Lately I received a primergy rx2530 m1, m2 and m4 (all maxed out with ram and cpus) and wonder if and which of them can be driven as energy efficient as any random diy built. I saw plenty of energy saving options on the Bios (cpu and ram related) but do not know how comparable this is with a consumer setup and which ones are important to be set. I will make my own measurements with truenas and proxmox but wonder if anyone else has those in use. I saw that the rx2540 might be the better option as it can pickup 8 x 3,5 hdd while on the rx2530s the m1 is the only one compatible with with 3,5. Also they have proprietary Hbas. Can those be switched into dumb mode where they allow the os direct access to the connected drives?
Thank you for any suggestions and sharing experiences.
I highly doubt these systems are suitable for your needs. Dual socket servers are not great in terms of power efficiency and the 1u form factor means you cannot even use some of the benefits like the high number of PCIe lanes. On top of that consumer CPUs got a lot faster in recent years so even if you need a fair bit of CPU power (normally not necessary for a NAS) you are better off getting something more modern. Your best bet is to sell off the servers and get something more suited to your needs.
I guess selling them makes most sense. Removing one of the cpus and 3/4s of the ram might be necessary to bring down the power consumption for home use. Noise is not that much of an issue as it would be placed in the cellar anyway. I am about to donate one of them to my local hackspace though (they might be interested to fiddle and get their hands on server grade stuff as some of them over there do not have access to it at work), so I still wonder how to run them as energy efficient and quiet as possible with options given on the bios by Fujitsu. I will post some findings with power consumption in a separate thread or here. Thanks!
Removing CPUs and RAM will also decrease its compute power. Disabling features also will likely remove some of the enterprise features like IPMI. You might end up getting the worst of both worlds - Not a ton of PCIe, few cores and RAM - but loud, and still pretty power hungry.