How Much Power Can You Save by Putting Your NAS HDD's to Sleep? [YouTube Release]

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Chapters
00:00 How Many Watts Can You Save?
00:25 The Test Setup
01:00 Drive Idle vs in Use Wattage
01:46 Putting The Drives To Sleep
02:37 Why Wake On LAN Would be Better
03:00 Drive Wear

2

Thanks for testing this. I had been recently wondering how much power I am wasting keeping the disks in my TrueNAS box spinning 24/7. It appears - not much!

I try to keep my homelab’s power usage reasonably low, without necessarily taking away functionality or enjoyment.

3

How much power can you save by using SSD instead of spinning drives? I kind of know this answer for one of my systems. Since it is similar, I’ll summarize:

Old NAS with HP DL360e gen8 and 96GB of ram, 8 2.5 inch spinning disks - 100 watts idle, no idea when at full go but probably another 15 watts worth.

Mini-NAS with n100, 16GB of ram and 6 spinning 2.5 inch disks - 32 watts at idle, up to about 50 watts at full go.

Mini-NAS with n100, 16GB or ram and 6 old SSD - 22 watts at idle, up to about 40 watts at full go.

So the savings are 1.66 watts per drive going from HDD to SSD (in my server). When you only need “small”, this is something to consider. Only using 4tb on the Mini-NAS and 2.5 on the old NAS, the SSD were small, too small to leave in place so my values may change if/when I get 960GB to 1TB SSD to replace the spinning drives.