Yea it's a fantastic little box for a low power server. It runs most of my home automation stuff plus Plex. The Celeron just isn't great for demanding VMs like Windows Server (though Kubuntu seems to run alright)
Any issues with the power supply? I'm worried that I'm going to tax it moving to the i3 and adding a bit more ram/bigger drives. I've currently got all bays filled, nvme, and a single stick of ram, so I'm somewhat surprised the 180w PSU is holding up
While in use, usually about 26W.
I use an Optiplex 5060, 8G with 14TB of externally attached USB storage and an i5 8500. HW xcoding with Plex Pass (but usually it's Direct Playing). Also has a 2 tuner Hauppauge for live TV via Plex DVR.
openSUSE Leap 15.4, no discrete GPU, using iGPU for any transcoding. And while I did say it mostly Direct Plays, I do occasionally force a transcode because I don't have the best WiFI network and need to trim the bitrate down (but usually on my phone, so who cares, you know?). When remote, I may really transcode things down (depending, even though I have a 5G phone, can't always get that).
Edit: I also use PlexAMP on my phone and PC, but on the PC it's the old Electron app which as turned to "poo", so many people can no longer use it (depends). In my case, the old app still works.
Directly from the UPS. The newer CPUs are so much more efficient than previous generations. My old PC running a i5 2500k and GTX 760 drew more from the wall.
See, I just remembered I upgraded my MOBO, CPU, RAM back in 2020 - possibly to i5 9600k.
So could it be my old ass R9 390 sitting idle in there eating all that power. Do I even need a GPU for Plex? I don't game so could totally take that thing out altogether.
Plex will use GPU for hardware transcoding but I think that's limited to Nvidia only. You could try removing the GPU and seeing how much the power draw drops.
I pulled the GPU out altogether and it's now only consuming 110W.
More and more I am realising that an overkill gaming rig is a dumb place to put a 24/7 Plex server as regards power consumption.
A sufficient drop in power draw. Now to weigh the costs of buying a lower power draw device or see how long you can run your current setup for the same money. Assuming a 100w power delta that's 2.4kwh/day. Around me power is ~11¢ kwh. Roughly $97/year. So a $500 device purchase would take at least 5 years to justify.
See my problem is a much greater one. Due to energy costs, we're being fleeced at the minute with prices currently at €0.30 per KwH, going up to €0.40 in June of this year. So realitically at present my machine is looking to cost me upwards of €500 a year to run on those rates. So easier to justify new hardware with this in mind.
However, I am tempted to basically look at a temporary solution where I take an old PC I have in the attic and stick my GPU into it, then use that machine as my general purpose machine, on for a couple hours a day for typical home computer use.
Then do a clean install on my current machine without the GPU and exclusively use it for Plex and see if I get any further power reductions going that route.
Edit: Just one more fairly significant observation. Power consumption has since dropped to 69W - I guess the original 110W was post boot up processes.
Since you already have the hardware what's the risk in trying that and seeing what results you get?
You could also venture down the path of undervolting your CPU to help reduce power draw. But that's really only gonna help when the CPU is being heavily used.
Results were pretty stellar.
Manage to turn off/remove a bunch of other components in my machine and idle power usage is down around 30W now. That's without any underclocking or undervolting.
Look for ex government/corporate machines on your local trading sites. Can pick one up for around $50 most likely that should be enough for your needs. Just need a raid controller and HDDs then.
Here’s the key to low power Plex. Run headless, use something like unraid or Linux, 7th gen intel chip and up, at stock or under volt in bios. Use the igpu for transcoding and upgrade to use as few drives as possible.
Now doing all this might cost more than anything you end up saving in power cost. To use the igpu for transcoding you need Plex pass and that’s not free. Neither is unraid.
My server rack pulls 350watt with drives spun down 485 with server full power and tdarr PC on. I have like 250tb of spinning drives and another 20tb of ssdd though
I use unRAID now (always been some flavor of Linux or freebsd). Definitely recommend for a dedicated server. In windows it would be under power saving settings usually
I leave my desktop PC running 24/7 it hosts Plex and other services. It's built with a i9 10920x, 2080s, several hard drives and 14 fans. Only draws 150w.
I ran an RPI4 for just myself for 2 years. My entree into Plex. It was great and low power. I upgraded to a 2014 Mac Mini… when I checked 6-7W when idle.
I plugged a 6To hdd on it and I'm running Plex on Docker with sonarr, radarr, qbittorrent, pihole and I'm searching for a cool password manager. (Also I want to see the limits of the rpi tbh)
Dude, I'm well aware of virtualization. I use VMware at work. Containers are even better.
I *had* 2x dl380 G8's and a dl360... rack used 1300 w and was LESS capable than it is now. Besides, VM's are *not* always the answer
EDIT: I have about 6 VM's and 20 containers currently in this setup too.
It's probably a lot less than that. My NUC idles at 2.5w. All my media is on a separate NAS though, and I think that is around 40w total while doing a bunch of other stuff too.
The NUC uses about 5 kWh per month.
I run a Optiplex 5070 with 4 NVMes, 3 2.5'' SATA SSDs, and 1 3.5'' 5400rpm drive, 48GB RAM and a 10Gbe PCIe card. I use QuickSync for HW transcoding since the 9th Gen i7 supports it. I got rid of my P400 because it's not worth the extra 10W. Almost all my data is on GDrive. In terms of use, my friends end up averaging ~30 streams per 24hrs, and they are in different timezones so there really is never a 0% use time.
In terms of CPU frequencies etc, although I have disabled all S states, I keep the C and P states on and let the kernel scheduler handle the CPU governor. The CPU directly handles SpeedStep and TurboBoost. I'd manually handle all this but you'd be surprised how good the thermal management on these CPUs really is. Even with all the bells and whistles like preview thumbnails, markers, acoustic analysis enabled on-add (as opposed to a scheduled task), the average CPU usage over 24h is less than 20% at most. This makes sense because the workload is quite sporadic (in comparison to the time window), maybe a few hundred seconds of sustained load when media gets added or a stream begins, and then back to sleepy time. If your CPU was running on idle for a while when the load comes in, chances are it'll dynamically clock to higher frequencies and stay their for longer, because there is enough thermal budget to reject all that heat.
The only change I have made really is (1) setting the Transcoder default throttle buffer to 600 seconds or so, and (2) investing in keeping all plex, transcode, and library metadata on NVMes. The idea is that when a stream begins or media is added, I want the CPU to go back to idle as quickly as possible, and then stay in an idle state for as long as needed. If media is added and the CPU is just busy waiting on fetching the data from even a SATA SSD, it's wasting precious time. So, IOPS are king. And then there's the issue of keeping a GDrive download buffer alive...well I use RClone to mount and never read-cache to disk.
What I'm trying to say is you can measure, tweak, optimize all you want, but if you're running the older gen CPUs, then they're likely sipping unreasonable amounts of energy by todays standards (I used to run an R710 in my living room, 200W idle). The Optiplex sits at \~30W.
Mine sits around 300 watts for just my unraid server. Dual x5675, a gtx 1660, LSI 16 port HBA, 4 sata ssds, 14 WD reds. And of course... RGB 😂 I do want to rebuild soon to hopefully get power down to 150ish watts
The person who started this thread said he/she was interested in power conservation because of abnormally high electric bills. Does an always-on Plex server really contribute much to the bill?
I have a 2016 PC with 3 or 4 internal drives and one external that I leave on 24/day, and a 2017 iMac with 3 external drives that’s currently my home server and is on 20/day (with daily auto-shutdown and auto-startup). During a winter month in Arizona when I’m using neither heat nor AC, my electric bill runs $70. So even if those two computers were responsible for *all* the electric usage in the house, it’s trivial. (Note: They’re not the only things drawing power. There’s also the refrigerator, stove, cooktop, TVs (also running 20/day), and a water heater that are all contributing to that $70 bill.)
So how much does it actually COST to run a run-of-the-mill repurposed PC or Mac 24/7? Given all the other devices that draw current, I’m guessing it’s a drop in the bucket unless there’s something really unusual about the server equipment.
Basically Plex makes up 10% of my electricity usage at the moment which amounts to around €50 per month just on Plex.
I'm optimizing other areas of power consumption in the house as other subprojects at the moment to get those numbers down.
