Small 2.5" HDDs are quite power efficient, but yes 500mb is kind of the limit where I also start questioning it it is worth to run them.
Comment on Lowering power consumption on Opteron
grue@lemmy.world 5 days agoIt has an HBA, 3 hard drives, and 3 SSDs. I was going to add a couple more hard drives (just to try to get some more use out of old ones I had lying around), but 0.5TB ones might not have enough capacity to be worth their power draw.
Moonrise2473@feddit.it 5 days ago
my HBA takes 20W at idle
tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 5 days ago
If you don’t mind the downtime, I’d turn it off, disconnect hba and all but the boot disk and boot up to see how much power they take. HBA can take a lot. You could also consider spinning down your HDD if they don’t need them that often