I was looking to upgrade my older server to something one generation newer. I looked at various r330, r430, r530, r630, and r730 as various options. I was looking for something more then 1u and was large form factor (LFF) drives while not increasing my power consumption. I found a dell r530 on ebay, made an offer of $65 (plus $85 for shipping) and the seller accepted. My goal was to see if I could get the power utilization lower on this server then my old one at about 95 watts.
Specification of the Dell r530
- Processor: 2x E5-2640v4 (decent surprise, figured it has the v3, the ebay listing didn’t specify)
- Ram: 64GB
- PSU: 495 Watt (only 1 plugged in)
- idrac running
- Raid in HBA bypass mode
- Hard drives – WD 3.5: 2 x 500GB (waiting on new drives to show up)
Software
- unraid 7.0 trial
I don’t take the best measurements for idle power consumption as default, however I know during boot up of the system its 140+ watts , and I want to say it was around 98 to 105 watts when using proxmox.
This pdf was the best source I found and I read through it and changed some settings in the BIOS per these recommendations – https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/power-efficiency-how-to-13g-servers_030216.pdf, hopefully I captured all of the changes I made. There was some changes I didn’t make or couldn’t find as I believe bios interface has been updated since that pdf was written.
Bios Settings
- Integrated Devices – Disabled NIC 3 and 4
- Systems profile settings
- System Profile: Custom
- CPU Power Management – System DBPM (DAPC)
- Memory Freq – Maximum Performance (I didn’t change this)
- Turbo Boost – Enabled
- Energy Efficient Turbo – Enabled
- C1E – Enabled
- C States – Enabled
- Energy Efficient Policy – Energy Efficient
- Monitor/Mwait – Enabled
- Raid Controller
- Controller Management
- Advanced Controller Properties
- Physical Disk Power Management
- Power Savings Mode – Maximum Power Savings
- Physical Disk Power Management
- Advanced Controller Properties
- Controller Management
Confirmed idrac vs wall meter and get similar numbers.
With no hard drives, idle power consumption at around 70 watts
With 2 hard spinning drives, idle power consumption is 84 watts
I don’t think the drives are spinning down, so I need to check into that or maybe just let unraid manage that.
I am really happy with the results, considering I am able to add an additional processor and more storage then my previous server and reduce the power consumption a little.