NAS Owner Question

[dave_the_nerd]

It might be worth asking if people really need to keep their NAS on 24/7. It's a lot of power once you add it up. If you have 6 drives always spinning, even idle, that's still easily 30-35 watts. Throw in a CPU, RAM, fans, and you're probably got 40-45 watts.

Hah. Mine pulls ~90w.

Personally I turn on my NAS only on the weekends and only when I need to use it. Normally my NUC is my HTPC that handles downloading. That thing loads at 10W and idles in the single digits. To me that's far more efficient. Keeping my NAS on all weekend along with a TV you can definitely feel the room warm up. The HTPC has more than enough storage to hold some media in a folder and when the NAS is connected the HTPC will auto-copy those files over.

But I'm no expert. My setup is less than ideal.

It's about power efficiency to a point, but it's also about convenience, and what you use the thing for.

My laptop is backing itself up constantly when I'm using it. If I only turned my NAS on, on the weekends, and my laptop got stolen on a Friday, I'd be out five days of... well... "work," let's say. Same for my housemate and her laptop.

Likewise, not everybody in the house has the technical expertise to go power up a NAS/server and spin up the right VMs in the right order, just to watch a stinkin' movie. If you have a spouse, WAF is a thing. If you have kids, you want even more for it to "just work."

A NAS/Server in a home may also be doing things like DVR work, running web logging or filtering, monitoring security cameras, home automation, etc. Which are all 24/7 tasks.

 

[SlitheryDee]

It might be worth asking if people really need to keep their NAS on 24/7. It's a lot of power once you add it up. If you have 6 drives always spinning, even idle, that's still easily 30-35 watts. Throw in a CPU, RAM, fans, and you're probably got 40-45 watts.

Personally I turn on my NAS only on the weekends and only when I need to use it. Normally my NUC is my HTPC that handles downloading. That thing loads at 10W and idles in the single digits. To me that's far more efficient. Keeping my NAS on all weekend along with a TV you can definitely feel the room warm up. The HTPC has more than enough storage to hold some media in a folder and when the NAS is connected the HTPC will auto-copy those files over.

But I'm no expert. My setup is less than ideal.

I very much like things to "just work". I'm absent minded enough that if my nas was off at one end of the house, I would constantly be turning a tv on at the other end, kicking myself for not turning my nas on first, and having to walk back across the house to turn it on. freeNAS has a not inconsiderable boot time as well, so waiting through that every single time I want to watch something would quickly become more trouble than it's worth, at least for me. I also have people in the house from time to time who don't know anything about the nas or what to do when it's off. I still want their experience to be as seamless and user friendly as I can make it without having to walk them through anything. I guess what I'm saying is that all that is worth the higher energy cost to me.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

^ Agreed which is why one of my criteria for a NAS is that it just works. My spouse is not too happy with the current setup of Freenas as its not very user friendly at all. It also depends on what you do with the NAS. If you do mission critical work that needs daily backups, then yeah 24/7 running is fine. But if it's just a media dump like mine is and your HTPC crashes and loses a week of TV shows, is that the end of the world? I mean they can be redownloaded after all. So that's how I look at it.