I am thinking of upgrading my servers to a single device and would be grateful for some advice on what to consider.
I currently have
a Raspberry Pi3B+, running Homeassistant - with USB SSD for the system.
an Ordoid HC2, running Openmediavault. This runs TVHeadend for all my recordings. Contains a 3.5" 14TB Harddrive.
A Raspberry PIB+, running PiHole.
With energy prices at the moment, energy consumption is going to be really key - are there any x86 mini pcs with really low power wattages or should I stick with ARM?
Plenty. Basically all based on Intel Pentium Silver oder Gold or Celeron APUs have more power than a Raspberry Pi 4 and do not consume significantly more energy.
Search eBay for “Dell Wyze 5070 J5005” and you’ll find many items in the price range of $50 to $75 USD. You can update the RAM and SSD to suit your needs.
My NAS, a Synology DS920+ - admittedly with 3 4TB disks and 20GB RAM - draws around 45W continuously, so I’m not sure that is the best solution energy-wise. I guess a smaller NAS will be better, but I wanted to warn that a NAS is not always as power-efficient as you’d think.
I would probably see if I could find a laptop with a broken touch screen cheap with a newer Pentium Silver N5000 or better yet the successor Pentium Silver N6000.
They are around 2.5-3 times faster than a Raspberry Pi4 on the CPU passmark score alone, but also comes with more features in hardware so they are in fact even faster.
The Pentium N5000/N6000 use 15W max on the CPU and have many power saving options, so often it run for a lot less and it is usually fanless.
The fact that it is a laptop also means that the battery can be used as a UPS, since a few command line sensors are enough to see if the laptop is running on mains or battery and you can also see the state of the battery and other stuff, so it is easy to make automations based upon these sensors.
With these dell thin clients be sure to check SSD compatibility. The M.2 is often limited to SATA HDDs and there is no NVME support. As the majority of M.2 SSDs sold are NVME these days it is easy to get a incompatible SSD.
Thanks very much for all this - this is actually a little more tricky than I thought.
Does anyone happen to know what the approximate power consumption of the Dell Wyze is?
I am still using 2.5" SSDs so the NVME is something that never occurred to me - is it possible that M.2 Sata sticks might just stop being sold in favour of NVME versions?
I have been looking at NUCs and they also look like a great option, though they can be quite expensive. I have found a number of clones, however, that seem to offer similar specs for cheaper:
I have 3 of the Dell WYSE 5070 boxes, modem, POE switch (powering two access points) and an external hard drive that all run off the same UPS and it reports between 27 and 36 watts.
When I had one of them plugged into a power monitoring plug I saw something similar, single digits at idle with an OS running and 10-13 with a synthetic CPU load running.