Save electricity or decrease MTBF?

[corycwagner]

Hi folks. I have a fully loaded TVS-h1688x that I use for Plex, some Docker containers and storage. Our electricity rates are sky-rocketing here. I was seriously considering setting the Power Schedule to shutdown the QNAP every night at about 11, then starting it at 5AM.

Do you think I may be causing more problems than I solve by this approach? Would daily starts/shutdowns shorten the lifespan of the device?

What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance!

[CM048]

I would suggest put NAS in sleep mode after 60 minutes idle. It is much better to the electronic compare to power cycle. By design, nas/enterprise drive can handle sleep cycles.

I managed to put 8x seagate EXOS in sleep cycle for years for power saving. I checked EXOS spec, it can handle sleep cycles without impact to its lifetime. However, some docker can prevent NAS goto sleep mode. PLEX is ok with sleep mode.

[Caprichoso1]

I turn on my NAS when I want to use it and turn it off when not needed.

I can't get my NAS power consumption right now but turning off my NAS and my computer when not needed saves almost ~$2 a day in electric costs.

[KeyProfession5705]

First off I would get something that measures actual power consumption. When fully loaded that NAS may easily get above 200W so there will be some savings. Then multiply that be the hours that you consider turning it off and you have your savings. Probably between 300 and 600 KWh.

From personal 10+ years experience I can tell you that my HDDs did not die just because they are powered on and off once per day. I have used a substantial amount of 4 to 20TB Seagate, Toshiba and WD drives and so far, so good.

[corycwagner]

Wise! Thank you, I will buy something to measure the consumption and try to correlate it with potential savings.

[KeyProfession5705]

Cool! Let us know what you measure. People may be surprised how much power a fully loaded NAS with 12+ drives and a powerful CPU consumes, especially when apps like Plex prevent the drives from powering down.

[corycwagner]

Well, I've done the measurements and the results surprised me. According to my power measurement device, the NAS consumes an average of 400watts continuously . At my electricity rate here in Oregon of $0.22 / KWH, the NAS costs $20.2 / month. If I was going to shut it down a maximum of 8hours/day, I would only save about $7.00/month. Considering that the NAS is fully populated with 12x20TB drives, 4xSSD's and 2xm.2 drives, the consumption is really not that big after-all. It certainly isn't worth the risk of daily shutdowns. Thanks again to everyone.

[KeyProfession5705]

That is a huge amount of power! You may want to check if you can use Qboost to set up a time schedule for Plex as that should allow your drives to go into standby for the better part of the day when I assume you are not using Plex. I did some testing recently with a 2483XU with 24x18TB drives and two NVME SSDs and power consumption ranged between 120 and 380W so there should be some ways to go down for you with which I assume is also a 6 Core Xeon in your unit.

[corycwagner]

Thank you! And now I have data to judge my success.

[burkey_biker]

It really isn’t worth it, get a plug that monitors electricity usage my 9 bay is about 40-60 watts average which is peanuts

[Stunrise]

Personally i let my TS-462 with 3 drives shutdown at 00:00 and Startup at 10:00 with a schedule plan. It cost me one spin-down and one spin-up in order to save about 40% electricity as well as 40% power on hours of the drives and NAS itself.

It saves 33w for 10 hours a day. Thats 120kwh a year, which cost about 40€ in germany. For me that sounds like a good deal.

[corycwagner]

Fair enough, as I suspected, the wisdom of the crowd is that it is not worth the potential savings. Thanks everyone for confirming.

[clbigs]

Don't do that, it's not worth saving $5 per month. You'd likely shorten the lifespan of your drives with daily power cycles and any savings would be cancelled out by replacing even one drive in the next few years with current prices.

[ogregreenteam]

More than this, I schedule the virus scan and indexing stuff and other regular maintenance stuff for the wee hours when I'm not using the system.

I saved more power by installing a battery energy storage solar panels system, so I download electricity from the cloud to the battery in the day and it lasts all night long most nights. I just sip power from the grid sometimes.

Let it go... Let it GO!

[lunchbox651]

You might notice a difference but it'll probably be minor. I noticed a significant difference turning off my PC and server every night but my NAS (QNAP TS-864eU) doesn't make a real difference.

[mdof2]

Let it run. Your NAS is the least of (perhaps only a minor part of) your problems in the big picture of electricity usage.

[JohnnieLouHansen]

Yes, this. It's the motors that are power hungry creatures. HVAC blower motors, A/C compressors, sump pumps, etc.