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, all 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.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 day ago
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.
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.
LeTak@lemm.ee 13 hours ago
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.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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