There are Intel Atom CPUs that support ECC. I had a Supermicro motherboard with a quad core part like that and I used it as a NAS. It was not that fast, but the power consumption was very low.
>Corsair SF450 PSU
>ASRock Rack X570D4U w/BMC
>AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5750GE (8C 3.2/4.6 GHz)
>128GB DDR4-2666 ECC
>Intel XL710-DA1 (40Gbps)
>LSI/Broadcom 9500-8i HBA
>64GB SuperMicro SATA DOM
>2 SK Hynix Gold P31, 2TB NVMe SSD
>8 Hitachi 7200rpm, 16TB HDD
>3 80mm fans, 2 40mm fans, CPU cooler
That was an at the time modern “Zen 3” (using Zen 2 cores) system on an X570 chipset. The CPU mostly goes in 1L ultra SFF systems. TDP is 35W, and under stress testing the CPU tops out around around 38.8-39W. The onboard BMC is about 3.2-3.3W of power consumption itself.
Most data ingest and reads comes from the SSD cache, with that being more around 60W for high throughput. Under very high loads (saturating the 40Gbps link) with all disks going, only hits about 110-120W.
By comparison, a 6-bay Synology was over double that idle power consumption, and couldn’t come close to that throughput.
thanks for the parts list, especially because I think ASRock Rack paired with a Ryzen Pro offers better performance than a Supermicro in the same price range.
I could drop a few more watts if ASRock could put together a decent BIOS where disabling things actually disables things.
SuperMicro costs what it does for a reason.
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If you’re looking for a chassis, I’m using a SilverStone RM21-308, with a Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 cooler, and cut some SilverStone sound deadening foam for the top panel of the 2U chassis.
Aside from disks clicking, it’s silent, runs hilariously cool (I 3D printed chipset and HBA fan mounts at a local library) and it’s more usable storage, higher performance (saturates 40Gbps trivially) and lower power consumption than anything any YouTuber has come remotely close to. That server basically lets me have everything else in my rack not care much about storage, because the storage server handles it like a champ. I really considered doing a video series on it, but I’m too old to want to deal with the peanut gallery of YouTube comments.
If you don't mind me asking, how do your other workloads access the storage on it, NFS? The stumbling block for NFS for me is identity and access management.
Wow I just picked up an ASRock Rack X570D4U and put my 5950X into it.
Do you know how to make the BMC not a laggy mess when using the “H5Viewer”? I’m getting basically unusable latency when the system is two yards away compared to a RDP server 1,000 miles away.
That's impressively low, considering the amount of storage capacity and the performance potential for the time you need it. It goes a long way towards paying for itself if you replace some old Xeon server with it.
I think it was idling at something like 30-40W with four HDDs and a UPS. I didn't have an especially efficient PSU and the UPS must have taken some power too. The motherboard alone would draw as little as 15W, I suppose.