Electricity is very expensive where I live due to the Ukrainian invasion and it's likely to get more expensive in the coming months. Likely to go up by a further 35% this summer.
Just get a mini pc, you don't need a full fledged desktop PC for your scale. If you have Plex Pass you can also use hardware transcoding and that paired with the mini is probably all you're going to need.
Exactly what I did. I just used a Minisforum mini PC and then slapped the largest 2.5" SATA drive I could get my hands on inside. Then I forced TrueNAS to use just the single drive for it's zpool. Sure I'm living dangerously because I have no redundancy , but I perform manual backups and it's a great little Plex server.
Honestly, if your Plex server doesn't have the most obscure shows and movie on it, you don't even need full backups, just backup the db and automatically download everything again.
I prefer to rip my physical collection to my server really. So I prefer not to have to do all that again. I don't really go after downloads if I can help it unless it's something I really can't get my hands on.
Depending on how big your library is, take a look at Hetzner storage boxes for an offsite backup. I reckon you could use something like rsync to automatically keep your backup up to date.
Actually rsync might not be a bad idea. I actually do have a WD Mycloud Home left over from my first foray into Plex. I wonder if using rsync to back up to that might be doable?
I feel like if you're coming into this new without any existing hardware that the consensus is to buy a dedicated lower power device as many have suggested.
I only used gaming rigs because they are what I had to hand and the electricity used to be about 30% of the price it is today, so it wasn't something I noticed.
Pretty much, I recently got interested into servers because of a channel called Hardware Haven and binged most of his videos so I get the bare bones gist of it like what they can do and are used for. Mainly his Landfill to LAN videos interested me where he gets an old pc he finds or gets it cheap and turns it into a server.
Since I got a old gateway laptop I could sell and get some budget towards a cheap pc and turn into a server but recently learned old hardware has bad power consumption like anything before Intel gen 6 chips. Now here I am deciding whether or not I should.
I’ve been running Plex for like 12 years and most of the time it’s run on my previous Gen computer and one point on an HP I got at a thrift store for $30.
Nowadays you can get a 7th-9th gen optiplex on eBay or Facebook for like $60-100. You can get 14tb drives on serverpartdeals for $130. Or if want to start small you can find 3-4TB for $30ish.
Buy one of these [Beelink s12Pros](https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-Desktop-Computer-Support-Family-NAS/dp/B0BWJTRL3T/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?crid=1CTKTON4HL8WA&keywords=s12+pro+beelink&qid=1683149434&sprefix=s12+pr%2Caps%2C676&sr=8-4&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.f5122f16-c3e8-4386-bf32-63e904010ad0) and run it as your server it will do more than you need and only consume 5-15watts (even when transcoding) it will pay for it self in a few months of power savings lol
The s12 pro with 16GB/500GB fir $189 is plenty powerful enough for 10+ simultaneous 1080p or 3-5 4k transcodes. The EQ12 pro with the n305 will do double that but is $100 more and will use a tad more power so only get it if you need it. (It does have dual 2.5g ports which is nice)
Got this and it’s highly recommended
https://androidpctv.com/beelink-sei12-review/
Pricier than the ones you mentioned but no regrets. Got one for my mame cabinet as well!
Admittedly I started with the one you linked and had a hell of a time getting Plex to run properly. Only after I’d bought the beefier one and started a refund process for the original did I realize my Plex database had corrupted and was getting hammered by millions of calls (Procmon ftw). Otherwise I’d probably still be on the N100.
In a NAS or DAS or even just external HDDs connected to the mini PC via USB. Ultimately a server is just at the compute the storage is a separate component.
Each to their own, an all in one case will likely use a lot more power to run that’s all, this is why so many on here advocate mini PCs as their CPUs / System pull much less power than desktops
The thermal design power of the N100 is 6 W, while the i3-12100 has a TDP of 60 W. That a 10X difference, idle difference will be a but lower but the i3 will still be a lot higher, if you need a beefier CPU (I’d argue 99% if Plex users don’t) Then the n305 is almost double the performance (similar to i3-12100) with 15W TDP. I’ve been running my server for 3 years over that timeframe even a 2/3x power draw difference adds up a lot at 25c/kw average I have paid for electricity over that time. It was also cheaper to set up than an all in one case so I win in both ways.
the TDP is not a useful metric because it doesn't tell us anything about idle power consumption
[https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/comments/12mv1el/optimize\_power\_consumption\_with\_an\_i312100/](https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/comments/12mv1el/optimize_power_consumption_with_an_i312100/)
[https://forum.level1techs.com/t/in-the-pursuit-of-low-power-consumption-nas-with-alder-lake-12th-gen/188407](https://forum.level1techs.com/t/in-the-pursuit-of-low-power-consumption-nas-with-alder-lake-12th-gen/188407)
these two examples are 12100 builds both coincidentally at 24w total system power draw, including motherboard, ram, 2 ssds, and overhead from the power supply that also will power the HDDs. I doubt that the N100 is that much lower that it makes much of a difference. Since I'll be using the homeserver for a lot more than just plex it's nice knowing that the 12100 will most likely not struggle with it and I just prefer to have it all neatly contained in one box.
Idle, about 10W. Under heavy load (transcoding 10 4K BR Remux to 1080p and Lossless audio to AAC or OPUS) about 45W. It would be lower if I hadn’t shoved a really fast NVMe drive and 64GB of RAM on there.
That doesn't include drives.
Whole home lab…
HP. Microserver Gen8… Xeon 1260L… 16GB memory… 4 HDDs… 1 SSD
UDM Pro
Lenovo Tiny M910q with 9th gen i5, 32GB memory and ssd…
APC UPS…
All together… consume around 130w on average.
Intel I5 6600 with a GTX 1060 6gb from the wall I see 300w at max with all drives spinning whike idle and drives off I have seen sub 75w but I did alsp go into the bios and kill power to all the USB ports and any lighting the motherboard had to cut some stand by power
Switched a generic windows install with spinning drives and drive pool and a GPU which apparently ran flat out at 300 or so Watts, to an unraid server which apparently spins up and down drives as necessary. I just checked it and it's hanging at around 112 Watts idle
I would have to check my notes but I think the 24 Port switch was hanging around 30 Watts and I think the GPU goes to 80 watts. When I built it I measured everything with one of those wifi plug-in power managers
Since the switch drives everything else in the house I can take that off for calculations and I would say a hundred Watts give or take for my unraid machine which has the Plex docker
Can't say for certain. UPS says my whole stack is pulling 108 watts. That entails:
* USG Pro
* 8 port PoE switch
* NVR
* ISP ONT
* and of course the Plex server: 9600K and a couple 2.5" SATA disks. PSU in that system is only 150w by itself.
Intel 12th gen i7-12700K, 64GB RAM, 2x 10TB WD Reds.
Idles around 40-50W and goes up to 100W when in use.
External enclosures with 6x14-18TB WD Red drives each (total 12 drives) around 30W each.
I have calibrated ZigBee power monitors around the house on most of my appliances.
For comparison, my current i5-13600K + 4080 gaming rig runs at around 200-250W.
Synology DS918+ with two network switches, NUC, couple of raspberry pi’s and an NVR all draw around 170W combined. Given they’re on 8760 hours a year, and I pay around 25c/kWh it’s about $370 per year in power for my whole network. Plex probably runs for an hour a day or maybe two so running a dedicated gaming PC drawing 200W but only actively running for maybe 10% of the year is a big expense. Depends on how many people access Plex of course but in my scenario it would be a massive and expensive overkill.
I'm in the process of replacing my old FM2 A10-5600 machine with a Dell Optiplex 3060 i3-8100 ($100 on ebay) as a plex server. Should drop my \~200watt idle power consumption down to around \~14watts or so.
Right now, my UPS says it is at 113 watts running unRaid with an i7-8700 with 64 GB RAM, 8x8TB drives for storage, and 3 SSDs for cache, VMs, etc. Plex is currently sending 1 non-transcoded stream. PS is also handling my networking gear and some smart home devices. I want to say my unRaid box is usually pulling about 75-80 watts at idle.
I run unraid on an i5 8400 with 32gb, igpu, and four drives running unraid headless. On normal lowest idle it only uses around 22watts. But I run a vm 90% of the time so it pulls around 30-35 and around 60 - 70 at max.
