I’m trying to improve the power consumption of my NAS. The 2 (7200 rpm) HDDs I had were using 15W at idle and 5W when spun down. I’m reading a lot of conflicting information about what is lower power between HDD, SSD and NVMe SSD. Eventually I started looking at SATA SSD (please let me know if this is not the most power efficient)

I found this site that shows a benchmark of different SSDs and their average power consumption. I was about to go with WD Red but then I found a YouTube video saying I shouldn’t go with WD for a NAS.

Can you tell me what brand or model you’re using in your homelab that’s power efficient? Ideally I would like 4TB SSD.

Thanks!

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    71·
    7 months ago

    2.5" 5400rpm HDDs are the most power efficient in my experience. They use around 1W when in normal use.

    SSDs generally use power according to their actual utilization. The faster they are the higher the power consumption seems to be. SATA SSDs are generally slower and fall into the 1-3W bracket, NVMe SSDs are more like 5-10W, especially the PCIe 4.0 ones.

    Don’t quote me on these figures, I have not extensively tested them and they are very rough ball-park ones.

    • Kwa@derpzilla.netOPEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      With what I saw with me current HDDs I wouldn’t have though smaller HDD would be the most power efficient. And now I understand better why sometimes I read HDD can be more efficient than SSD.

      Any brands/models you would recommend?

    • Flipper@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      Probably worth noting that is pretty hard to find new 2.5" drives with reasonable TBW and prices nowadays.