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How much power does your home lab take?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Hmm according to homeassistant my Rack+PC consumed precisely this much over the last day (graph from homeassistant). I have been trying to minimize power consumption through more efficient hardware, but you can only go so far without making big sacrifices.
wow. unless you're doing lots of compute / AI stuff /crypto or have multiple servers or a big amount of spinning storage, i bet your 450W is far from 'efficient' without 'sacrifices'. You can have one decent cpu with a few cores, one or two spinning hdd and one or two ethernet NICs idling at 20W to 40W. probably also including a few VMs with light usage.
A single Xeon in an R630 with 256GB RAM and redundant PSUs idles around 100W, and that is with no storage controller or other add-in cards, no SSDs or HDDs. Stick some storage, add-in cards and actual load and you could easily see 300W+
Add in a UPS with some conversion losses and some switches, maybe a couple PoE injectors... 600W isn't so far away
Yes we are looking at 2-3 generation old servers, but what do you expect for a home lab? It would be silly to pay a premium for newer equipment solely in the name of efficiency as the costs will far outweigh the energy savings. If you just care about being "green" then your money could do more spent elsewhere.
Sure one can run off old domestic hardware like old laptops/PCs or SBCs like a NUC/RPi but some of us are either trying to replicate a production environment or want/need ECC memory (or both).
Please don't belittle other people's setup just because you might not understand their motivations/constraints or think you might be able to do it "better".
Edit: Not to mention the parent comment said this includes his PC. My PC is a bastion of inefficiency when playing games; have you seen the TDP on current gen CPUs and GPUs?
Dude, chill. This isn't how that works. While a server that consumes as much as a few mordern lightbulbs will almost always be something like energy efficient if it does any kind of real work.... This simply isn't the case when we're talking about half a kilowatt. And you don't say my pc has X components and consumes Y amount of power, therefore it's efficient. You measure that against the job it's doing.
It's like with a big truck and fuel efficency. It would be very inefficient to buy a big truck only to drive your daughter to school. But the same big truck might be very efficient at hauling large quantities of stuff through the country. The same applies to your setup. Good for you, for owning a CPU, memory and so on. I too have a few generations old Xeon, ECC ram and hard disks. This doesn't tell me anything about efficiency without knowing what you DO with all of that energy. Hence my (implied) question...
But you're right. I wasn't paying close attention to the diagram. It is 220W - 320W for their rack/stuff and 450W when they also start up their pc.
This is self-hosting, it is inherently inefficient.
Consolidating servers, storage, power, cooling, networking is always more efficient.
From your example: one full bus is more efficient than any configuration of even the most efficient cars.
I do this for a bunch of reasons, including being a hobby. Hobbies aren't meant to be efficient; first and foremost they are meant to be fun 😊
I'm pretty chill. I'm not sure attacking someone's efficiency based on their power consumption for an unspecified rack/workload is very chill...