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FreeBSD on Aoostar WTR Pro NAS

tumfatig.net43 points5 comments
Screenshot of FreeBSD on Aoostar WTR Pro NAS

A hands-on evaluation of the Aoostar WTR Pro Ryzen edition shows a sturdy metal chassis that fits a 10" rack, easy-to-access NVMe slots underneath and numbered front-loading SATA trays with mostly tool-less 3.5" support (2.5" trays require screws and some fiddling). BIOS has SecureBoot off by default and exposes fan and temperature controls; a low-pitched, audible fan and case resonance are prominent until the BIOS fan curve is tuned. With a single 32 GB module and no storage the system draws about 28 W in BIOS, and adding NVMes barely changes that figure.

Power measurements and tuning across Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD reveal wide differences and concrete knobs to save watts. Alpine/Linux idle sits around 11-12 W (Debian reached 8-9 W after tuning and disconnecting USB peripherals). NetBSD idles near 18 W, dropping to 14 W when the USB display is removed. OpenBSD ranged 21 W during install, to ~10 W after removing peripherals. FreeBSD started ~19 W, and enabling deeper C-states (hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest=C3) reduced it to ~12 W; setting hw.pci.do_power_nodriver=3 reached ~11 W, and loading amdgpu drivers dropped consumption to ~8 W. powertop, usbconfig power_save, amdtemp for sensors, and BIOS fan adjustments are the main practical levers; powerd and apmd showed limited benefit on this hardware.

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