I have some quad core celeron board integrated thing. It draws 15watts. I added a PCI-E sata which gave me 6 extra ports. I am sure you can buy better ones.

I used a Fractal Node Case that has 6 drive bays. Installed TrueNAS Scale on an SSD. Swapping drives is a pain as I have to take the computer apart. But that is infrequent. So it is fine.

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M95D 5 days ago | parent [-]

15W with or without the PCIe SATA? And it's still 10W too much.

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extraisland 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think you are being a bit silly. I just plugged the numbers into an online cost calculator.

That is extra 10 watts, is less than £2 a month in the UK. Drives are about 5 watts idle and I have 6 of them.

The NAS costs me about £20/month. Which isn't too crazy IMO. The UK has some of the most expensive energy prices in Europe.

I will probably be upgrading the board to something better in a few years and see if I can put in a GPU for some AI bits and pieces.

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whizzter 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you still use HDD's they pull around 10w each, 15w for the board is not too bad. (My current quite old machine is something like 40-50w, disks being the big draw), still at 15W you'll get a fair bit more perf than with any Arm board.

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interstice 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Why 5W?

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M95D 5 days ago | parent [-]

Electricity prices and not wanting to turn it on and off all the time.

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horsawlarway 5 days ago | parent [-]

The difference here is pretty much negligible to the vast majority of folks.

10w is... Nothing. There are only very specific cases where it's worth picking hardware on this constraint, and unless you're on a solar powered sail boat or something similarly niche, you probably shouldn't be prioritizing this.

In my region, 10w comes out to about 0.90 USD/month. Or roughly 3 pennies a day.

Over the entire lifetime of the device (5 years assumed) it's less than 50 USD in power costs.

I'll take basically any other quality of life improvement instead...

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M95D 5 days ago | parent [-]

I've done the calculations just now:

10W constant over 10 years would cost me 275 euro. My hard drives (7 ST2000DL003 and one ST2000DL001) are 10-15 years old now. They're all different batches, none failed yet, so I expect it to last at least 5 more years, possibly a lot more.

The current NAS setup I have (router + DAS + 2 USB) is around 50W. Over 20years it will cost me ~2800 euro in today's prices. So you see, the electricity is a very significant portion of TCO. In fact, it's more than half, because I bought everything second-hand.

	▲	SirMaster 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Your setup is a tiny niche of a niche. Nobody using a NAS is using tiny 2TB HDDs in 2025 when 20+TB drives are so available. I feel like you are making your setup more complicated than is even worth and searching for a weird solution when all you need is a RasPi with a big 16+TB USB HDD connected to it.
	▲	extraisland 5 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> 10W constant over 10 years would cost me 275 euro. €2.30 per month. Which is almost nothing. > Over 20years it will cost me ~2800 euro in today's prices. That is €11 a month over 20 years. So the extra 10 watts is still next to nothing even taking into account your exaggerated time frames, which I am dubious as to whether this is real. I am certainly not going to worry about €11 a month.
	▲	horsawlarway 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You've picked incredibly long time ranges and you still have small numbers. 3k over 20 years is literally nothing. It's lost change in the couch compared to almost any other financial decision you could make.