what I have to use and that's power hungry.

twei ,

Damn, your switches are using that much? I have a MikroTik CRS518 and it's using like 40 Watts on idle (transceivers not included)

ssdfsdf3488sd ,

yah, my house is wired with copper and 10 gig copper uses a lot of power. It doesn't really help that the new slightly less power hungry 48 port 10 gig switches are thousands of dollars. I'm using 100 to 150ish watts per 10 gig switch to be able to buy the switch for under 500 bucks instead of using 60-100 watts and paying 2-5k per switch...

verstra OP ,

Ok, so most of you also use normal PC processors for your setups. So my power usage is not that high in comparison.

But still, a RaspberryPI would use much less and would still be performant enough.

tburkhol ,

5W vs 50W is an annual difference of 400 kWh. Or 150 kG CO2e, if that's your metric. Either way, it's not a huge cost for most people capable of running a 24/7 home lab.

If you start thinking about the costs - either cash or ghg - of creating an RPi or other dedicated low power server; the energy to run HDDs, at 5-10W each, or other accessories, well, the picture gets pretty complicated. Power is one aspect, and it's really easy to measure objectively, but that also makes it easy to fetishize.

Bizarroland ,

At $0.13/kwh 100 watts 24/7/365 will cost you $113.88 a year, or roughly $10 a month. Little things add up.

tburkhol ,

$10/month is one drink in the pub on one Friday night out of four. It's not even a movie ticket.

European electricity rates are closer to $0.30, and I agree that 100W 24/7 is a cost worth being aware of. I think we're seeing in this thread that it's pretty easy to find a system with standard PC parts from the past decade that idles in the 50W range, like OP, even with a couple of HDDs, and $50/year (US), even $150/year (EU), electricity cost to keep an old desktop out of a landfill maybe doesn't seem so bad.

I mean, one should think hard whether their home lab really needs a second full system running for failover, or whether they really need a separate desktop-based system just for NAS. And maybe don't convert your old gaming rig and its GPU to a home server. Or the quad-Xeon server that work is 'just giving away,' even if it would be cool to have a $50,000 computer running in the basement.

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

Probably about a kilowatt.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

1.21 giggawats

elephantium ,
@elephantium@lemmy.world avatar

What do you get when you cross Family guy with BTTF?

1.21 giggetywatts!

kylian0087 ,

About 500W. 1 self build server 1 Dell R510 and one dell R710.
This also includes a bit of network gear like a 48 port switch.

thejevans ,
@thejevans@lemmy.ml avatar

My current setup uses ~180W, which is a lot, but WAY better than my previous one, which was ~600W. Power is cheap where I live, so I'm not too worried about it.

180W homelab:

  • N6005 fanless mini PC running pfsense
  • mikrotik CRS310-8G+2S+IN switch
  • TP-Link AP225 access point
  • Server running proxmox w/ AMD 5900X, RTX 3080, 128GB ECC RAM, LSI-9208i w/2x10TB drives, and dual SFP+ NIC

600W homelab:

  • Aruba 24-port PoE gigabit switch w/ 4xSFP+ ports
  • Dell R720xd fully kitted out w/ 12x 6TB drives, 2x 512GB SSD, 2x 32GB SD cards, 100-something GB RAM, 2x whatever the best CPU was for that unit
  • Dell R710 w/ 6x 6TB drives, 1x 256GB SSD, 100-something GB RAM, 2x whatever the best CPU was for that unit.
  • TP-Link AP225 access point
mouse , (edited )
@mouse@midwest.social avatar

~53 W

  • Server:

    • AMD Ryzen 5 5600G
    • 4x16 GB DDR4 3200 Mhz
    • 256 GB NVMe as boot-disk
    • 2x256 GB Samsung SSDs for VMs
    • 2x2 TB WD Red Plus HDDs

  • Mini PC: Beelink S12 N95

    • 16 GB DDR4
    • 256 GB NVMe

  • 8 port unmanaged TP Link switch

I would like to expand my storage, however I don't have any available SATA ports and I believe adding an HBA would increase the idle draw about 8 W. I might just upgrade the SSDs and split the storage between the HDDs and SSDs.

Norgur ,

6w or so in idle, 50w under load with HDDs and RPi combined

Decronym Bot , (edited )

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
AP WiFi Access Point
DNS Domain Name Service/System
Git Popular version control system, primarily for code
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
NAS Network-Attached Storage
NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
PSU Power Supply Unit
PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
Plex Brand of media server package
PoE Power over Ethernet
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SBC Single-Board Computer
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
nginx Popular HTTP server

16 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

[Thread for this sub, first seen 26th Feb 2024, 15:35]
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qaz , (edited )

~25W which consists of:

  • Mini PC
    • Lenovo Thinkcentre M700 Tiny
    • i5-6500T
    • 8GB DDR4
    • 500GB SSD
  • External USB 3.5" enclosure
    • 2 x 2 TB HDD
  • Network switch
    • 4 Ports Gigabit

I've been thinking about upgrading because the CPU isn't that fast, the RAM ain't that much and I want to add a few more HDD's.
I've seen a pretty interesting Lenovo P520 with 64GB RAM a CPU that's 3x times as fast and room for 6 HDD's for €350, but the power consumption I can see online (80W) isn't that appealing with European electricity prices.

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