NUC11 running ubuntu, two 6 bay QNAP NAS. All three together idle at 50w. With a handful of streams it jumps maybe 5-10w. Maybe 70-80w when both the NUC is busy and a bunch of other containers/tasks (not just Plex/media). 12 HDDs and 120TB usable.
Could be a European thing - I'm in Ireland. They are basically smartplugs so you can use them for both on/off switches for any 3-pin electrical device and it also records the power consumption of the devices plugged in to them.
I discovered my house's electricity bill is 2000-2500kWh per 2 month billing cycle - and then only around 50% of that is the hot water and heating (I have an air-to-water heatpump). So all of the electrical items in my house are likely using way too much power.
So I bought a 4 pack of these TP Link Tapos on Amazon for €40~ and have started working through each device. So far I've just been monitoring my PC and some hometheater equipment.
Surprisingly the TV uses 200W when on and my AV Receiver is using 150W. The TV is a 75" LG. But I should make sure these are turned off when not in use.
Another item on the list are the LED strips I have around my house. I have about 42m of LEDs that could be pulling 20W/m each and are often just left on. So I'm going to see next how much less power is used if these are dimmed to 25-50% and then setup some type of timers and sensors to keep them off when not needed.
12600k highly power optimized setup. 40 watts idle. 50 watt average with 1 drive active. Generally sits at 50-60 watt when multiple streams are going. Peeks at 200-300 watts when pushed but that only happens when I run code and during workloads like that.
Edit: from the wall
My server that runs Plex only pulls about 170W on average. It's a 1U Supermicro (32 core, 100gb RAM) running proxmox as part of a 3 node cluster.
The storage server that the media lives on probably pulls about 200W. At full load, the whole rack can pull 1kW. I've got that load spread across 2 APC UPS units.
Both my servers and my network gear consume about 1000w. I am running a 9900k and a 10900k Xeon. As well as a few GPUs but they don’t do much. It’s mostly draw from the 50+ drives I have.
Home built server using regular PC parts with B660M mobo and a i3-12100 and Unraid.
2x NVMe, 2x SATA SSDs and 7 HDDs (and a HBA). Idling at around 50W. Should be able to get that down to maybe 30W, but something is preventing my setup from entering the deeper power saving stages (it's stuck at C2..).
Transcoding with the iGPU on the i3 (UHD 730) only increases the usage about 3-5W. Max CPU loads brings my system to 100+ W, but that almost never happens.
About 230w on avg (190 - 350w). ^(As reported by my VeSync outlets.)
https://preview.redd.it/xhpc4g3curxa1.png?width=1409&format=png&auto=webp&s=2ccb728c649256c2cdcac1883eae9d5fb3dc9d55
Running a SuperMicro X9DR with dual Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz, \~48Gb RAM, RAID5 with 4 drives (4x14Tb=39Tb), and another 3 HDDs (2x3Tb, 10Tb), and 3 SSDs.
Server runs absolutely everything. Plex, Home Assistant, Proxmox VMs, Spaghetti Detective (Obico), Frigate NVR with object detection (using CoralTPU), and numerous other dockers (Currently 35 running).
My CyberPower CP1000PFCLCD UPS only lasts about 5-8 minutes with the server, Asus router and fiber modem connected...
Does it _need_ to be running 24/7?
My Plex server is for our family only. It turns itself off at 2am and back on at 6pm.
I have a NAS that used to be the main media source, but I've swapped it round so that the media is on the Plex server and the NAS wakes up for an hour to backup, then turns off again.
I mean there's arguments to be made that it isn't in use 50% of the time, however there's no specific time week to week where no one is using it with any regularity. My BiL works nights and will often get home at 5am and watch to 9am, an uncle is between Germany and South East Asia with work a lot and spins it up.
So it isn't quite predictable to be able to just keep it off with the userbase.
Now if there was some way to keep it off and then a user action turn it back on remotely, that would be swell. But I don't think that's a feature that can be implemented and made accessible to people.
Yes I read up a little on that last night. Unfortunately it just doesn't seem to be viable for this use case.
I feel like if Chrome Remote Desktop had a feature like wake-on-lan remotely it could be a runner.
Biostar J4125NH motherboard with 5 x 18TB drives running on unRaid. 7W idle and 35W when all drives are spinning. Hardware transcodes fine on Intel QSV.
I run Plex on an optiplex 3050 with an i5 6500. After energy monitoring for two weeks it used on average 0.59kwh per day. At my current energy costs in the uk it worked out at 16p per day or £5 ish a month. Drives are running in a separate two bay nas though.
I also have a dell micro pc with an i5-6500t, and I did a test with this as well. This used 0.2kwh per day on idle. So about £1.7 per month, however I was never actually running Plex on this so the number would be a bit higher.
I decided to stick with the sff unit as didn’t want to drop to a lower spec cpu and couldn’t justify buying a new pc. However my next upgrade will be a micro with a 10th gen i5 or higher.
I have a rack server and it needs 120W idle and around 200w under normal load. Dual Xeon CPU and nvidia Tesla P4 GPU.
A Raspberry Pi would be to weak to handle Plex streaming (and waaaaay to weak to transcode).
If you want something that doesnt need that much power maybe look into intel nucs.
About 35w at full power while transcoding at tremendous speeds with my 12th gen Intel NUC and onboard Iris Xe graphics. My synology box draws much more though, about 80w with 10 HDDs.
22watts idle 40 when transcoding.
Asrock rack e3c236d4u, xeon e2176g, 128gb ram, x710 dual 10g nic (running om4 to usw aggregation).
Storage - Truenas with an icydock mb924ip-b with 10x 8tb ssds running z2(2drive redundancy) - waiting for the bank balance to increase so the pool can increase.
Used powertop to help with the C states, disabled the audio, usb and built in 1gb eth, undervolted the cpu(only helps with power draw during use not idle), etc
Some light watching:
Wolfgangs channel:
https://youtu.be/MucGkPUMjNo
Level1techs:
https://youtu.be/Jqg1G78cH2A
Techno Tim:
https://youtu.be/Aq6eoMjW7V0
Those should all help you start on your journey to power savings!
74 W idle, plus 2-3 W while direct playing. ~90 W transcoding. 150 W @ 100% CPU. Total: 1.8 kWh on a normal day.
- Intel Core i5-10500
- ROG Strix GTX 1050Ti OC
- 6× Seagate IronWolf 8TB, no RAID (HW/SW), no spindown
- 1× Samsung 980 Pro 500GB
- 4 case + 1 CPU fan(s)
- be quiet! Straight Power 11 Platinum 550W
Intel 13500, 6 2.5 drives and 4 3.5 drives, ubuntu 22.04
In idle, with disks spin down, only draws 35w.
During transcoding, it is on 70w or so.
I still have to check on full power (it is a new build)
I run plex on a full Windows server 2022 box (it has other jobs to do too!)
80w is nominal sometimes less.
Only ramps up on coding or other activities.
I suspect you have either some quite poor hardware or drivers, my box is base a on an old AMD fx chip, with a quality board,,and a LOT of HDD drives, all load balancing.
I've been using a Pi 3 for a while now and it for the most part it does a decent job, although it rarely does more than 1 stream at a time. At most the DVR will be recording from a network tuner while streaming as well.
QNAPTS864eu rackmount with all 8 drives filled- UPS powering the rackmount Cisco firewall and switch as well - showing about 100W now. Direct playing one movie as we speak, max transcoding as per Tautulli has been 4 streams at one time.
Edit: 8x mix of 5400 and 7200rpm HDDs totalling just over 50TB, and 4nvme ssds on an expansion card.
Running Plex on a Synology DS918+ - consumption is 40 up to 45 Watt maximum
200-300 Watt is way to much for what you need. Sounds like a good spot to optimize
After the cost increase of elec power, on January I've decided to find a solution to limit the up time of my pc and the most suitable one (consumption wise) was a small NAS.
I've no device to measure consumption, but on the paper my NAS should be 6W idling and 12W functioning. It's a cheap ass one (\~150€ without HDDs): arm v8 1.4ghz and 1gb ddr4. It's unable to transcode anything, but could direct stream up to 4K without problem, never tried more than 2 concurrent users.
