Question How much power supply for a 12 drive NAS?

Put your configuration into PC Part Picker and see what it says. Id say 750w is more than enough especially if you don't have a big GPU.

I would try to configure staggered spin-up so that all 12 drives don't instantly load up your PSU.

A 12-drive NAS typically requires a power supply of around 300–500 watts, depending on the drives and system components. Always check the NAS specs and drive requirements for accuracy.

On top of the motherboard m, CPU, etc., a 3.5” spinning HDD usually uses 15-20w while operating, or ~1w when it’s spun down.

So 12 would use 240w tops. Probably closer to 180w. Either way, a 750w PSU should be fine.

Keeping an 8350 idling 24/7 is going to hurt the power bill, though. I’d seriously consider hitting up a local swap meet or freecycle type site to see if I could trade it for a platform with better power management.

^ Are you factoring for the 8350 being mostly idle? I realize you mentioned idling but what is the TDP downclocked to do so? It's only a 120W TDP at peak, right?

Maybe underclock/undervolt as well. Yes there are lower TDP processors for a mere NAS application, but I don't think it would get even 25W average in this use compared to the ~200W of the HDDs and motherboard. Granted, less if the HDDs spin down and sleep on a conservative interval, but that is (to me) the biggest performance hit of all, having to wait for HDDs to spin back up upon initial access.

Also the 4 x 8GB is overkill unless there is a high # of concurrent accesses. A single 8GB would be plenty. Underclock and undervolt that as well. A NAS needs nowhere near that level of performance for limited concurrent access home use.

I'm sure benchmarks would suggest otherwise, but I don't tend to find any that replicate my typical use pattern. YMMV.

Lastly no mention was made of the ethernet speed. Concurrent access can easily saturate 1Gb, if pulling files rather than just streaming video, but if it is mostly streaming video, do you need to plan for over 2.5Gb if the motherboard (being DDR3, seem unlikely to have support for and no mention was made of this critical NAS feature, "IF" needed...) ethernet higher than 1Gb so a 2.5Gb or better card was added to achieve this?

If it's going to be connected by only 1Gb ethernet, save the value of the parts and get something very low power and toss 4GB memory in. About a decade ago I did that with an embedded J1900 celeron board (Asrock Q1900M and raid card), for ~$75 at the time... so yes I'm coming back full circle and also think power consumption can be reduced, depending on the specifics of what is needed out of the NAS... and something like a J1900 CPU, doesn't even need a passive (no fan) heatsink more than about 5 cubic inches depending on chassis airflow patterns.

There are better low power embedded alternatives today than a Celeron J1900, I'm not suggesting that today. Shop around and see what you find, except that if you have the DDR3 memory, an older platform that takes it could make sense.

Much details missing about what performance is needed, the use pattern.

mindless1 said:

^ Are you factoring for the 8350 being mostly idle? I realize you mentioned idling but what is the TDP downclocked to do so? It's only a 120W TDP at peak, right?

Click to expand...

I was curious about that and in old reviews, it seems like even at idle an 8350 is pulling some pretty serious wattage. (System idle over 100w.)

IIRC the really nice single-digit idle wattage numbers we get now weren't really a thing until ivy bridge and ryzen.

mindless1 said:

Maybe underclock/undervolt as well. Yes there are lower TDP processors for a mere NAS application, but I don't think it would get even 25W average in this use compared to the ~200W of the HDDs and motherboard. Granted, less if the HDDs spin down and sleep on a conservative interval, but that is (to me) the biggest performance hit of all, having to wait for HDDs to spin back up upon initial access.

Click to expand...

Yeah, HD spinup/down is a big power saver but it definitely adds ~20 seconds or so to initial access latency. I you get a little creative with SSDs, mount points, ZFS, etc., you can probably create a "tiered" storage system that puts your most frequently accessed data on a solid state drive. Spinning 200w of HDDs would cost me about $0.75/day (YMMV), so payoff for an SSD would be relatively quick.

Always some argument about whether 24/7 operation is harder on the drives than the head parking/unparking.