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.
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.
- Latency of accessing files/loading times
- Lifespan reduction because of spin up / spin down Head moves (the most common for head crash, as I learned from my Teacher)
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.
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.
A big portion of that is caused by the drives, so you’d have to compare the empty QNAP vs your empty machine. Also, depending on which NAS appliance, check that the CPU is actually powerful enough to run all your services.
Drives only consume power on reads and writes, if your NAS spins them down as it should (and apparently QNAP *doesn’t, which I didn’t know).
As per my other comment - 8 drives or 1 drive, same idle power for desktop hardware. My actual NAS uses about 1/8 the power at idle for 5 drives.
How do you monitor power consumption? I’m new to self hosting and I want to do that.
Some local libraries (e.g. in Heidelberg) or ecological initiatives lend devices to measure electricity consumption at the power plug. In particular, this is useful to measure other appliances as well.
Specifically for computers, they probably have some means that tell you their own consumption, but they may not be accurate or complete and will most certainly omit any peripherals, e.g. external hard drives.
Thank you! I will see if I can get my hands on one of those.
I use a KillaWatt device. It is a simple device you plug into the outlet and then plug the device you want to measure into it. I’ve had mine for a long time so I have no idea what a new one would cost, but I’m guessing sub $30.
I actually have an extension cord with IoT chip. Can measure power consumption via home assistant.
“Old PC” meaning what, exactly? Need some specs.
In general, a Qnap or Synology box is going to be much lower wattage than a full PC.
It’s 6th gen i5 processor with gigabyte motherboard. And Qnap is ts-531x.
I switched from an I3-530, nominal TDP 73W, to an N-100, nominal TDP 7W, and power from the wall didn’t change at all. Even the i3 ran around 0.1 CPU load, except when transcoding, and I’m left with the impression that most of the power goes into HDDs, RAM, maybe fans, and PS losses. My sense is that the best way to decrease homelab power use is to minimize the number of devices. Start with your seyrver at 60W, add a WAP at 10-15W, maybe a switch at 10-15W… Not because of the CPUs, necessarily, but because every CPU every CPU comes with systems to keep the CPU going, keep the power regulated, etc.
Power isn’t from drives, if your OS spins them down (as any NAS solution should).
Thank you, this is what I needed to know. I thought n100 (similar to what dedicated nas has 6-10w) would bring power down considerably, and thanks to you, I now know it’s not the case.
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.
Thank you, this is what I am thinking too. I don’t wanna create e-waste, and apart from power consumption, the nas is very handy performance wise and tackles all load.
You’ll want to look up the QNAP as well. I’ve seen reports with quite some variety on the power consumption. Depending on the exact model, it could be somewhere in the range from 25W to 55W… So could be less, could be the same. And have a look at the amount of RAM if you want to run services on it.
Ram is definitely abysmal on Qnap, so it’s one reason for hesitation. But I wanted to get some idea how much power saving is possible on dedicated NAS. If it’s not much, I would rather keep my PC.
My NAS uses a similar amount of power. The drives use most of the power. The PC uses less than 20W on its own. Upgrading to a couple of large helium filled drives will save a good bit of power. SATA drives tend to use a little less power than SAS drives too.
Instructions unclear, now my server is slowly floating into the sky…
Instructions unclear, now my NAS’s voice is squeaky.