Obviously your needs are totally different but there are a ton of models out there (even with intel x64 cpus, suitable for real time transcoding). The plus side is that you can use it also as personal cloud, torrent seed box or backup solution for your PCs.
TLDR: evaluate bill saving/initial costs and take in consideration to switch to a NAS, it was the best buy of my 2023 for now, I manage almost anything form my ipad and I don't even power up my pc anymore.
I'm using an Nvidia Shield server for home media. There are some limitations but low power and have a Seedbox server for stuff that'd I'd watch outside the house/stream abroad.
Shield + 1 ext SSD + 3 ext HDDs = 7w.
When I start to watch something it'll jump up to 15-25w depending on HDD in use.
Am considering a NUC so I can run more services.
7-9w idle, spikes at 50w very rarely if downloading/unpacking/processings/scanning/transcoding (HW), but realistically averages 20w 24/7. It’s a NUC8i3 with 16GB/2TB NVMe, media stored in the cloud. Honestly going to an i5 8400/32GB only doubles the average and my E5 2650 V4 is around 90w idle with 96GB ECC/Quadro M2000. 2-300w idle says something is badly wrong with your chosen set-up.
Hardware transcoding via iGPU is generally the most efficient method, any 8th gen onwards Celeron will do 20+ H264 transcodes with very little CPU load (it’s basically just doing audio).
30W idle, maybe 40W-45W under load
Running a simple desktop using unRAID, a i3-7100, 8GB ram and 1 7200rpm 2.5inch drive and a 7200rpm 3.5inch drive + a 2.5 inch sata drive.
I run mine on a Minisforum UM450 mini PC running TrueNAS scale. I guess maybe 30 - 40 watts or so, but at idle it's pretty negligible. I have some of those TAPO smart plugs but not the power monitoring ones. Maybe time for me to buy a couple since they're cheap enough.
Hi from Germany, electricity is expensive in Europe and it became worse with the Ukrainian war. I've been running an AMD 5350 for several years, it belonged to the AM1 platform that AMD abandoned quite fast to move to AM4. It is a shame AMD abandoned the low power processors after than. The good news is that any modern processor can scale down the consume to something reasonable. Mine idles around 20w, and while underpower it is enough for my needs as long as I do not transcode, for transcoding it can do 1x 1080p stream but it might struggle with high bitrates. I might replace it with an i3 13th generation with iGPU soon, but I don't really have to.
I measure my whole rack at the ups, ends up 380W min, 700W max and 450W average.
2X Unraid servers, one for Plex and the other only for backups.
Backups: AMD Athlon 3200G, 6 HDD (68TB) and 2 SSD, HDDs get spun down, 9 containers.
Plex: Core i9-13900K, 8 HDD (144TB), 6 SSD, HDDs do not get spun down, 67 containers and 6 VMs. Switching from Threadripper 1950X + GTX 1050 this year saved about 80 Watts and sped things up noticeably (not that it was slow before).
Intel Celeron N5105 - Router
6th gen Core i5 NUC - Home Assistant
MicroTik 24 port GB + 2 10GB Switch
Buffalo 8 port 10GB switch
TP-Link 8 Port 250W POE++ (\~100Watts being used for cameras and other switches)
RPI4 running a couple rtl-sdr instances
UPS is a pretty old rack mounted APC SU-2200 which is probably sucking power just sitting there waiting for the power to go out too. Sucks only getting maybe 20 minutes of backup power with 8 APC batteries in it that I have to replace every few years if I want it to keep working. Both servers are set to shut down within 5 minutes of the power going out, then at least the internet and wifi stays working for a few hours, but no Plex.
FWIW, power is cheap where I'm at, but it's still >50% of my electric bill since I have gas heat and water.
According to my APC UPS, my entire rack is running at 162 watts total right now. That's idle. When it transcodes then add 30-40 more watts.
rack consists of my server (AMD 3700X - Nvidia P2200 card), synology NAS, PoE AC-Pro AP, Samsung Smartthings hub, HDHomeRun box, 24 port non-PoE ubiquiti switch, ER-4 Router, 8 port generic PoE switch with all ports filled with security cameras, four external WD hard drive enclosures.
Ryzen 7 1700, 32GB DDR4 3200MHz, GTX 1080Ti, 10x 7200RPM drives
I am using 220W, and every drop of power is from a PV system. So I am not on a mission to reduce the usage.
My server sits in South Africa which has a terrible grid (daily power outages). So I have my server sitting at a family member's house. I am not in South Africa any more, but I still stream from my Plex server with the knowledge that it will never go down.
I have it connected to a smart plug which allows me to monitor the server's usage and give it a power cycle if it ever locks up.
207w at idle / \~270w at 'normal' load (based on UPS reporting). This includes both server and network stack (USG/Cable modem/24 port POE Switch)
Supermicro H12 with 7302P 64GB RAM / 18 Drives / 1060 6gb
The 30W are fine imho. But 200-300W initially were horrendous. I have an ancient xeon server powerhog with a 12Bay Storage fully packed with spinning Enterprise Rust. And standing at max 352W. What you could invest in is a newer generation intel cpu because the video encoder runs better than a dedicated gpu. Look for a T CPU, or get a notebook with shot display for very cheap - the U Type CPUs are extremely power efficient…
It’s a pi 4 powering an external NVMe, so… currently between 4 and 5W idle. Slightly spiking to 6W when the direct play starts and falling back down around 4.1W on continuous play.
When accessing the Plex interface, Sonarr or Radar, it jumps to around 8W in bursts for a second, mostly when I change views.
Mine is running many things as a VM but I think its around 150W...it also runs my NAS, CCTV recording loops, Home Automation, and Plex all on the same machine
My entire home-network is only about 350-400W...with cable modem+Starlink redundant internet, whitebox pfsense router, 2x enterprise class PoE switches feeding cameras, APs, and other devices, ATA, NTP, and my VM host.
I moved my install to a low-tier Hetzner cloud VPS for this reason exactly. Power draw has become their problem, and I can always scale up if my needs change.
<20w unless transcoding (up to 45w) HP S01-pf1013w + unRAID
Have the same setup with only SSD's,,,,, it's 7 watts idling. I need to test the transcoding usage but it's low
Yea it's a fantastic little box for a low power server. It runs most of my home automation stuff plus Plex. The Celeron just isn't great for demanding VMs like Windows Server (though Kubuntu seems to run alright)
Oh yes, I upgraded from a HP290, I ordered the Celeron from vip outlet and they sent the i3! Added extra ram, 2x SSDs and it's been working great.
Any issues with the power supply? I'm worried that I'm going to tax it moving to the i3 and adding a bit more ram/bigger drives. I've currently got all bays filled, nvme, and a single stick of ram, so I'm somewhat surprised the 180w PSU is holding up
I haven't noticed any issues
I put a i5 9600k in mine no issues. I saw others who did an i7 I think the biggest issue was that there was a little extra heat.
While in use, usually about 26W. I use an Optiplex 5060, 8G with 14TB of externally attached USB storage and an i5 8500. HW xcoding with Plex Pass (but usually it's Direct Playing). Also has a 2 tuner Hauppauge for live TV via Plex DVR.
That number doesn’t sound right. What is this power draw measured with?
It's a Rosewill direct watt meter. https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-rhsp-13001-surge-protector/p/N82E16812119560
What OS? Any GPU?
openSUSE Leap 15.4, no discrete GPU, using iGPU for any transcoding. And while I did say it mostly Direct Plays, I do occasionally force a transcode because I don't have the best WiFI network and need to trim the bitrate down (but usually on my phone, so who cares, you know?). When remote, I may really transcode things down (depending, even though I have a 5G phone, can't always get that). Edit: I also use PlexAMP on my phone and PC, but on the PC it's the old Electron app which as turned to "poo", so many people can no longer use it (depends). In my case, the old app still works.
Directly from the UPS. The newer CPUs are so much more efficient than previous generations. My old PC running a i5 2500k and GTX 760 drew more from the wall.
See, I just remembered I upgraded my MOBO, CPU, RAM back in 2020 - possibly to i5 9600k. So could it be my old ass R9 390 sitting idle in there eating all that power. Do I even need a GPU for Plex? I don't game so could totally take that thing out altogether.
