NAS Power Consumption
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In my experience using a PC as a NAS, the power draw isn't necessarily the drives as they spin down when idle.
I have an old desktop setup as NAS - with 2 drives or eight drives, idle power draw is virtually the same, about 100w, regardless of the OS (Windows, Linux, UnRAID, Proxmox).
I also have an old consumer NAS, with five 4TB drives, and it idles under 20w (I think last I checked it was ~15w... I need to check it again and write that down).
Two very similar systems, one designed to be a NAS, the other a desktop. It really comes down to the motherboard design and capabilities.
I also have a Dell SFF that idles at about 15w, regardless of drive count - one drive or four (and to get four I added a SATA expansion card and rigged some power splitters, really pushing the power supply). That box idling the same, even when pushed well past design, is pretty telling.
And don't think that SSD drives would do better - spinning disk drives generally have far better idle power than SSD does, and usually much better write power consumption.
So it really depends, and mostly on the motherboard itself. Yes, you'll get more power usage with more drives, but that's at write and read time. My SFF idles at 12w, peaks at 80w when converting videos, the read/write power is negligible, same with the NAS (I transfer hundreds of gigs between them every few days).
In my experience using a PC as a NAS, the power draw isn't necessarily the drives as they spin down when idle.
that's not always the default setup, especially with enterprise drives. also if you have some kind of monitoring, that can keep the drives from going down (for that, use linux hd-idle instead of drive internal idle timer), and it can also wake them up (for that, prometheus node exporter's smart collector first checks whether a drive is up, and only then collect stats). Interestingly, checking temps with smartctl always spins up my drives, while linux hwmon can give me live temp stats even while the drives are down
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In my experience using a PC as a NAS, the power draw isn't necessarily the drives as they spin down when idle.
I have an old desktop setup as NAS - with 2 drives or eight drives, idle power draw is virtually the same, about 100w, regardless of the OS (Windows, Linux, UnRAID, Proxmox).
I also have an old consumer NAS, with five 4TB drives, and it idles under 20w (I think last I checked it was ~15w... I need to check it again and write that down).
Two very similar systems, one designed to be a NAS, the other a desktop. It really comes down to the motherboard design and capabilities.
I also have a Dell SFF that idles at about 15w, regardless of drive count - one drive or four (and to get four I added a SATA expansion card and rigged some power splitters, really pushing the power supply). That box idling the same, even when pushed well past design, is pretty telling.
And don't think that SSD drives would do better - spinning disk drives generally have far better idle power than SSD does, and usually much better write power consumption.
So it really depends, and mostly on the motherboard itself. Yes, you'll get more power usage with more drives, but that's at write and read time. My SFF idles at 12w, peaks at 80w when converting videos, the read/write power is negligible, same with the NAS (I transfer hundreds of gigs between them every few days).
And don't think that SSD drives would do better - spinning disk drives generally have far better idle power than SSD does, and usually much better write power consumption.
I wonder if they can be "spinned down" like hard drives. their startup time would be much faster, so it's shutdown could even be on a tighter schedule. I mean probably they dont have an internal idle timer, but who cares if you can just have something like hd-idle that shuts it down according to a better schedule.
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"powerful" LOL it's a turd
but yeah my current setup also happens to play games and adding storage is much easier cuz I can just throw whatever in there instead of making sure the drive conforms to some arbitrary crap.
It's "powerful" in the sense that it has 48 PCI lanes and can use almost 800GB of memory (ECC included). This is just way overkill on most homelabs so the extra power draw isn't worth it.
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If you can figure out how to get a qnap to spin down its disks, please let me know lol. I've been searching for months and haven't found a reliable solution. I basically only need to access it once a day at MOST, so having the disks spinning away for like 99% of their life sucking down power is something I'd like to avoid. The problem seems to be that even with a perfectly clean slate, no services running, the system set up in their own RAID0 SSD pool, the HDD's, even with 0 bytes of data on them, are being pinged for access at least once a minute. I'm assuming it's some log being written to, but it's not anything visible in the file system, and I haven't been able to find any solution online, lots of people seem to have the same issue.
I'm tempted more and more every day to just grab one of those low-power embedded ITX boards and build up a custom rig. Other than the disk spinning constantly, the TS-462 does everything I need perfectly.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]The problem seems to be that even with a perfectly clean slate, no services running, the system set up in their own RAID0 SSD pool, the HDD's, even with 0 bytes of data on them, are being pinged for access at least once a minute.
if it's for drive health stats, and the device runs linux, hd-idle could help. it only counts actual block device (so, storage) access as activity
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It's "powerful" in the sense that it has 48 PCI lanes and can use almost 800GB of memory (ECC included). This is just way overkill on most homelabs so the extra power draw isn't worth it.
Ah yes, in that context I would agree.
