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!
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.
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?
Probably worth noting that is pretty hard to find new 2.5" drives with reasonable TBW and prices nowadays.
tomshardware has power consumption+efficiency charts
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
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Maybe you are looking at the wrong thing. CPU + motherboard controllers idle state matters more than spun down hdds
I saw a spreadsheet somewhere of a lot of cpu + motherboard combinations with idle power consumption for ultra low energy NAS optimisation.
The issue is that’s it’s too late… I already have my NAS. The only things I can optimize are the disks
Still you can calculate how much you will save with 2w power reduction with selling this one and buying different NAS.
You can reduce the disk idle time after access to 5-15 min for better power saving.
Yeah whatever I’m doing is bad, 5800x in 65w eco mode and asrock pro4m “idles”(all hdds spun down) at like 150watts. I run like 20 dockers on it so I don’t think it ever really idles