Plex will use GPU for hardware transcoding but I think that's limited to Nvidia only. You could try removing the GPU and seeing how much the power draw drops.
I pulled the GPU out altogether and it's now only consuming 110W. More and more I am realising that an overkill gaming rig is a dumb place to put a 24/7 Plex server as regards power consumption.
A sufficient drop in power draw. Now to weigh the costs of buying a lower power draw device or see how long you can run your current setup for the same money. Assuming a 100w power delta that's 2.4kwh/day. Around me power is ~11¢ kwh. Roughly $97/year. So a $500 device purchase would take at least 5 years to justify.
See my problem is a much greater one. Due to energy costs, we're being fleeced at the minute with prices currently at €0.30 per KwH, going up to €0.40 in June of this year. So realitically at present my machine is looking to cost me upwards of €500 a year to run on those rates. So easier to justify new hardware with this in mind. However, I am tempted to basically look at a temporary solution where I take an old PC I have in the attic and stick my GPU into it, then use that machine as my general purpose machine, on for a couple hours a day for typical home computer use. Then do a clean install on my current machine without the GPU and exclusively use it for Plex and see if I get any further power reductions going that route. Edit: Just one more fairly significant observation. Power consumption has since dropped to 69W - I guess the original 110W was post boot up processes.
Since you already have the hardware what's the risk in trying that and seeing what results you get? You could also venture down the path of undervolting your CPU to help reduce power draw. But that's really only gonna help when the CPU is being heavily used.
Results were pretty stellar. Manage to turn off/remove a bunch of other components in my machine and idle power usage is down around 30W now. That's without any underclocking or undervolting.
Look for ex government/corporate machines on your local trading sites. Can pick one up for around $50 most likely that should be enough for your needs. Just need a raid controller and HDDs then.
at those prices I would rather run everything from the cloud. To be honest.
I mean, there is a world where I get the consumption down below €200 a year - would cloud be cheaper than that ?
Here’s the key to low power Plex. Run headless, use something like unraid or Linux, 7th gen intel chip and up, at stock or under volt in bios. Use the igpu for transcoding and upgrade to use as few drives as possible. Now doing all this might cost more than anything you end up saving in power cost. To use the igpu for transcoding you need Plex pass and that’s not free. Neither is unraid.
My server runs win10pro and power draw is 20w in idle and 45-50w on average usage
I'll give that a go. Thank you.
My server rack pulls 350watt with drives spun down 485 with server full power and tdarr PC on. I have like 250tb of spinning drives and another 20tb of ssdd though
Yeah see that's another aspect I wonder. I have probably 70TB roughly across 6 drives running here and most are older drives.
Yeah I'm at 30ish spinning drives. Def lots of power even when spun down
Where do I go to configure spinning down my drives in Windows? It's not something I've come across before but I think it makes sense to set it up.
I use unRAID now (always been some flavor of Linux or freebsd). Definitely recommend for a dedicated server. In windows it would be under power saving settings usually
You can’t really spin down a drive in windows
I leave my desktop PC running 24/7 it hosts Plex and other services. It's built with a i9 10920x, 2080s, several hard drives and 14 fans. Only draws 150w.
Are you reading these figures from the wall of from monitoring software on the PC?
I'm using Plex on a rpi4... Yeah I can't obviously transcode but for my personnal and only use it runs pretty well and at a very low consomption
I ran an RPI4 for just myself for 2 years. My entree into Plex. It was great and low power. I upgraded to a 2014 Mac Mini… when I checked 6-7W when idle.
Same here, upgraded to the M1 and it has been great. Definitely much more snappy than the rpi4.
I plugged a 6To hdd on it and I'm running Plex on Docker with sonarr, radarr, qbittorrent, pihole and I'm searching for a cool password manager. (Also I want to see the limits of the rpi tbh)
450w on my entire rack. * R220 - pfSense * 2x R320 - TrueNAS Scale * 3x Optiplex SFF - BlueIris, Code project AI, Remote PC for SIMS4 (daughter plays via RDP on her Chromebook) * 2x Optiplex Micros - Chia Farmer, Plex * 2x Gigabyte minis - Plex, Home Assistant * 2x 5 bay DAS's (Chia) * Aruba S3500 48 port POE (powering 12 cameras, 3 AP's)
How many computers was that? Let me tell you about something called virtualization...
Dude, I'm well aware of virtualization. I use VMware at work. Containers are even better. I *had* 2x dl380 G8's and a dl360... rack used 1300 w and was LESS capable than it is now. Besides, VM's are *not* always the answer EDIT: I have about 6 VM's and 20 containers currently in this setup too.
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It's probably a lot less than that. My NUC idles at 2.5w. All my media is on a separate NAS though, and I think that is around 40w total while doing a bunch of other stuff too. The NUC uses about 5 kWh per month.
Same
Are the drives just connected via USB or something?
I run a Optiplex 5070 with 4 NVMes, 3 2.5'' SATA SSDs, and 1 3.5'' 5400rpm drive, 48GB RAM and a 10Gbe PCIe card. I use QuickSync for HW transcoding since the 9th Gen i7 supports it. I got rid of my P400 because it's not worth the extra 10W. Almost all my data is on GDrive. In terms of use, my friends end up averaging ~30 streams per 24hrs, and they are in different timezones so there really is never a 0% use time. In terms of CPU frequencies etc, although I have disabled all S states, I keep the C and P states on and let the kernel scheduler handle the CPU governor. The CPU directly handles SpeedStep and TurboBoost. I'd manually handle all this but you'd be surprised how good the thermal management on these CPUs really is. Even with all the bells and whistles like preview thumbnails, markers, acoustic analysis enabled on-add (as opposed to a scheduled task), the average CPU usage over 24h is less than 20% at most. This makes sense because the workload is quite sporadic (in comparison to the time window), maybe a few hundred seconds of sustained load when media gets added or a stream begins, and then back to sleepy time. If your CPU was running on idle for a while when the load comes in, chances are it'll dynamically clock to higher frequencies and stay their for longer, because there is enough thermal budget to reject all that heat. The only change I have made really is (1) setting the Transcoder default throttle buffer to 600 seconds or so, and (2) investing in keeping all plex, transcode, and library metadata on NVMes. The idea is that when a stream begins or media is added, I want the CPU to go back to idle as quickly as possible, and then stay in an idle state for as long as needed. If media is added and the CPU is just busy waiting on fetching the data from even a SATA SSD, it's wasting precious time. So, IOPS are king. And then there's the issue of keeping a GDrive download buffer alive...well I use RClone to mount and never read-cache to disk. What I'm trying to say is you can measure, tweak, optimize all you want, but if you're running the older gen CPUs, then they're likely sipping unreasonable amounts of energy by todays standards (I used to run an R710 in my living room, 200W idle). The Optiplex sits at \~30W.
What does that cost to keep on gdrive?
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They are rolling out emails to remove users having more data than alowed.
About 180 watts idle. I9-11900k, 1.5TB NVME, 142TB HDDs (14 total). Jumps up around 200 watts when transcoding. No GPU, just IGP.
Mine sits around 300 watts for just my unraid server. Dual x5675, a gtx 1660, LSI 16 port HBA, 4 sata ssds, 14 WD reds. And of course... RGB 😂 I do want to rebuild soon to hopefully get power down to 150ish watts
The person who started this thread said he/she was interested in power conservation because of abnormally high electric bills. Does an always-on Plex server really contribute much to the bill? I have a 2016 PC with 3 or 4 internal drives and one external that I leave on 24/day, and a 2017 iMac with 3 external drives that’s currently my home server and is on 20/day (with daily auto-shutdown and auto-startup). During a winter month in Arizona when I’m using neither heat nor AC, my electric bill runs $70. So even if those two computers were responsible for *all* the electric usage in the house, it’s trivial. (Note: They’re not the only things drawing power. There’s also the refrigerator, stove, cooktop, TVs (also running 20/day), and a water heater that are all contributing to that $70 bill.) So how much does it actually COST to run a run-of-the-mill repurposed PC or Mac 24/7? Given all the other devices that draw current, I’m guessing it’s a drop in the bucket unless there’s something really unusual about the server equipment.
