alt Hacker NewsI think the worry about power consumption is a bit overblown in the article. My NAS has an i5-12600 + Quadro P4000 and uses maybe 50% more power than the one in this article under normal conditions. That works out to maybe $4/month more cost. Given the relatively small delta, I'd encourage picking hardware based on what services you want to run.
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Indeed, I always compare it with what I get if I ran it via cloud services and the electricity cost pales in comparison.
My NAS is around 100W (6-year old parts: i3 9100 and C246M) which comes to $25/£18 per month (electricity is expensive), but I can justify it as I use many services on the machine and it has been super reliable (running 24/7 for nearly 6 years).
I will try to see if I can build a more performant/efficient NAS from a mix of spare parts and new parts this coming month (still only Zen 3: 5950X and X570), but it is more of a fun project than a replacement.
It depends how much electricity costs where you live. I’m quite pleased mine idles at ~15W.
$4/mo is more than I expected. I always compare to cloud storage and $50/yr is significant.
I'm with you, but my "NAS" is also really just a server, running tons of other services, so that justifies the power consumption (it's my old 2700X gaming rig, sans GPU).
But i do have to acknowledge that the US has relatively low power costs, and my state in particular has lower costs than that even, so the equation is necessarily different for other people.
Less power, less heat. Less heat, less cooling required. At some point that allows you to go fanless, and that's very beneficial if you have to share a room with the device.