We often talk about idle performance but in research, we often say performance for what?

Not very scientific but in this poll, here are some ground ‘rules’ please comment about your specific setup or other considerations I didn’t think of. Why not number of services? I think it’s not a good comparison because one service could be much bigger than another and often it doesn’t make a difference. I just started my kasm lxc and it idle, there was no change in power since I have so much idle CPU and it uses the host kernel.

  1. Raw online terabytes; zfs and raid reduce total storage but the setups too numberous to compensate for. If it’s a cold/hot spare it doesn’t count.
  2. Do include any storage running on a NAS or other devices, just like you would pcie disk controllers or system fans. The main point is that it is available to read/write to over your network or locally.
  3. Do include any system hardware that’s just there on idle. In my case I have two dGPUs doing different things, the smaller one of which is always active because of frigate…
  4. Do include your minimum idle services, whether it’s on a rack server, tower, or Synology container for example. Things like portainer, adguard, pinhole, proxmox backup server, immich. Don’t include, if you can spare the downtime, any VMs that you interact directly with (in my case a windows 11 gaming VM). Since we aren’t going for perfect accuracy z don’t worry about making your services busy or idle (like a queued yt-dlp download but all the background *are stuff counts).

Ok that’s it, looking forward to the poll results and discussion! It’d make the poll too complicated but it’d be interesting to see how professional server racks compare to small modular labs in economy of scale terms.

Oh, an older post sort of talks about this but not really. And the German lowest idle spreadsheet doesn’t really capture the raw TBs and has a different objective compared to real world use IMO.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/s/VOjLBMudhB

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  • citruspers@alien.topB
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    11 months ago

    1.25W/TB

    Consumer mobo + 8x8TB spinning + HBA + 10G networking.

    Could be better (especially with EU power prices), but in the winter it’s not too bad.

  • eepybird@alien.topB
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    11 months ago

    Assuming I can math…. I’m at about 30W/TB. Cisco UCS C220 M4 w/ 1x 0.5TB Junk storage drive 2x 1.0TB in Raid 0 for lab experiments 4x 2.0TB in Raid 10 for redundant storage and services.

    Power draw at the outlet is about 200W 🥲

    • DarkKnyt@alien.topOPB
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      11 months ago

      Sounds like you are more about the experimentation so so not having huge storage makes sense.

      That Cisco better be pulling its weight for all its electron nom noms.

      • eepybird@alien.topB
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        11 months ago

        You would hope but right now it’s only hosting 2 dedicated game servers, a cloud flare server, a guacamole server, and a desktop to play around with guac.

        I’ve got a handful of other VMs but they’re only on when I’m using them so I didn’t include them

        • DarkKnyt@alien.topOPB
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          11 months ago

          What’s the cloud flare server? Planetary file system or something else?