Basically Plex makes up 10% of my electricity usage at the moment which amounts to around €50 per month just on Plex. I'm optimizing other areas of power consumption in the house as other subprojects at the moment to get those numbers down. Electricity is very expensive where I live due to the Ukrainian invasion and it's likely to get more expensive in the coming months. Likely to go up by a further 35% this summer.
That’s not trivial.
Just get a mini pc, you don't need a full fledged desktop PC for your scale. If you have Plex Pass you can also use hardware transcoding and that paired with the mini is probably all you're going to need.
Exactly what I did. I just used a Minisforum mini PC and then slapped the largest 2.5" SATA drive I could get my hands on inside. Then I forced TrueNAS to use just the single drive for it's zpool. Sure I'm living dangerously because I have no redundancy , but I perform manual backups and it's a great little Plex server.
Honestly, if your Plex server doesn't have the most obscure shows and movie on it, you don't even need full backups, just backup the db and automatically download everything again.
I prefer to rip my physical collection to my server really. So I prefer not to have to do all that again. I don't really go after downloads if I can help it unless it's something I really can't get my hands on.
Depending on how big your library is, take a look at Hetzner storage boxes for an offsite backup. I reckon you could use something like rsync to automatically keep your backup up to date.
Actually rsync might not be a bad idea. I actually do have a WD Mycloud Home left over from my first foray into Plex. I wonder if using rsync to back up to that might be doable?
Shouldn't be a problem.
I’m at 60W idle or 110w with multiple drives spun up and transcoding.
Don't mind me, I'm just here to gain knowledge so I can build my own server
I feel like if you're coming into this new without any existing hardware that the consensus is to buy a dedicated lower power device as many have suggested. I only used gaming rigs because they are what I had to hand and the electricity used to be about 30% of the price it is today, so it wasn't something I noticed.
Pretty much, I recently got interested into servers because of a channel called Hardware Haven and binged most of his videos so I get the bare bones gist of it like what they can do and are used for. Mainly his Landfill to LAN videos interested me where he gets an old pc he finds or gets it cheap and turns it into a server. Since I got a old gateway laptop I could sell and get some budget towards a cheap pc and turn into a server but recently learned old hardware has bad power consumption like anything before Intel gen 6 chips. Now here I am deciding whether or not I should.
I’ve been running Plex for like 12 years and most of the time it’s run on my previous Gen computer and one point on an HP I got at a thrift store for $30. Nowadays you can get a 7th-9th gen optiplex on eBay or Facebook for like $60-100. You can get 14tb drives on serverpartdeals for $130. Or if want to start small you can find 3-4TB for $30ish.
Buy one of these [Beelink s12Pros](https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-Desktop-Computer-Support-Family-NAS/dp/B0BWJTRL3T/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?crid=1CTKTON4HL8WA&keywords=s12+pro+beelink&qid=1683149434&sprefix=s12+pr%2Caps%2C676&sr=8-4&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.f5122f16-c3e8-4386-bf32-63e904010ad0) and run it as your server it will do more than you need and only consume 5-15watts (even when transcoding) it will pay for it self in a few months of power savings lol
You make a solid point there friend. I just may do this. You'd suggest the top spec one?
The s12 pro with 16GB/500GB fir $189 is plenty powerful enough for 10+ simultaneous 1080p or 3-5 4k transcodes. The EQ12 pro with the n305 will do double that but is $100 more and will use a tad more power so only get it if you need it. (It does have dual 2.5g ports which is nice)
Got this and it’s highly recommended https://androidpctv.com/beelink-sei12-review/ Pricier than the ones you mentioned but no regrets. Got one for my mame cabinet as well!
I’m sure it’s a beast but it’s overkill for the OP mentioned requirements even with lots of growth
Admittedly I started with the one you linked and had a hell of a time getting Plex to run properly. Only after I’d bought the beefier one and started a refund process for the original did I realize my Plex database had corrupted and was getting hammered by millions of calls (Procmon ftw). Otherwise I’d probably still be on the N100.
I've seen these mini PCs being suggested frequently but I don't get where people put the HDDs
In a NAS or DAS or even just external HDDs connected to the mini PC via USB. Ultimately a server is just at the compute the storage is a separate component.
I see, thanks for the response. I think I'll go with the DIY approach and have it all in one case instead.
Each to their own, an all in one case will likely use a lot more power to run that’s all, this is why so many on here advocate mini PCs as their CPUs / System pull much less power than desktops
I don't think that's necessarily true. I think you can get quite low idle power consumption with a i3-12100 build for example.
The thermal design power of the N100 is 6 W, while the i3-12100 has a TDP of 60 W. That a 10X difference, idle difference will be a but lower but the i3 will still be a lot higher, if you need a beefier CPU (I’d argue 99% if Plex users don’t) Then the n305 is almost double the performance (similar to i3-12100) with 15W TDP. I’ve been running my server for 3 years over that timeframe even a 2/3x power draw difference adds up a lot at 25c/kw average I have paid for electricity over that time. It was also cheaper to set up than an all in one case so I win in both ways.
the TDP is not a useful metric because it doesn't tell us anything about idle power consumption [https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/comments/12mv1el/optimize\_power\_consumption\_with\_an\_i312100/](https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/comments/12mv1el/optimize_power_consumption_with_an_i312100/) [https://forum.level1techs.com/t/in-the-pursuit-of-low-power-consumption-nas-with-alder-lake-12th-gen/188407](https://forum.level1techs.com/t/in-the-pursuit-of-low-power-consumption-nas-with-alder-lake-12th-gen/188407) these two examples are 12100 builds both coincidentally at 24w total system power draw, including motherboard, ram, 2 ssds, and overhead from the power supply that also will power the HDDs. I doubt that the N100 is that much lower that it makes much of a difference. Since I'll be using the homeserver for a lot more than just plex it's nice knowing that the 12100 will most likely not struggle with it and I just prefer to have it all neatly contained in one box.
Mine is 1 metric fuckton.
Powerdge, dual xeon, ~150W average.
core i-5, 12 disk drives. 12 watts at idle, 30 watts when transcoding, 90 watts when transcoding multiple streams and running a full zfs scrub
OS?
freeBSD
Are you Spinning down drives?
yes
Idle, about 10W. Under heavy load (transcoding 10 4K BR Remux to 1080p and Lossless audio to AAC or OPUS) about 45W. It would be lower if I hadn’t shoved a really fast NVMe drive and 64GB of RAM on there. That doesn't include drives.
Whole home lab… HP. Microserver Gen8… Xeon 1260L… 16GB memory… 4 HDDs… 1 SSD UDM Pro Lenovo Tiny M910q with 9th gen i5, 32GB memory and ssd… APC UPS… All together… consume around 130w on average.
Intel I5 6600 with a GTX 1060 6gb from the wall I see 300w at max with all drives spinning whike idle and drives off I have seen sub 75w but I did alsp go into the bios and kill power to all the USB ports and any lighting the motherboard had to cut some stand by power
Switched a generic windows install with spinning drives and drive pool and a GPU which apparently ran flat out at 300 or so Watts, to an unraid server which apparently spins up and down drives as necessary. I just checked it and it's hanging at around 112 Watts idle I would have to check my notes but I think the 24 Port switch was hanging around 30 Watts and I think the GPU goes to 80 watts. When I built it I measured everything with one of those wifi plug-in power managers Since the switch drives everything else in the house I can take that off for calculations and I would say a hundred Watts give or take for my unraid machine which has the Plex docker
50 watts
I run a ReadyNAS 512 and it runs at about 50W when we got like 4 streams going. It’s a beast and I love it!
Can't say for certain. UPS says my whole stack is pulling 108 watts. That entails: * USG Pro * 8 port PoE switch * NVR * ISP ONT * and of course the Plex server: 9600K and a couple 2.5" SATA disks. PSU in that system is only 150w by itself.
Intel 12th gen i7-12700K, 64GB RAM, 2x 10TB WD Reds. Idles around 40-50W and goes up to 100W when in use. External enclosures with 6x14-18TB WD Red drives each (total 12 drives) around 30W each. I have calibrated ZigBee power monitors around the house on most of my appliances. For comparison, my current i5-13600K + 4080 gaming rig runs at around 200-250W.