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You can only spin drives down if they're idle. If you have a service that touches it - say, homeassistant logging data, tvheadend updating EPG - then they're going to keep spinning.
I would hope one would use an SSD for something like HomeAssistant. HDDs really shine as bulk media storage (music, pictures, video) not as storage for what would be the equivalent of running an OS on it.
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Drives only consume power on reads and writes, if your NAS spins them down as it should (and apparently QNAP *doesn't, which I didn't know).
As per my other comment - 8 drives or 1 drive, same idle power for desktop hardware. My actual NAS uses about 1/8 the power at idle for 5 drives.
Drives only consume power on reads and writes, if your NAS spins them down as it should (and apparently QNAP *doesn't, which I didn't know).
not really. not all drives spin down by themselves, by default. and even if they do, it'll happen relatively long after reads and writes, a the while it'll consume power.
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The problem seems to be that even with a perfectly clean slate, no services running, the system set up in their own RAID0 SSD pool, the HDD's, even with 0 bytes of data on them, are being pinged for access at least once a minute.
if it's for drive health stats, and the device runs linux, hd-idle could help. it only counts actual block device (so, storage) access as activity
They run a custom vendor-locked distro named QTS, so they're not really as easy to modify as a normal system, I don't think you can even install programs like that.
I'll definitely bookmark it though if I ever get around to building my own solution, thanks!
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I have been using an old PC as NAS and running docker containers (Immich, Nextcloud, paperless-ngx etc.). I got 5 3.5" HDD disks and a Nvme. Even on idle, I am consuming 50-60w. A friend of mine is selling a Qnap NAS which is a dedicated machine and probably consumes less power, although I don't know if it's worth it.
My NAS uses a similar amount of power. The drives use most of the power. The PC uses less than 20W on its own. Upgrading to a couple of large helium filled drives will save a good bit of power. SATA drives tend to use a little less power than SAS drives too.
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My NAS uses a similar amount of power. The drives use most of the power. The PC uses less than 20W on its own. Upgrading to a couple of large helium filled drives will save a good bit of power. SATA drives tend to use a little less power than SAS drives too.
Instructions unclear, now my server is slowly floating into the sky....
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If you can figure out how to get a qnap to spin down its disks, please let me know lol. I've been searching for months and haven't found a reliable solution. I basically only need to access it once a day at MOST, so having the disks spinning away for like 99% of their life sucking down power is something I'd like to avoid. The problem seems to be that even with a perfectly clean slate, no services running, the system set up in their own RAID0 SSD pool, the HDD's, even with 0 bytes of data on them, are being pinged for access at least once a minute. I'm assuming it's some log being written to, but it's not anything visible in the file system, and I haven't been able to find any solution online, lots of people seem to have the same issue.
I'm tempted more and more every day to just grab one of those low-power embedded ITX boards and build up a custom rig. Other than the disk spinning constantly, the TS-462 does everything I need perfectly.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I remember to have it working with default software I got but it was 10 years ago.
Then they added this bloatware like media streaming addon or notification center.
I have now entware with minidlna and set minidlna scanning disk once per day because media streaming was scanning all the time.I haven't figure out how to permanently kill their /usr/local/sbin/ncd, ncdb, qNoticeEngined, qulogdb, NotificationCenter, mariadb processes. If I figure out it it probably start working again.
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In my experience using a PC as a NAS, the power draw isn't necessarily the drives as they spin down when idle.
I have an old desktop setup as NAS - with 2 drives or eight drives, idle power draw is virtually the same, about 100w, regardless of the OS (Windows, Linux, UnRAID, Proxmox).
I also have an old consumer NAS, with five 4TB drives, and it idles under 20w (I think last I checked it was ~15w... I need to check it again and write that down).
Two very similar systems, one designed to be a NAS, the other a desktop. It really comes down to the motherboard design and capabilities.
I also have a Dell SFF that idles at about 15w, regardless of drive count - one drive or four (and to get four I added a SATA expansion card and rigged some power splitters, really pushing the power supply). That box idling the same, even when pushed well past design, is pretty telling.
And don't think that SSD drives would do better - spinning disk drives generally have far better idle power than SSD does, and usually much better write power consumption.
So it really depends, and mostly on the motherboard itself. Yes, you'll get more power usage with more drives, but that's at write and read time. My SFF idles at 12w, peaks at 80w when converting videos, the read/write power is negligible, same with the NAS (I transfer hundreds of gigs between them every few days).
Good point.
I looked mostly at the spec sheet from the manufacturer and for example the Samsung 870 Evo vs Seagate IronWolf NAS Drive.
Side note, AFAIK NVME drives have a higher power consumption. Especially PCIe 5.0.My NAS with 2 HDDs from Seagate has a total powerdraw of around 30-40w.
