NAS - Spin down Disks or Shutdown Entire NAS for Power Saving

jeeg on 13/07/2017 - 22:52
Last edited 14/07/2017 - 10:04 by 1 other user

I have 2 x HP Microservers each with 4 x hard drives.

No problem with the NAS except the power consumption of both running is about 120w and if I run 24/7 the electricity cost is high. I was wondering if I should get the drives to spin down (currently they don't even if I wanted to because I am using Xpenology DSM 5 so will need to change OS and filesystem to achieve this) or should I set the NAS to auto power off at certain time of the day.

I read spinning disks down will kill the drives so not sure.

What do you guys do? Run the NAS 24/7, or spin down the disks or shutdown?

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  Master Bates on 14/07/2017 - 00:28

  I read spinning disks down will kill the drives so not sure.

  Depends on what drives you are using, but in general it is worth avoiding repeated spin down. I keep my N40L with 5x WD Reds running 24/7.

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    jeeg on 14/07/2017 - 08:44

    These are all WD red. Running these 24/7 cost a fair bit of electricity doesn't it?

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      Master Bates on 14/07/2017 - 20:56

      You are probably right, but ignorance is bliss.

      This article may interest you if you're NAS contains WD Reds and want to stop them running 24/7.

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  psy on 14/07/2017 - 08:26

  I power mine down. It powers on about 30mins before I'm traditionally home from work, and powers off later that night. It's only on for about 8hours Mon-Thu.
  Over the weekend it runs 24/7.

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    jeeg on 14/07/2017 - 08:46

    Thanks. Any concern starting and stopping the drives will wear out the drives more than leaving these running? Just wondering because i m thinking of doing the same

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  samfisher5986 on 14/07/2017 - 15:10

  I spin my drives 24/7.

  My main reason is they can be accessed around 16 hours a day so a short spin down timer could be very bad for them. A long spin down timer wouldn't save much and would just frustrate me or others when trying to access media for the first time after a spin down.

  Plus in addition to Plex I'm assuming my cloud uploads and plex maintenance overnight would keep a lot of them spinning anyway.

  I'm a big believer that its a lot healthier for them to keep spinning, I have 6 year old drives that are still going with only 40-50 spin downs/ups.