After making my first system based on J5040 running 9W idle, I discovered that there is a way to make an even more powerful server, that is running at around 3W idle. This is not strictly necessary for me, but just a fun project, but lower power consumption will help me to use less battery power from my semi-off-grid solar system. Anyways, I want to give my son a stationary computer, specifically not for gaming, so he will inherit the previous server, if I’m successful with this new build 
SBC
Like many people here probably know that the RockChip RK3588 CPU is a bit of a beast in the SBC arena, manufactured on an 8nm process node, while the big.LITTLE architechture ensures it can run at very little power in idle. As it’s probably the only SBC CPU produced on this scale, there probably aren’t many others that can compete with it in performance/watt.
I think that the improved performance and the more cores, will help me to utilize the virtual machines more seriously, without disturbing the running docker containers.
After evaluating various boards with both RK3588 and RK3588S, I decided on the Orange Pi 5 Plus. This is specifically because it has a full length M.2 slot, where I can install a card with 5 SATA ports. It has a mounting screw by default, which some boards don’t. It has two Ethernet ports, which may come in handy. For some reason it seems faster at video playback than the Rock Pi model 5B, which has the exact same processor.
I ended up choosing the 16GB model, because it was only USD $6 more than the 8 GB model and it would help me to allocate sufficient memory to the virtual machines. I don’t know exactly how that’s going to affect the energy consumption, but it is going to add a bit.
The Orange Pi 5 Plus has the RK3588 processor, which has 4/5 PCIe lanes, which enables much faster transfer speeds than the RK3588S that only has 1 PCIe lane. I will not utilize all the lanes in this build, because of a choice I had to make. When looking through the options for an M.2 to SATA port adapter, I saw that most of them have very thin PCB’s (boards) and are very flexible and some report random disconnection issues, which are two things that could be related. The only ones that were more solid because of the heat sink, were not able to use the full potential of the M.2 port. So, for now I went for the safer option and went for the Vance M.2 PCIe Gen3x2 B+M key. The speed is a matter of the “keys” on these ports, which decides what forms of transfer can be made, the Orange Pi 5 Plus has the M key that supports 4 lanes and the adapter I chose has the M+B key, which fits both in to M key slots and B key slots, but can’t fully utilize the M key slot.
One further consideration for me living in Uruguay is that I can only order for 200 USD from outside Uruguay, up to three times a year. I was so lucky that the Orange Pi 5 Plus + the Vance M.2 adapter landed exactly below 200 USD.
I’m curious to see how this system handles virtualization, if it will do it as well as the J5040 or if there will be issues.
I’ve been through a lot more considerations and have skipped various less elegant solutions, that I’ll spare you the details of.
HARDDRIVES
Naturally I’ll be using SSD’s for a low power build, but all SSD’s are not the same. The transfer speed is not crucial in this build, as the limitation will most likely be in the M.2 SATA controller, as it’s probably not going to have more than 600 mb/s capacity and I do not have any applications where I would really need that kind of speed. So, I’m going to be more focused on power consumption and it seems like Samsung EVO 870 is a good choice:
I was almost able to buy a 4TB Samsung EVO 870 from Amazon for 169.99 USD, until I clicked the link and they as they do so often pushed the price up to 212.5 USD when it was in the basket, which means that I can’t buy it here in Uruguay. So, I’m probably going to end up with 2TB Samsung EVO 870. I also have an old Samsung EVO that I could use for boot drive, if possible. I might also add 2x1TB PNY SSD drives later and see how they affect the power consumption.
One thing I don’t know, that is if I’m going to be able to boot from an SSD or I’ll have to boot from the SD card. It’s possible with a single drive in the M.2 slot, but I have no idea how it will behave with the 4 port controller. Two issues I see if I can’t boot from an SSD is that both the cache and the docker containers resides on the boot drive by default and the SD card isn’t very fast, but at least I should be able to configure the docker containers to install elsewhere.
POWER
The power question is difficult, the bigger the power supply, the less efficient it will be at low power consumption, on the other hand, you don’t want it too small. My experience from my first build is that when I push the system to the max by starting 14 containers, I get to 25W and I expect the system I’m building to be much more power efficient.
I would like the power supply to be somewhat efficient at around 2-3 watts, as that’s where I hope the idle power of the system to land. You can find power supplies that are about 70% efficient at 10% load, so if we have a 20W power supply, we would have that efficiency at around 2 watts.
I have to consider that if I make the power budget very tight, then I’ll have to consider upgrading the power supply later, if I decide to expand with more drives.
Looking at the idle and max power draw of the components considered.
| | Idle W | Max W |
| Samsung EVO 870 | 0.03 | 2.58 |
| Samsung EVO 870 | 0.03 | 2.58 |
| Sata controller (estimate) | 0.2 | 5 |
| Orange Pi 5 Plus | 2 | 12 (8) |
| Total | 2.26 | 22.16 |
At the wall, we will probably be a bit above 3W I don’t expect to ever get above 20W and I would expect that there is a small buffer for short spikes above 20W. What I’ve seen when looking around is that the Orange Pi 5 Plus uses around 8 watt when pushed hard.
All in all, I think it’s safe to use a 20W adapter for the chosen components and the idle consumption will depend very much on the efficiency of the adapter at about 10% load. At first, I’ll give the adapter included with the Orange Pi 5 Plus a chance and that one is exactly rated at 20 watts.
I toyed with the idea about drawing 5V out of the ATX plug from a pico power supply for the Orange Pi 5 and then just add some splitter cables for the SATA power connectors. Then I noticed that the SATA power connectors in the pico supply that I was looking at only had 5V (red) and 12V (yellow) cables, no 3.3V (orange) cables, so then I immediately started analyzing what power an SSD’s really need and it appears that in general 2.5” SSD’s only use 5V! Which means that the whole thing should be able to be powered straight off a 5V power supply.
So, my plan is to connect the power like this:
This means:
- Cutting off the plug with 5 cm cable on it from the supplied 20W power supply to the Orange Pi 5 Plus.
- Remove the insulation from where the cable was cut (both the plug and the supply cable).
- Solder the strip of SATA power plugs and the power plug for the Orange Pi, onto the cable of the power supply (red to positive and black to negative, as the Orange Pi have negative ground). This could also be done with a terminal block.
- Insulate the wires.
Looking forward to your comments