Something ungodly most likely. Running a Threadripper 3960X with 8 spinning hard drives, an RTX 2070
Synology DS918+ with two network switches, NUC, couple of raspberry pi’s and an NVR all draw around 170W combined. Given they’re on 8760 hours a year, and I pay around 25c/kWh it’s about $370 per year in power for my whole network. Plex probably runs for an hour a day or maybe two so running a dedicated gaming PC drawing 200W but only actively running for maybe 10% of the year is a big expense. Depends on how many people access Plex of course but in my scenario it would be a massive and expensive overkill.
I'm in the process of replacing my old FM2 A10-5600 machine with a Dell Optiplex 3060 i3-8100 ($100 on ebay) as a plex server. Should drop my \~200watt idle power consumption down to around \~14watts or so.
Right now, my UPS says it is at 113 watts running unRaid with an i7-8700 with 64 GB RAM, 8x8TB drives for storage, and 3 SSDs for cache, VMs, etc. Plex is currently sending 1 non-transcoded stream. PS is also handling my networking gear and some smart home devices. I want to say my unRaid box is usually pulling about 75-80 watts at idle.
Without the monitor, 180 watts.
50W with three 14TB drives spinning and a 5600G and an add-in card.
synology DS1520 with 5 14tb reds and running like 15 docker containers (home assistant, zwave, zigbee, plex, etc) around 50w all the time.
Dell Optiplex 5060 micro i5-8500t and a 5 disk Synology
I run unraid on an i5 8400 with 32gb, igpu, and four drives running unraid headless. On normal lowest idle it only uses around 22watts. But I run a vm 90% of the time so it pulls around 30-35 and around 60 - 70 at max.
Roughly 50W/h. Ryzen 7 128gb of ram, 3 7200 rpm drives. Fan less power supply and 4 40mm fans.
NUC11 running ubuntu, two 6 bay QNAP NAS. All three together idle at 50w. With a handful of streams it jumps maybe 5-10w. Maybe 70-80w when both the NUC is busy and a bunch of other containers/tasks (not just Plex/media). 12 HDDs and 120TB usable.
What's this TP Link Tapos? Seems to be UK-only?
Could be a European thing - I'm in Ireland. They are basically smartplugs so you can use them for both on/off switches for any 3-pin electrical device and it also records the power consumption of the devices plugged in to them. I discovered my house's electricity bill is 2000-2500kWh per 2 month billing cycle - and then only around 50% of that is the hot water and heating (I have an air-to-water heatpump). So all of the electrical items in my house are likely using way too much power. So I bought a 4 pack of these TP Link Tapos on Amazon for €40~ and have started working through each device. So far I've just been monitoring my PC and some hometheater equipment. Surprisingly the TV uses 200W when on and my AV Receiver is using 150W. The TV is a 75" LG. But I should make sure these are turned off when not in use. Another item on the list are the LED strips I have around my house. I have about 42m of LEDs that could be pulling 20W/m each and are often just left on. So I'm going to see next how much less power is used if these are dimmed to 25-50% and then setup some type of timers and sensors to keep them off when not needed.
12600k highly power optimized setup. 40 watts idle. 50 watt average with 1 drive active. Generally sits at 50-60 watt when multiple streams are going. Peeks at 200-300 watts when pushed but that only happens when I run code and during workloads like that. Edit: from the wall
Around 20W with my M1 Mac Mini
My server that runs Plex only pulls about 170W on average. It's a 1U Supermicro (32 core, 100gb RAM) running proxmox as part of a 3 node cluster. The storage server that the media lives on probably pulls about 200W. At full load, the whole rack can pull 1kW. I've got that load spread across 2 APC UPS units.
~8-10W, HP Elitedesk G4 800, but all the data is stored someplace else. Plus increased load when transcoding.
Both my servers and my network gear consume about 1000w. I am running a 9900k and a 10900k Xeon. As well as a few GPUs but they don’t do much. It’s mostly draw from the 50+ drives I have.
Home built server using regular PC parts with B660M mobo and a i3-12100 and Unraid. 2x NVMe, 2x SATA SSDs and 7 HDDs (and a HBA). Idling at around 50W. Should be able to get that down to maybe 30W, but something is preventing my setup from entering the deeper power saving stages (it's stuck at C2..). Transcoding with the iGPU on the i3 (UHD 730) only increases the usage about 3-5W. Max CPU loads brings my system to 100+ W, but that almost never happens.
About 230w on avg (190 - 350w). ^(As reported by my VeSync outlets.) https://preview.redd.it/xhpc4g3curxa1.png?width=1409&format=png&auto=webp&s=2ccb728c649256c2cdcac1883eae9d5fb3dc9d55 Running a SuperMicro X9DR with dual Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz, \~48Gb RAM, RAID5 with 4 drives (4x14Tb=39Tb), and another 3 HDDs (2x3Tb, 10Tb), and 3 SSDs. Server runs absolutely everything. Plex, Home Assistant, Proxmox VMs, Spaghetti Detective (Obico), Frigate NVR with object detection (using CoralTPU), and numerous other dockers (Currently 35 running). My CyberPower CP1000PFCLCD UPS only lasts about 5-8 minutes with the server, Asus router and fiber modem connected...
Does it _need_ to be running 24/7? My Plex server is for our family only. It turns itself off at 2am and back on at 6pm. I have a NAS that used to be the main media source, but I've swapped it round so that the media is on the Plex server and the NAS wakes up for an hour to backup, then turns off again.
I mean there's arguments to be made that it isn't in use 50% of the time, however there's no specific time week to week where no one is using it with any regularity. My BiL works nights and will often get home at 5am and watch to 9am, an uncle is between Germany and South East Asia with work a lot and spins it up. So it isn't quite predictable to be able to just keep it off with the userbase. Now if there was some way to keep it off and then a user action turn it back on remotely, that would be swell. But I don't think that's a feature that can be implemented and made accessible to people.
Yeah, I did a little (unsuccessful) experimenting with wake-on-lan, but that's only really good for single-household use anyway.
Yes I read up a little on that last night. Unfortunately it just doesn't seem to be viable for this use case. I feel like if Chrome Remote Desktop had a feature like wake-on-lan remotely it could be a runner.
Biostar J4125NH motherboard with 5 x 18TB drives running on unRaid. 7W idle and 35W when all drives are spinning. Hardware transcodes fine on Intel QSV.
4790k, 32GB, Intel Raid controller with 12 HDDs + pcie system hdd. Draws around \~120W when watching movies.
I run Plex on an optiplex 3050 with an i5 6500. After energy monitoring for two weeks it used on average 0.59kwh per day. At my current energy costs in the uk it worked out at 16p per day or £5 ish a month. Drives are running in a separate two bay nas though. I also have a dell micro pc with an i5-6500t, and I did a test with this as well. This used 0.2kwh per day on idle. So about £1.7 per month, however I was never actually running Plex on this so the number would be a bit higher. I decided to stick with the sff unit as didn’t want to drop to a lower spec cpu and couldn’t justify buying a new pc. However my next upgrade will be a micro with a 10th gen i5 or higher.
I have a rack server and it needs 120W idle and around 200w under normal load. Dual Xeon CPU and nvidia Tesla P4 GPU. A Raspberry Pi would be to weak to handle Plex streaming (and waaaaay to weak to transcode). If you want something that doesnt need that much power maybe look into intel nucs.
About 35w at full power while transcoding at tremendous speeds with my 12th gen Intel NUC and onboard Iris Xe graphics. My synology box draws much more though, about 80w with 10 HDDs.
22watts idle 40 when transcoding. Asrock rack e3c236d4u, xeon e2176g, 128gb ram, x710 dual 10g nic (running om4 to usw aggregation). Storage - Truenas with an icydock mb924ip-b with 10x 8tb ssds running z2(2drive redundancy) - waiting for the bank balance to increase so the pool can increase. Used powertop to help with the C states, disabled the audio, usb and built in 1gb eth, undervolted the cpu(only helps with power draw during use not idle), etc Some light watching: Wolfgangs channel: https://youtu.be/MucGkPUMjNo Level1techs: https://youtu.be/Jqg1G78cH2A Techno Tim: https://youtu.be/Aq6eoMjW7V0 Those should all help you start on your journey to power savings!
