A big portion of that is caused by the drives, so you'd have to compare the empty QNAP vs your empty machine. Also, depending on which NAS appliance, check that the CPU is actually powerful enough to run all your services.

Wow, QNAPS don't spin down disks? Geez, what a crappy design choice. Thanks for that tidbit, I was considering one for my next NAS.

I have an old dell power edge that I got from work that I used as a NAS for a while, it sucked down more juice than the old PC I was using and was stupidly loud all the time. I ended up transferring everything back to my old PC and now that turd just sits there waiting for someone else to be dumb enough to buy it from me. I wouldn't waste the money personally.

Power isn't from drives, if your OS spins them down (as any NAS solution should).

See my other comment.

The power edge server is going to draw way more power just because it has a "powerful" cpu(s) and other power running components. The Qnap will be much quieter and consume maybe a few watts less power than your existing setup, potentially. I wouldn't use it though because your existing setup is way more flexible on what you can do with it.

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.

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).

"powerful" LOL it's a turd

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/123540/intel-xeon-bronze-3106-processor-11m-cache-1-70-ghz/specifications.html

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

edit: https://github.com/adelolmo/hd-idle

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.

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.

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).

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.

Instructions unclear, now my server is slowly floating into the sky....

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.