NAS Power Consumption
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.
You're viewing a single thread.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
In my experience using a PC as a NAS, the power draw isn't necessarily the drives as they spin down when idle.
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
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.
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.
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
They run a custom vendor-locked distro named QTS, so they're not really as easy to modify as a normal system, I don't think you can even install programs like that.
I'll definitely bookmark it though if I ever get around to building my own solution, thanks!
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 no idea if it's a QNAP-wide issue, or just some specific models, I haven't bothered to do that much research. I'm guessing that the discs WOULD spin down if you have that option selected if they weren't constantly being pinged a couple times a minute. That constant pinging is the part I can't seem to track down.
An excerpt from a post I was reading while researching this sums it up prettt well: "700 posts about spindown/sleep/standby not working in the QNAP HDD Spin Down Forum. No one seems to be able to resolve it. Qnap clearly couldn't care less."
The only solution that I've found that seems to work is to install some other operating system on it, which kind of defeats the purpose of buying a turn-key NAS, and is slightly outside my comfort zone right now. I just ordered a kill-a-watt, so I'll see how much power it's taking with/without drives and go from there if it's worth my time to dive into an OS swap, or building a custom rig.