I turned an old laptop into a power efficient FreeNAS server using hot glue and duct tape!

A video about my laptop powered 6 hard drive FreeNAS server! It only consumes 56 watts idle, and performs fairly well on a gigabit network.

Power Consumption:

At the end of the video you can see a picture of the power meter with system idle at around 54 watts. I have worked a lot on power management and have come up with the following figures. Not sure if this qualifies as ultra power efficient as I mentioned in the video, but the numbers hold up against many off the shelf models!

Read/Write: 65-70 watts
Idle Disks spinning: 54 watts
HDD Standby: 18.1 watts
(Using powerd - and C2 power state)

System Specs / Hardware:

Lenovo T520 Motherboard
https://support.lenovo.com/ca/en/solutions/pd015761

Lenovo T520 Docking Station
Intel i7 - 2640m mobile cpu
8 GB Ram
2x 16GB kingston flash drives for boot (configured in raid 1)
6x 2TB Western Digital Red NAS Drives
Old 3u server chassis

I tried the latest version of FreeNAS (11.2) but I was not able to get the system to run correctly due to terrible performance booting from USB. After some research, I discovered I am not the only one with these problems, so I went with 11.1 which works fine.

Performance Results:

Copying large files (30MB +) I was able to maintain about 100MB/s write, and 105-110 MB/S read.
Smaller files such as pictures (not tested in video) was about 40-60 MB/s write, and slightly faster reading.

Reference:

CPU / HDD Temperature Script
https://pastebin.com/FtZKahQk

Freenas Setup Guide (Links to another channel)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMZ-s8wHkHw

PCIE Adapter
(I did not have a lot of confidence that this would even work, but it did!)
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32861221054.html

BIOS MOD
(This took a lot of reading to find a download link that actually worked!)
https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-REQUEST-Lenovo-T520-8AETxxWW-Whitelist-Removal?page=19

Видео I turned an old laptop into a power efficient FreeNAS server using hot glue and duct tape! канала Tech with Shae