Low Power but High Performance Haswell based OMV NAS

My initial objective was to get below 15 watts idle power on a NAS with 3x4TB in Raid5.

After upgrading to Kralizec today (re-install on Debian 7.5.0) and using the lastest Kernel backport 3.14 with a few power tweaks (powertop), I can confirm that my OMV bild is running at equal power consumption compared with my ARM based NAS but providing a much higher transfer and system performance. Transfer SMB performance is maxing out GiB Network >100MByte/sec.

Power figures are measured at the AC side 230V /w KD 302 and confirmed with Energy Check 3000
40 watts - 2 parallel SMB large file copies to/from OMV NAS maxing out GiB speed
33 watts - 1 SMB large file copy to/from OMV NAS
28 watts - incremental file access/backup
21 watts - OMV idle / 3x4TB disks spinning
12 watts - OMV idle/ 3x4TB disks spun down

The build is based on the Intel DH87RL, i3-4130T (non-T was not avail at purchase order), mSATA PCIe 30GB Kingston, 3x 4TB WD RED, Enermax ETL300AWT Triathlor 80 Plus, 1x4GB DDR3-1600. Heads free operation: no Monitor, Keyboard or Mouse!
Disks are filled up 80%. In the future I might add up to two more 4TB disks if needed.
Latest BIOS update and using recommended settings for FANs gave another watt reduction.
http://www.heise.de/ct/projekt…s-und-Server-1375124.html

For those interested in the Debian 7.5.0 Haswell power tweaks (still experimental), which I added in
/etc/rc.local - these setting provide all "good" result from powertop

#!/bin/sh -e
#
# rc.local
#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
# Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.


# SATA Link Power Management
for i in /sys/class/scsi_host/host*/link_power_management_policy;
do echo min_power > $i;
done


# Runtime PM for PCI Device
for i in /sys/bus/pci/devices/????:??:??.?/power/control;
do echo auto > $i;
done


# Reduce disk activity by waiting up to 10 minutes before doing writes
echo 90 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio
echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs


# Set sound card power savings
echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save


#disable NMI
echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog


#disable wol
ethtool -s eth0 wol d


exit 0
#-------------------------- end of rc.local -------------------------

AND to use highest possible savings with the built-in HD graphics (enable deepest rc6)
/etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf

options i915 i915_enable_rc6=7 i915_enable_fbc=1 lvds_downclock=1

Furthermore I am re-thinking to use autoshutdown, which is working quite well. Assuming max 12h savings time the resulting energy cost saving is calculated to be around 15.- EUR per year, which I probably will take leveraging the effect of comfort having the NAS accessible all time and almost immediately. The WD RE´s are spinning up quite fast. And I am considering to split the boot disk into 2 partitions making one avail. for some services that do not need to have the monster drives spun up.

This is the status as per today and without more time for detailed research.

Pls. let me know your suggestions and if we can go much lower and how

It is the whole HW/SW setup that enables low power consuption in idle operations: using latest Haswell CPU, chipsets, efficient PSU and latest intel drivers being avail. in 3.14 kernel. There are significant differences in power consumption wrt diffenrent motherboards. The DH87RL is known for low power in idle mode. The deep C states have to be enabled in the BIOS - they are normally switched off.
The same HW setup and using Debian Squeeze (old intel drivers not optimized for i3-4130 CPU and HD GPU and backport kernel 3.2) and without anything enabled/optimized took around 23watts idle (disks spun down). Power was 21 watts without the three disks and only the boot mSATA SSD. You still can use powertop 1.1 to experiement. Enabling SATA Link Power Management is good for 3+ watts savings in my HW config.

@blubblub
your setup is very different from mine and not 100% Intel/Haswell (which may explain the issues reported) but plus ASPEED 2300 for BMC controller, Realtek RTL8211E for dedicated IPMI GLAN - derived from their web page...
This additional hardware is known to consume the extra bit of power ... and was the reason for me to use a low power desktop board which unfortunately is not not offering ECC.
Anyway my advise would be to check if you can make the e.g. system headless while switching those things off - in case you do not need them.
Sorry but for a server setup I have not seen figures been reported even close to the optimized Intel DH87RL.
- guess there is not much less power you may get... let me know otherwise.