Building low power NAS (possibly for CCTV also)

What type of power supply and RAM do you have "laying around"? Do you have a case already? If not, what abaut Mini-ITX?

For CCTV: Specify more details here, depending on resolution and amount of cameras, storage-performance and NIC performance can be quite important.

Edit: I checked ZoneMinder FAQ, it tooks quite a lot of RAM, disc dpace and CPU. The Celeron N/Pentium N is not that powerful. I would go for a Kaby Lake Quad with 16 GB RAM.

Well what type of RAM? DDR2/3/4? speed? voltage?

700 Watts is a lot, what type and efficiency?

There are some Mini-ITX boards out there that fit classic desktop RAM. Limits are often 2 slots up to 32 GB of RAM. I use 2 different ones myself

Zitat von InvalidHandle

It's DDR3 RAM. I've also found some socket 1150 Mini-ITX motherboards that seem fine, but I'm afraid these will use more power than mobo's with onboard CPU (Not sure why I assume that ?)If I build a NAS with a say G1850 CPU, what (ballpark) power consumption should I expect

I just did a TON of research on this very topic for my own project. Here's some info that may help with your decision if you haven't made it already.

Since Socket 1150 is "obsolete", new CPUs are harder to get. If you are OK with used, the Xeon 1220L V3 was the lowest power CPU made for Socket 1150, and are readily available for less than $45 (US) on Ebay.

This Xeon was one that Intel did some odd naming for though, so you will want to check closely before you buy. You'd need a Version 3 CPU, as Version 1 and 2 were Socket 1156 and 1155 respectively. The version number is printed right on the CPU though, so its not hard to check. Also, they made two versions of this CPU for Socket 1150, both named "Xeon 1220L v3": Version SR159 is 1.6 Ghz with 16 Watt TDP and SR1BT is 1.1 Ghz with 13 Watt TDP. The 13Watt version seems to be the easiest to find. If you are unfamiliar with S-Spec numbers (SR159 & SR1BT for these CPUs), they are printed on the top of the CPU, usually in the third row of text. You'd need to check motherboard compatibility too of course.

The G1850 mentioned immediately above, by comparison, is a 53 Watt TDP processor. While TDP isn't necessarily a measure of actual power draw in use, both of these processors are the same stepping (C0) so are going to perform similarly respective to their design power. So, the Xeon will draw significantly less power in most use cases. The lower power (1.1Ghz, 13 Watt) version appears to have 20% better performance than the Celeron N3150 from benchmark info I found online. The G1850 is a better performer than both by a significant margin, but does so at a power premium.

You can find a list of all the CPUs made for Socket 1150 here: http://www.cpu-world.com/Sockets/Socket_1150_LGA1150_H3.html Its a sortable chart, so you can sort by the "TDP (Watt)" column to see all the lower power options. The CPU-World site has similar lists for all CPU Sockets. That site and the Benchmark/performance scores available at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ have been very handy for me over the years in selecting parts for my builds.

Cheers!

Zitat von riff-raff

For CCTV: Specify more details here, depending on resolution and amount of cameras, storage-performance and NIC performance can be quite important.

Really? If you let your cameras use somewhat decent encoding then neither storage nor NIC performance is any issue. Our 'worst case' surveillance installation consists now of 6 RPi B+ as cameras (h.264 decoding since Raspberries can't do better) and one Gigabit Ethernet equipped Allwinner A20 device (dual-core ARM SoC running at below 1.0GHz) that stores the raw h.264 streams on disk and restreams them using VLC (I'm also pushing out a playlist so on every Android/iOS device in the internal network the streams can be watched in real-time).

GbE on these old Allwinner ARM thingies shows crappy performance, same with SATA. CPU performance is horribly low compared to any x86 design. Works flawlessly.

Zitat von riff-raff

700 Watts is a lot, what type and efficiency?

Irrelevant!

Every 700W PSU will waste such enormous amounts of energy if operated in the 'below 20% of rated capacity' mode. The PSU alone will most probably waste 30 times more energy doing literally nothing than my 'low power NAS' boxes (relying on ARM of course and idling below 1-3W)