Hi everyone,
I’m in the middle of a bit of a hardware migration, and I could really use some collective wisdom from the OMV community. I’ve finally decided to move my "Frankenstein" NAS build from an old mid-tower case into a proper 4U rackmount chassis. The goal is to stop relying on various PCIe-to-SATA expansion cards and move to a more stable enterprise-grade motherboard that can handle my growing array of drives natively.
However, I’ve hit a bit of a snag regarding the power configuration. The chassis I picked up is designed to run redundant 1200-Watt server power supplies. In the past, I’ve always stuck to standard ATX power units because they’re quiet and easy to replace, but as I scale up this build, the redundancy of server-grade power is becoming really attractive. My personal insight from years of tinkering is that you don't really appreciate a redundant PSU until you have one fail at 3:00 AM on a Sunday, which has happened to me once too often!
The specific point I’m struggling with is the low-load efficiency curve of these beefy units. Even though I’m planning on filling this thing with disks, OMV is so efficient that the system will likely spend most of its life idling at maybe 80–100 Watts. I’m worried that a 1200-Watt server power module, even if it’s Platinum or Titanium rated, might be operating at a very inefficient point on its curve when it's only under a 7% or 8% load. I’ve read some conflicting reports that some enterprise motherboards can have issues with power-good signals if the draw is too low for the PSU's expected range.
I'm also a bit concerned about the noise and the PMBus communication. I’d love to be able to monitor the power consumption directly within OMV, but I’m not sure if the standard plugins will play nice with a server-grade power backplane. I really want a setup that is "set it and forget it," but I don’t want to end up with a system that’s pulling 20W more than it needs to just to keep the PSU fans spinning.
For those of you who have bridged the gap between consumer motherboards and high-output 1200-Watt server power, have you noticed any significant stability issues or surprisingly high idle power draws? Or is the "overkill" factor of such a large power supply actually a benefit for long-term component health?
Thanks in advance for any insights!
