So, for the last couple decades, I've been lucky enough to be a professional geek doing server support for what is essentially an MSP. Every few years when they cycle their servers, I get a free upgrade from the e-cycling pile. That's worked great, but the third utility price increase in the as many years has me looking to rightsize my home server.
I'm currently running a Dell 720 which was a VDI server in its previous life, meaning 384G of memory and 40 cores of Xeon E5-2680, but I'm only using 20G of memory running about a dozen Docker containers, including Jellyfin; my load average is less than 1. I've been using Debian on that server, but I'm comfortable in any distro.
Unfortunately, the iDRAC says this is running between 200 and 250 watts at base. The hardware is vastly overspec'ed and I'd like to lower my power usage, if possible, as I'm certain it's not going to get any cheaper as time passes.
I also need to retire an old W10 box running BlueIris and migrate to a Frigate Docker container before October, because I'm not buying a Windows 11 machine just for that.
So I need a sanity check for my plan, as I've been on the server-side so long that my knowledge of desktop technology is sorely lacking, and I suspect some people here are running the EliteDesk 800 as a server.
I want to pick up an HP EliteDesk 800 5g SFF with an i9-9500 or i7-9700, such as: https://www.amazon.com/HP-EliteDesk-800-G5-Desktop/dp/B0BZ9J54WK
I'm not beholden to buying from Amazon, it was just the first link I found at a reasonable price.
I've chosen the EliteDesk because of the AMT KVM, and the SFF to add 3 1/2 HDDs.
I have DIMMs I can borrow or buy to get it to 48 or 64 gigs.
I'm using less than a TB of local storage on the 720, as it uses expensive 10k SAS drives, so most storage is NFS from the NAS. As a result I'm looking at a 1TB NVME for local OS storage.
I plan to use a couple 4TB spinning rust SATA drives for Frigate storage in the new system.
Are any of the M.2 slots on the board compatible with the Coral M.2 accelerators for Frigate? Preferably the Dual Edge variety? I'm having a hard time finding what kind of slots they are. I know I can get a PCI-E adapter, but native is better.
Is the i5-9500 enough, or should I pay the extra $150 for the i7-9700?
Is the i5/i7 iGPU strong enough for Jellyfin or should I be looking for a discrete GPU?
Those of you running one, what does your power consumption look like?
Am I going about this completely wrong?
Thanks in advance for any help.
Not saying getting smaller hardware is the wrong move, but have you tried just reducing power with software on your existing machine?
I mean, if you're happy with it other than on idle power usage, I imagine that one can probably do things like:
Set a power-down time using
hdparmon the rotational drives, so that disks that you aren't using spin down. On my system, I've coupled this with an autofs mount, which means that the mount point doesn't have to be visible and rotational drives don't get spun up by anything just touching the filesystem and looking in /mnt or whatever. Handy if you have a drive that you do want to have a rarely-touched filesystem on.Run
# powertop --auto-tune.Run
# powerprofilesctl set power-saverif you're using power-profiles-daemon.I dunno if and how Xeon on Linux exposes any ability to force a core to power down, but maybe
# cat 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/onlineand so forth.I imagine that it's probably possible to lower the minimum fan speed in whatever hardware control Dell provides.
That being said, I haven't used terribly large hardware, so I don't know how far one can go in bringing minimum power usage down.
The 720 is not going to benefit from power savings, even going to hot-spare for the power supplies. These things are relics from the time when power was cheap.
I couldn't get my r720 down below 160w, which is unacceptable for just running some containers.
I know, having had one, that you can set a power budget... but it's going to clock your CPUs all the way down and still run at least 120W with horrible performance.
Data center servers are a different breed. I got an old one for cheap once and only ran it for a few minutes because it sounded like a jet engine. No way to make that thing efficient.