I’ve got a NAS built in a Node 304 mini itx case that works great, but uses a ton of power. In Unraid (the OS for my NAS) there is some kind of issue with the Ryzen 3900x processor that I’m running that means I have to disable all sleep states - so it’s always at it’s 100W TDP. Power is super expensive where I live so I’d love to find something more power efficient.

Does it make more sense to buy a more recent(ish) 5th gen ryzen in hopes that the sleep states will work, and thus save money by keeping my existing motherboard?

Or I could go with something a bit more interesting. I’ve seen on Aliexpress motherboards with mobile CPU’s soldered which are very power efficient. For example the N100 has an insane 6W TDP and comes on special boards with lots of sata ports and 2.5G networking (link). The worry with the n100 though is that it only officially supports 16G of ram which might not be enough for zfs.

Any thoughts? Is anyone running a power-efficient build who could throw some advice my way? Thanks!

  • mbirthAEnglish
    4·
    5 months ago

    I’m looking at the TerraMaster F4-423 which is basically an Intel NUC soldered to a SATA controller. It has 4x 3.5" SATA bays, an internal USB slot for the OS, 2x m.2 slots, HDMI output, 2x 2.5G LAN, etc. Comes with 4GB RAM, supports up to 32GB. I think it’s the smallest NAS with custom OS you can get.

      • mbirthAEnglish
        3·
        5 months ago

        Of course. The original OS, Terramaster OS (TOS), is Linux based and you can replace it with other plain Linux versions or a NAS-specific distro such as OMV or UnRAID.

        Since this is basically an Intel NUC, even Windows might run on the thing.