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 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.
LeTak@lemm.ee 15 hours ago
Most of the power draw is from the hdds. I have the same issue. If you want less power consumption. Invest in SSD or SSD and HDD hybrid where you store quick access files on SSD and rare access on hdd (then you can spin them down with timeout of , let’s say 30-60 min). This should save some energy
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 12 hours 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.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 9 hours 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 9 hours 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
Bags@piefed.social 15 hours ago
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.
vane@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
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
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 12 hours ago
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.