Did I Accidentally Build The World's Most Power Efficient NAS and Homelab Combo Server?

There is a serious problem with the question in the title. It all hinges on what you feel qualifies as a NAS or a homelab. We could serve a README.MD over WebDAV on an ESP32 and call it a power-sipping NAS, and if that is what you had in mind, then the answer to the question in the title is a definitive “No!”

I don’t have Guinness on speed dial, and I doubt that I am literally breaking any actual records either on purpose or by accident, but I am somehow accidentally landing in the top one percent category after ordering a 6-bay Cenmate USB SATA enclosure back in June.

6-Bay Cenmate USB enclosure with my N100 router mini PC

I have not staged any cool pictures for this blog, but it has been ready to publish for almost a month now. This is a photo from one of the previous blogs. I will attempt to correct this in the near future!

I knew the first time that I picked it up after filling it with 3.5” hard drives that the Cenmate enclosure is dense, but I didn’t do the math to understand exactly how dense my enclosure paired with an N100 or N150 mini PC actually is until almost two months later. I have a NAS that hold six 3.5” SATA drives that takes up just barely more than six liters. That is less than a third the size of a Jonsbo N2 case.

I may very well have built the lowest price, lowest power, most dense homelab and NAS setup. I don’t know that you could beat it without unless you buy used parts instead.

NOTE: I don’t ACTUALLY have this NAS built and running in my home, but it isn’t just hypothetical. I do have all the necessary parts on hand to measure the cost, power consumption, and volume. I definitely don’t have the six 26 TB hard disks here to max it out to 156 terabytes!

What about power consumption?

I already know that my Trigkey N100 mini PC that I bought for $143 averages around 7 watts on the power meter. That is running Proxmox with a few idle virtual machines and LXC containers booted.

When I first plugged the empty 6-bay Cenmate enclosure into both my power meter and my mini PC, I learned that the enclosure only uses 0.2 watts of additional power. That is as close to a rounding error as it gets.

At this point I have an empty 6-bay, 6.2-liter Intel N100 NAS with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB NVMe that cost me $325, and it is idling away at 7.2 watts.

Plugging in hard disks adds about as much power consumption as you would expect. The meter goes up by 8 watts when you plug a 3.5” hard drive into a bay, and hammering the disks with a mean benchmark brings that up to 9 watts per drive. Your mileage may vary here, because every make and model of hard disk runs a little differently.

My fully-loaded 6-disk NAS idles at about 55 watts, and it maxes out at around 62 watts when the CPU or GPU are under maximum load.

NOTE: These wattages are gathered from notes and blogs. I’m going to plug six real hard disks back in, and power the Trigkey N100 mini PC and Cenmate enclosure using a single power-metering smart outlet to get a proper, correct, real number soon. I am in the middle of torture testing the Cenmate enclosure with massive IOPS on a stack of SATA SSDs, and I don’t want to stop that to re-verify these numbers.

It Was Cheaper To Buy A Second Homelab Server Mini PC Than To Upgrade My RAM!

Couldn’t we beat this “record” with a Raspberry Pi?

Yes. A Raspberry Pi would drop the price by $50 to $70, and it would drop the idle power consumption by 3 or 4 watts. It might even be slim enough to bring the total volume down to an even six liters!

I don’t think this is a good trade. Proxmox on an x86 machine is fantastic, and gives you a lot more flexibility and way more horsepower. It is hard to beat an Intel N100 or N150 when you’re transcoding with Plex or Jellyfin. Most Intel N150 mini PCs come with twice as much RAM as the most expensive Raspberry Pi, and they ship with a real NVMe installed, so you don’t have to boot off a fragile SD card. The mini PC will also already be installed in a case, and it comes with its own power supply.

We are starting to see Intel N150 mini PCs with one or sometimes two 2.5-gigabit Ethernet ports down near $150. That is a nice feature to get effectively for free, and the best part is that an Intel N150 is fast enough to encrypt Tailscale traffic at around 2.4 gigabits per second. That is something a Raspberry Pi can’t manage, and that is extremely important for my setup.

I don’t like focusing on volume and liters

Volume is not a terribly interesting measurement for most home users. We could build a custom two-liter server that is a few inches wide, an inch tall, and 32” deep. That would be awful! It would hang off the front of your desk!

In the olden days, you would be excited if your physical shop had 100’ of frontage along Main Street. There’s a similar concept that applies to the linear footage of your desk. It almost doesn’t matter how tall something is, as long as it isn’t too wide or too deep, then it’ll fit well on the surface of your desk.

