Comment on Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy

• cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  You can slow the RAM down too. You don’t need XMP enabled if you’re just using the PC as a NAS. It can be quite power hungry.

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  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Eh, older RAM doesn’t use much. If it runs close to stock voltage, maybe just set it at stock voltage and bump the speed down a notch, then you get a nice task energy gain from the performance boost.

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    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There was a post a while back of someone trying to eek every single watt out of their computer. Disabling XMP and running the ram at the slowest speed possible saved like 3 watts I think. An impressive savings, but at the cost of HORRIBLE CPU performance. But you do actually need at least a little bit of grunt for a nas.

      At work we have some of those atom based NASes and the combination of lack of CPU, and horrendous single channel ram speeds makes them absolutely crawl. One HDD on its own performs the same as this raid 10 array.

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      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Yeah.

        In general, ‘big’ CPUs have an advantage because they can run at much, much lower clockspeeds than atoms, yet still be way faster. There are a few exceptions, like Ryzen 3000+ (excluding APUs), which idle notoriously hot thanks to the multi-die setup.

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• Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Stuff designed for much higher peek usage tend to have a lot more waste.

  For example, a 400W power source (which is what’s probably in the original PC of your example) will waste more power than a lower wattage on (unless it’s a very expensive one), so in that example of yours it should be replaced by something much smaller.

  Even beyond that, everything in there - another example, the motherboard - will have a lot more power leakage than something designed for a low power system (say, an ARM SBC).

  Unless it’s a notebook, that old PC will always consume more power than, say, an N100 Mini-PC, much less an ARM based one.

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  • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    For example, a 400W power source (which is what’s probably in the original PC of your example) will waste more power than a lower wattage on

    in my experience power supplies are more efficient near the 50% utilization. be quiet psus have charts about it

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    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The way one designs hardware in is to optimize for the most common usage scenario with enough capacity to account for the peak use scenario (and with some safety margin on top).

      However specifically for power sources, if you want to handle more power you have to for example use larger capacitors and switching MOSFETs, and those have more leakage hence more baseline losses. Mind you, using more expensive components one can get higher power stuff will less leakage, but that’s not going to happen outside specialist power supplies which are specifically designed for high-peak use AND low baseline power consumption, and I’m not even sure if there’s a genuine use case for such a design that justifies paying the extra cost for high-power low-leakage components.

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  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    All true, yep.

    Still, the clocking advantage is there. Stuff like the N100 also optimizes for lower costs, which means higher clocks on smaller silicon. That’s even more dramatic for repurposed laptop hardware, which is much more heavily optimized for its idle state.

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• Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  And heat your room in the winter!

  Add spring + autumn if you live up north.

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