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Sunday, September 18, 2016

How much power does my NAS based on the HP MicroServer Gen8 use?

Ever since building a Network Attached Storage (NAS) for storing all my data files, I was intrigued about how much power it actually drew from the wall. This turned into a concern when our household electricity bill skyrocketed in the last couple of months. I did not think the server contributed to a significant portion of the usage, but you never know.

I finally decided to buy a watt meter. Kill-a-watt, which is the popular product amongst PC users was expensive. So I looked at Chinese products on eBay and AliExpress. Found one for cheap on AliExpress an ordered. It took a long time to arrive. The current price is much higher than what I paid for it. I only paid $11.71.

I plugged the watt meter to the wall socket and the server to it, and measured the power consumption. While idling, it used about 40W, which was a bit higher than I expected. But it could be because it has two mechanical drives, an SSD and 10GB of RAM. What was impressive was that it only used about 6W more while doing a HandBrake transcoding job, however it is painfully slow compared to my Desktop.

So it would use about 1 unit per day if I run it 24/7. It is not that bad, but could be lower, and would have definitely be lower if it was an off-the-shelf NAS. I'm just relieved that it is not using a horrendous amount of power.

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