[ITX] low power NAS with 10Gbe

Hi,

Here is a little NAS that I've built my NAS :

• case : CFI A7879 or A7979 mini-ITX case
• 12cm fan : Artic F12
• MLB and CPU : MSI B250I Gaming Pro and Intel G3900
• boot disk : Intel Optane 16 Go NVMe SSD
• Network : Sonnet 10Gbe
• 4x Seagate IronWolf hard drives

This makes me a very very reliable 10 Gbe NAS for ~450€.
I can make the same setup with only 2 1Gbe ports with some J3455 ITX MLB for ~350€.

Here are some photos :

In this case I mostly look for reliability and low consumption :

• the low cost G3900 CPU has a low TDP and is far enough powerfull to drive my NAS with good performances
• the Intel Optane 16Go SSD is cheap (i got them for 16€) and ultra reliable as OMV boot disks.
• the CFI 12cm original fan is replaced with a better one
• I now always set the NAS to power off / on at sheduled time (see this thread)

I've built and used dozens of similar NAS like this one for very long, most where used in small organisations.
I've started to build them in ~2010 with same A7879 cases and Zotac G43-ITX MLB / Intel E3300 core 2 duo.
At the present those nearly 10 years old NAS are all being upgraded with new disks and MLB but I keep the chassis and PSU...

They all have last long because I made them shut down during night and restart in the morning, so my NAS only work 10 hours a day / 20 days a month, this make 2000 hours a year (instead of 8000 hours...)

Best regards

gilles

The PSU in this cases are very reliable yes. It's not ASTEC but they have good components inside.

I have some A7879 ITX chassis that have run 24h a day during 8 years, and they still have perfect voltages (12V is very stable and less than 2% deviation) and no inflated or leaking capacitors.
Those chassis / PSU are very reliable, I can't say the same of the logicboard (G43 ITX), the 12cm fans, and the seagate infamous ST3000DM001 that I put inside 8 years ago and went all dead...(and no, it wasn't because of the PSU)
As for those 8 year old A7879 chassis and PSU, I thoroughly cleaned them, changed the 12cm fan and logic board and have put them back again in service for backups of home users.

The A7979 case is prettier than the A7879, but it has no reset button.

If you want I can take photos and measure ESR of capacitors of the 8 years old PSU.

PS : I remember how hard those A7879/A7979 cases were hard to find 10 years ago.
Long story short : back then I had to import them from linitx.com which, at that time, started to sell Unifi products and now they even don't do ITX products any more.. Thanks to LinITX I also discovered Unifi products and started to build and sell hundreds of distributed Wifi networks with fast roaming in restaurants, just because I looked one day for a compact ITX case..
Funny where life can gets you unexpectedly

Zitat von Morlan

Have you measured the power consumption?

Yes and I'm not quite satisfied.

At the main plugs, with a wattmeter here is what I guet with the Pentium G3900 / 4GB ddr4 / the 10Gbt ethernet card and 4x 3TB ironwolf disks :

• 2.5W in sleep (S3) state
• 40W idle
• 50W full speed smb3 transfer (~550MB/s)

Idle power consumption is still too much to my taste, I need to check bios / voltage settings (the ITX MLB I tested is a gaming model, which I got for 60£ on sale).

I will measure the power consumption of the J3455 version later this week, should be lower.