And I don’t spin the drives down.- Latency of accessing files/loading times
- Lifespan reduction because of spin up / spin down Head moves (the most common for head crash, as I learned from my Teacher)
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I have been using an old PC as NAS and running docker containers (Immich, Nextcloud, paperless-ngx etc.). I got 5 3.5" HDD disks and a Nvme. Even on idle, I am consuming 50-60w. A friend of mine is selling a Qnap NAS which is a dedicated machine and probably consumes less power, although I don't know if it's worth it.
I use a 5600g on b450 ITX board and 4x 8GB Seagate drives and see about 35W idle and about 40W average. It used to be 45W because I was forced to use a GPU in addition to a 3600 to boot (even though its headless, just a bad bios setup that I can't fix) and getting a CPU with graphics dropped my idle consumption quite a bit. I suspect the extra wattage for your machine is probably the bigger motherboard and the less efficient CPU.
It is possible to get the machine part down into single digits wattage and then about 5W a drive is the floor without spinning them down, so the minimum you could likely see with a much less powerful CPU is about 30-35W.
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Instructions unclear, now my server is slowly floating into the sky....
Instructions unclear, now my NAS's voice is squeaky.
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I have been using an old PC as NAS and running docker containers (Immich, Nextcloud, paperless-ngx etc.). I got 5 3.5" HDD disks and a Nvme. Even on idle, I am consuming 50-60w. A friend of mine is selling a Qnap NAS which is a dedicated machine and probably consumes less power, although I don't know if it's worth it.
If the aim is to save money, figure out how long it will take you to break even. Then the service life of such a machine
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I have been using an old PC as NAS and running docker containers (Immich, Nextcloud, paperless-ngx etc.). I got 5 3.5" HDD disks and a Nvme. Even on idle, I am consuming 50-60w. A friend of mine is selling a Qnap NAS which is a dedicated machine and probably consumes less power, although I don't know if it's worth it.
I'm probably in a similar boat thanks to 4x NAS drives (in 2x mirror vdevs so essentially half as power efficient too). I wonder if using an SSD or two for things like caches would help with power draw since you could defer disk usage for longer by relying on a more efficient cache.
SnapRAID is also an option. One benefit is that multiple disks don't need to be spinning at once to access data. Downside is that your parity isn't calculated in real time so less data redundancy.
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I'm probably in a similar boat thanks to 4x NAS drives (in 2x mirror vdevs so essentially half as power efficient too). I wonder if using an SSD or two for things like caches would help with power draw since you could defer disk usage for longer by relying on a more efficient cache.
SnapRAID is also an option. One benefit is that multiple disks don't need to be spinning at once to access data. Downside is that your parity isn't calculated in real time so less data redundancy.
I am already running Snapraid and machines do spindown after sometime, but it's still around 50w.
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I have been using an old PC as NAS and running docker containers (Immich, Nextcloud, paperless-ngx etc.). I got 5 3.5" HDD disks and a Nvme. Even on idle, I am consuming 50-60w. A friend of mine is selling a Qnap NAS which is a dedicated machine and probably consumes less power, although I don't know if it's worth it.
This is the reason I use a NAS specific box. So much more power efficient
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I have been using an old PC as NAS and running docker containers (Immich, Nextcloud, paperless-ngx etc.). I got 5 3.5" HDD disks and a Nvme. Even on idle, I am consuming 50-60w. A friend of mine is selling a Qnap NAS which is a dedicated machine and probably consumes less power, although I don't know if it's worth it.
Easiest way is to use a tasmota based power plug.
They need to calibrated once,but then are pretty reliable and can be found for 15 bucks.Nous A1T (or similar nous,but watch out for the T at the end, Z is zigbee) is popular in central europe. They are well built and cheap as fuck. But again,they need to be calibrated once which you need a steady user (e.g an old incandescent light bulb ) and a multimeter for... It's easy and only needs to be done once.
Another option are the Inter-Tech PDUs, they costs around a 100 Bucks, are fully IP, can switch channels but only measure the consumption of the whole strip.
If you have a more advanced USV they often have a total power consumption measurement.If you want to go all in you need to look for "switched and metered" PDUs, but they are fucking expensive. The Cyberpower PDU81005 is the cheapest "good" one and is over 400 bucks here .
So.... Most people won't do that,even in a professional setting. -
I have been using an old PC as NAS and running docker containers (Immich, Nextcloud, paperless-ngx etc.). I got 5 3.5" HDD disks and a Nvme. Even on idle, I am consuming 50-60w. A friend of mine is selling a Qnap NAS which is a dedicated machine and probably consumes less power, although I don't know if it's worth it.
Old PCs often have that problem.
My "NAS" is more a full on proxmox server with an AM5 CPU, 64GB ECC and yet it halved my power consumption compared to its predecessors.
