Xeon NAS - Power consumption and PCI passthrough to TrueNAS

The Workshop On The Hill sets up a high performance NAS system based on a Chinese X99 Xeon board (see first boot video here:    • $180 NAS board - does it work?   ). Details power consumption, core temperatures, and shows how to enable PCIe device passthrough in Proxmox to allow TrueNAS native access to the two onboard SATA controllers, avoiding all of the hardware virtualisation overhead that Proxmox would otherwise introduce.


00:00 Introduction & recap
00:18 DIY chassis & drive bays
01:25 Sleep power consumption
02:00 Idle power consumption, no spinning drives
02:49 Stressed power consumption & temperatures, no spinning drives
03:57 Installing the drives
07:05 Power consumption with drives
07:56 Enabling hotswapping on the two SATA controllers
09:15 Enabling SATA controller passthrough in Proxmox
11:42 Consuming the passthrough in the TrueNAS VM
13:55 Final power measurement with Proxmox & TrueNAS running