Calculating power requirements

Calculating power requirements

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When building a system you need to do some power requirements guesstimates, most often this doesn’t have to be very precise and especially when building a normal form factor PC or server, the power supply is often heavily oversized anyway.

However when trying to build a performant but energy efficient system, things become a little bit more critical. Especially when you really start taking a look at see how much power you are going to need on the 12v and especially 5v rail.

Let’s explore!

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Fully designed hardware for the nodes

The hardware the nodes will use

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Nowadays you have lots of options when building a PC, you can choose between Intel and AMD, within their lineup they have various generations and types (mobile, desktop, prof, server, etc.) and then you have various motherboard vendors, lots of different cases, power supplies, and the list goes on, what combination will get you what you need?

It’s hard to say what *you* need, below is what I think that, at the time of writing, is ideal for my situation to get a good combination of Performance, power usage and expandability.

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To Cluster or not to Cluster, that is the question

Partly a cluster, partly not?!

Home Server Cluster 2025 index

Over the years I have been using Proxmox and I’ve grown to like it a lot. I know there are a lot of other solutions out there but Proxmox takes the right boxes for me such as being heavily integrated with ZFS and allowing you to run Clusters even with dissimilar hardware, etc. so I will keep using it moving forward.

Cluster with no shared storage?

One of the things I have transitioned to a few years back on my current Proxmox cluster is not running my VMs on storage that is RAID backed up or at least not on all nodes. Instead I use a different strategy which running in a cluster enables.

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Don’t run hardware until the end of time!

Hardware won’t live until the end of time

Home Server Cluster 2025 index

Hardware has a finite amount of time that it will stay working. It varies from component to component but still, in the end it will die.

A CPU or RAM stick, when cooled properly and running 24/7 can probably last you between 10 and 20 years without a problem.

But something like a fan or harddisk (HDD) that has spinning motors, those will have a much more finite lifespan. In my person opinion and experience, it can be expected to last at least 5 years but beyond that wear and tear is going to start taking more and more of a toll. Disks will start to fail more and more often but there is also the energy usage factor to consider, let’s dive into that!

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Davinci Resolve Speed Editor not functioning (2024)

Davinci Resolve Speed Editor stops working

I’ve been using Davinci Resolve since 2022 when I switched from Vegas Pro 19 (crashing mess, can’t handle 4K with a few timelines) to Davinci Resolve. I’ve been quite happy with Resolve, it’s quick to use and has lots of functions (of which I don’t use nearly any at all).

I get my Davinci Resolve license by buying a Speed Editor, a little extra keyboard with a job dial on there which makes editing in Davinci a whole lot easier and quicker (even though I don’t use the cutting view and just the timeline view).

It’s a great little keyboard for a great price, but it really sucks when it stops working!

The Davinci Speed Editor keyboard

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DIY Cloud backup 2022 update

Update to the DIY Cloud backup project
2022 update!

In 2017 I built a DIY cloud backup solution (which you can find documented here). This has been running every since but somewhere end of 2021 I decided the used hardware could use a little update.

I’ve been trying to do a video series of basically a re-imagining of the project but I’m having a hard time following it through!

With this post video part 4 (and 5) are going to be released and we are finally heading towards the end of the project!

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Lots of External HDD on a single Power Supply

Sometimes you accumulate a lot of equipment in one spot that all runs on 12v. This can for instance be a rack with multiple switches and routers or, as in my case, 15 External Hard Drives, a USB HUB and some fans that all need 12v. To cut down on the clutter, let’s take out the 18 Adapters to run this and replace them with a single power supply.

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Chia farming info post

I’ve recently started farming Chia using a lot of harddisk space. To me it’s the ultimate system administrators crypto coin since it doesn’t use GPUs and there is a lot involved getting it to run quickly and correctly! This post will serve as an accompanying posts to my videos about the subject.

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