A 4’ tall but narrow server might look silly on your desk, and that might be too tall to even hide under your desk.

I feel that my build is very well suited to sitting on the edge of your desk. It is only about five inches wide and eight inches deep, and it is still less than a foot high.

This might be the laziest way to build a DIY NAS!

Two power cables and one USB cable. That’s it. Just place the two boxes on or near each other and plug them in. That’s the hardware setup for this DIY NAS. Slide in as many hard disks as you need, and you’re ready to set up your software.

It almost feels like cheating.

Aren’t USB hard drive enclosures scary?!

I am currently doing my best to torture test my Cenmate enclosure. I have been running continuously running fio randread tests averaging 60,000 IOPS across a RAID 0 of old SATA SSDs. The test has been running for 14 days straight without a single error as I am writing this paragraph.

USB storage was sketchy in the USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 days. Things have gotten a lot more solid in the last few years. Professional-grade video cameras write RAW video directly to USB SSDs. Professional video editors are working directly with the footage over USB, or many of them are copying that footage to other USB SSDs and working from that copy.

That entire world loves Apple laptops, and Apple laptops don’t have any options for large amounts of storage besides the USB and Thunderbolt ports. These things have to be well made now.

You don’t have to follow my Intel N100 blueprint!

Mini PCs, simple external USB hard drives, and 6-bay USB enclosures are a lot like Lego bricks. Need a lot of storage? Plug in a bigger Cenmate enclosure. Still not enough storage? Plug in a second one? Need more RAM or CPU power? Use a beefier mini PC!

An example would be the Acemagician M1 that I use as a Bazzite gaming machine in the living room. It also idles at around 6 watts when running Proxmox. It costs twice as much as an Intel N150 mini PC, but it is also more than three times faster and can hold twice as much RAM.

The price will go up a bit, so we wouldn’t be building the lowest cost 6-bay NAS anymore, but you definitely get some upgrades for your money. The Intel N100 does manage to beat the Ryzen 6800H in the Acemagician M1 by a small margin, and my 6800H uses 50 watts of power to while transcoding for Jellyfin. My Intel N100 transcodes faster, and that mini PC uses less than 15 watts while doing it. This is not a big deal unless you watch movies 12 hours every day.

The Acemagician M1 is a good value for your homelab if you can get it on sale. I paid around $330 for mine. It is a good fit because it has two DDR5 SO-DIMM slots, two m.2 NVMe slots, and 2.5-gigabit Ethernet. That’s about as good of a combination as you can get in this price range.

You don’t have to build a NAS, you can directly attach the Cenmate enclosure to your computer!

I could write an entire blog post listing tons of good reasons why you might want to have a NAS on your home network.

I can’t do the topic justice in a couple of paragraphs, but I can say this! When the cost of turning a 6-disk enclosure into a NAS is only an extra $150 or so, there isn’t much excuse not to do it.

Even though it is inexpensive, you don’t have to do it. Maybe you just need a place to store footage when you edit videos at home. Maybe you need storage for your daily or weekly backups. You might already have to plug your laptop into a docking station when you sit at your desk at home, and your Cenmate enclosure can just stay plugged into the dock. This is a fine workflow to have.

What if you want to set things up so you can have remote access to that footage when you aren’t at home. Your home Internet connection may not be fast enough to edit video directly, but being able to grab a video file in a pinch could save you a drive. That’s a good reason to set up a NAS with Tailscale.

Conclusion

Should you [build your DIY NAS][] out of a mini PC and a USB enclosure? I don’t know! My NAS needs are simple to the extreme. I don’t need my NAS to have a management interface. I manually set up my RAID arrays and the two shares or NFS exports I might need. I have absolutely no idea what TrueNAS does when you plug in an enclosure like this. Since it is USB-attached-SATA, I assume TrueNAS will treat them just like any SATA disks, but I haven’t tested this.

I just think it is neat that my lazy and simple set of LEGO-style pieces here wound up being nearly the most power efficient and storage-dense setup that anyone could make even make with off-the-shelf parts, and USB enclosures like the ones from Cenmate fit my use case extremely well. I enjoy having the extreme level of flexibility.

What do you think? Can you build a more densely packed NAS that uses mechanical hard disks? Can you do it without spending too much more money? Will your build sip even less power? Will it sip enough less power to make a difference on my monthly electric bill? You should join our friendly Discord community to tell us about your build, or to give me a link to your write-up so I can point people to it!