[uxp8u61q]

I know nothing about building NASs so maybe my question has an obvious answer. But my impression is that most x64 CPUs are thoroughly beaten by Arm or RISC-V CPUs when it comes to power consumption. Is there a specific need for the x64 architecture here? I couldn't find an answer in TFA.

[adrian_b]

Most Arm or RISC-V CPUs (with the exception of a few server-oriented models that are much more expensive than x86) have very few PCIe lanes and SATA ports, so you cannot make a high throughput NAS with any of them.

There are some NAS models with Arm-based CPUs and multiple SSDs/HDDs, but those have a very low throughput due to using e.g. only one PCIe lane per socket, with at most PCIe 3 speed.

[arp242]

> my impression is that most x64 CPUs are thoroughly beaten by Arm or RISC-V CPUs when it comes to power consumption

Not really.

ARM (and to lesser degree, RISC-V) are often used and optimized for low-power usage and/or low-heat. x64 is often more optimized for maximum performance, at the expense of higher power usage and more heat. For many x64 CPUs you can drastically reduce the power usage if you underclock the CPU just a little bit (~10% slower), especially desktop CPUs but also laptops.

There are ARM and RISC-V CPUs that consume much less power, but they're also much slower and have a much more limited feature-set. You do need to compare like to like, and when you do the power usage differences are usually small to non-existent in modern CPUs. ARM today is no longer the ARM that Wilson et al. design 40 years ago.

And for something connected to mains, even doubling the efficiency and going from 7W to 3.5W doesn't really make all that much difference. It's just not a big impact on your energy bill or climate change.

[pmontra]

I'm using an Odroid HC4 as my home server. It has an ARM CPU and it's idling at 3.59 W now with a 1 TB SATA 3 SSD and some web apps that are basically doing nothing, because I'm their only user. It's got a 1 GB network card, like my laptop. I can watch movies and listen to music from its disk on my phone and tablet.

There is no need to have something faster. The SATA 3 bus would saturate a 2.5 GB card anyway. The home network in Cat 6A so it could go up to 10 GB. We'll see what happens some years from now.

[hmottestad]

You can very easily run docker containers on it. That’s why I went with a ryzen chip in mine.

You could always use an rpi if you want to go with ARM, and you’ll want something with ARMv8.