Orange Pi Zero 3: Power Usage Benchmarks and Efficiency Tuning

In recent months, I’ve noticed that my file server has been shutting down frequently. The primary reason is that the UPS (LX2UPS) charge is no longer sufficient. It is likely that the 18650 cells have degraded, and frequent power outages have only worsened the situation. Therefore, I decided to investigate how this can be fixed.

My server is built on an Orange Pi Zero 3 and a 2.5” SATA HDD in an external USB enclosure. To start, I decided to measure the actual power consumption.

Test #1: Power Consumption Without Drives

In this test, I will check the power consumption of the Orange Pi Zero board alone, without any peripherals. I am conducting the measurements using a USB power meter, which allows me to monitor instantaneous current and total power consumption in milliwatts (mW).

  • First stage: 30 minutes of operation with Wi-Fi and Ethernet enabled, with no background processes. Measurements showed a consumption of 820 mWh.

  • Second stage: The same conditions, but the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules were software-disabled (rfkill and modprobe -r uwe5622_bsp_sdio). Consumption dropped slightly to 771 mWh.

  • Final stage: All network interfaces enabled, and a stress test was launched to load all four cores at 100%. In this mode, consumption rose to 1750 mWh.

Test #2: with a 2.5” USB HDD

In this phase, I measured the system’s power consumption with an external 2.5” USB HDD connected. Following the same methodology as the previous test, measurements were taken over 20–30 minutes across different operating modes.

  • Idle Mode: The system is booted and the disk is connected, but there is no active file access. Power consumption was 3.5 Wh.

  • Active Load Mode: A stress test for the disk subsystem was initiated (sudo stress --io 2 --hdd 1). In this mode, consumption rose to 4.8 Wh.

HDD — The Primary Load Source: Compared to the first test, connecting the hard drive increased the system’s baseline power consumption by nearly 4.5 times. This is primarily because a mechanical HDD consumes a significant amount of energy just to keep the spindle constantly spinning, even when no data is being read or written.

Test #3: Power Consumption with an NVMe Drive

In this test, I connected an NVMe drive via a USB adapter and measured the system’s power consumption in the following configuration:

  • Idle Mode: System is booted and the drive is connected, but there are no active requests. Power consumption was 1.35 Wh.

  • Active Load Mode: A disk subsystem stress test was initiated (sudo stress --io 2 --hdd 1). In this mode, consumption increased to 2.29 Wh.

The primary enemy of uptime is the mechanical hard drive. It creates a constant background load that is four times higher than the power consumption of the Orange Pi board itself. For my 18650-powered mini-server, this load is critical.

Comparison Summary

Configuration Idle (Steady State) Active Load (Stress)
Orange Pi Zero 3 (Board Only) 0.82 Wh 1.75 Wh
Orange Pi + NVMe SSD 1.35 Wh 2.29 Wh
Orange Pi + 2.5” HDD 3.50 Wh 4.80 Wh

P.S. I happen to have a few spare NVMe drives in my stash, which is why I installed one in the Orange Pi. However, if we don’t ignore the fact that memory and SSD prices have at least doubled recently, it might actually be cheaper to simply add more battery cells to the UPS module instead of buying a new drive.

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