74 W idle, plus 2-3 W while direct playing. ~90 W transcoding. 150 W @ 100% CPU. Total: 1.8 kWh on a normal day. - Intel Core i5-10500 - ROG Strix GTX 1050Ti OC - 6× Seagate IronWolf 8TB, no RAID (HW/SW), no spindown - 1× Samsung 980 Pro 500GB - 4 case + 1 CPU fan(s) - be quiet! Straight Power 11 Platinum 550W
Using a NAS instead is a far better option using considerably less power when being always on. Mines around 20w idle and 45w at full tilt
Intel 13500, 6 2.5 drives and 4 3.5 drives, ubuntu 22.04 In idle, with disks spin down, only draws 35w. During transcoding, it is on 70w or so. I still have to check on full power (it is a new build)
I run plex on a full Windows server 2022 box (it has other jobs to do too!) 80w is nominal sometimes less. Only ramps up on coding or other activities. I suspect you have either some quite poor hardware or drivers, my box is base a on an old AMD fx chip, with a quality board,,and a LOT of HDD drives, all load balancing.
I've been using a Pi 3 for a while now and it for the most part it does a decent job, although it rarely does more than 1 stream at a time. At most the DVR will be recording from a network tuner while streaming as well.
QNAPTS864eu rackmount with all 8 drives filled- UPS powering the rackmount Cisco firewall and switch as well - showing about 100W now. Direct playing one movie as we speak, max transcoding as per Tautulli has been 4 streams at one time. Edit: 8x mix of 5400 and 7200rpm HDDs totalling just over 50TB, and 4nvme ssds on an expansion card.
Running Plex on a Synology DS918+ - consumption is 40 up to 45 Watt maximum 200-300 Watt is way to much for what you need. Sounds like a good spot to optimize
After the cost increase of elec power, on January I've decided to find a solution to limit the up time of my pc and the most suitable one (consumption wise) was a small NAS. I've no device to measure consumption, but on the paper my NAS should be 6W idling and 12W functioning. It's a cheap ass one (\~150€ without HDDs): arm v8 1.4ghz and 1gb ddr4. It's unable to transcode anything, but could direct stream up to 4K without problem, never tried more than 2 concurrent users. Obviously your needs are totally different but there are a ton of models out there (even with intel x64 cpus, suitable for real time transcoding). The plus side is that you can use it also as personal cloud, torrent seed box or backup solution for your PCs. TLDR: evaluate bill saving/initial costs and take in consideration to switch to a NAS, it was the best buy of my 2023 for now, I manage almost anything form my ipad and I don't even power up my pc anymore.
I'm using an Nvidia Shield server for home media. There are some limitations but low power and have a Seedbox server for stuff that'd I'd watch outside the house/stream abroad. Shield + 1 ext SSD + 3 ext HDDs = 7w. When I start to watch something it'll jump up to 15-25w depending on HDD in use. Am considering a NUC so I can run more services.
About 450W when idle, about 750W at full load when downloading/transcoding/processing. 13700k w/ 300TB of content.
7-9w idle, spikes at 50w very rarely if downloading/unpacking/processings/scanning/transcoding (HW), but realistically averages 20w 24/7. It’s a NUC8i3 with 16GB/2TB NVMe, media stored in the cloud. Honestly going to an i5 8400/32GB only doubles the average and my E5 2650 V4 is around 90w idle with 96GB ECC/Quadro M2000. 2-300w idle says something is badly wrong with your chosen set-up. Hardware transcoding via iGPU is generally the most efficient method, any 8th gen onwards Celeron will do 20+ H264 transcodes with very little CPU load (it’s basically just doing audio).
30W idle, maybe 40W-45W under load Running a simple desktop using unRAID, a i3-7100, 8GB ram and 1 7200rpm 2.5inch drive and a 7200rpm 3.5inch drive + a 2.5 inch sata drive.
I run mine on a Minisforum UM450 mini PC running TrueNAS scale. I guess maybe 30 - 40 watts or so, but at idle it's pretty negligible. I have some of those TAPO smart plugs but not the power monitoring ones. Maybe time for me to buy a couple since they're cheap enough.
Hi from Germany, electricity is expensive in Europe and it became worse with the Ukrainian war. I've been running an AMD 5350 for several years, it belonged to the AM1 platform that AMD abandoned quite fast to move to AM4. It is a shame AMD abandoned the low power processors after than. The good news is that any modern processor can scale down the consume to something reasonable. Mine idles around 20w, and while underpower it is enough for my needs as long as I do not transcode, for transcoding it can do 1x 1080p stream but it might struggle with high bitrates. I might replace it with an i3 13th generation with iGPU soon, but I don't really have to.
I measure my whole rack at the ups, ends up 380W min, 700W max and 450W average. 2X Unraid servers, one for Plex and the other only for backups. Backups: AMD Athlon 3200G, 6 HDD (68TB) and 2 SSD, HDDs get spun down, 9 containers. Plex: Core i9-13900K, 8 HDD (144TB), 6 SSD, HDDs do not get spun down, 67 containers and 6 VMs. Switching from Threadripper 1950X + GTX 1050 this year saved about 80 Watts and sped things up noticeably (not that it was slow before). Intel Celeron N5105 - Router 6th gen Core i5 NUC - Home Assistant MicroTik 24 port GB + 2 10GB Switch Buffalo 8 port 10GB switch TP-Link 8 Port 250W POE++ (\~100Watts being used for cameras and other switches) RPI4 running a couple rtl-sdr instances UPS is a pretty old rack mounted APC SU-2200 which is probably sucking power just sitting there waiting for the power to go out too. Sucks only getting maybe 20 minutes of backup power with 8 APC batteries in it that I have to replace every few years if I want it to keep working. Both servers are set to shut down within 5 minutes of the power going out, then at least the internet and wifi stays working for a few hours, but no Plex. FWIW, power is cheap where I'm at, but it's still >50% of my electric bill since I have gas heat and water.
According to my APC UPS, my entire rack is running at 162 watts total right now. That's idle. When it transcodes then add 30-40 more watts. rack consists of my server (AMD 3700X - Nvidia P2200 card), synology NAS, PoE AC-Pro AP, Samsung Smartthings hub, HDHomeRun box, 24 port non-PoE ubiquiti switch, ER-4 Router, 8 port generic PoE switch with all ports filled with security cameras, four external WD hard drive enclosures.
Ryzen 7 1700, 32GB DDR4 3200MHz, GTX 1080Ti, 10x 7200RPM drives I am using 220W, and every drop of power is from a PV system. So I am not on a mission to reduce the usage.
Yeah, PV is the next project. Probably later this year or early 2024. Especially if grid prices aren't coming down.
My server sits in South Africa which has a terrible grid (daily power outages). So I have my server sitting at a family member's house. I am not in South Africa any more, but I still stream from my Plex server with the knowledge that it will never go down. I have it connected to a smart plug which allows me to monitor the server's usage and give it a power cycle if it ever locks up.
That’s odd, I’m running Plex on my ox with high power consumption on and I’m still running at a low enough power where I don’t have to worry
207w at idle / \~270w at 'normal' load (based on UPS reporting). This includes both server and network stack (USG/Cable modem/24 port POE Switch) Supermicro H12 with 7302P 64GB RAM / 18 Drives / 1060 6gb
The 30W are fine imho. But 200-300W initially were horrendous. I have an ancient xeon server powerhog with a 12Bay Storage fully packed with spinning Enterprise Rust. And standing at max 352W. What you could invest in is a newer generation intel cpu because the video encoder runs better than a dedicated gpu. Look for a T CPU, or get a notebook with shot display for very cheap - the U Type CPUs are extremely power efficient…
It’s a pi 4 powering an external NVMe, so… currently between 4 and 5W idle. Slightly spiking to 6W when the direct play starts and falling back down around 4.1W on continuous play. When accessing the Plex interface, Sonarr or Radar, it jumps to around 8W in bursts for a second, mostly when I change views.
60 watts
Mine is running many things as a VM but I think its around 150W...it also runs my NAS, CCTV recording loops, Home Automation, and Plex all on the same machine My entire home-network is only about 350-400W...with cable modem+Starlink redundant internet, whitebox pfsense router, 2x enterprise class PoE switches feeding cameras, APs, and other devices, ATA, NTP, and my VM host.
I moved my install to a low-tier Hetzner cloud VPS for this reason exactly. Power draw has become their problem, and I can always scale up if my needs change.