I have been using an old PC as NAS and running docker containers (Immich, Nextcloud, paperless-ngx etc.). I got 5 3.5" HDD disks and a Nvme. Even on idle, I am consuming 50-60w. A friend of mine is selling a Qnap NAS which is a dedicated machine and probably consumes less power, although I don’t know if it’s worth it.
If you can figure out how to get a qnap to spin down its disks, please let me know lol. I’ve been searching for months and haven’t found a reliable solution. I basically only need to access it once a day at MOST, so having the disks spinning away for like 99% of their life sucking down power is something I’d like to avoid. The problem seems to be that even with a perfectly clean slate, no services running, the system set up in their own RAID0 SSD pool, the HDD’s, even with 0 bytes of data on them, are being pinged for access at least once a minute. I’m assuming it’s some log being written to, but it’s not anything visible in the file system, and I haven’t been able to find any solution online, lots of people seem to have the same issue.
I’m tempted more and more every day to just grab one of those low-power embedded ITX boards and build up a custom rig. Other than the disk spinning constantly, the TS-462 does everything I need perfectly.
Wow, QNAPS don’t spin down disks? Geez, what a crappy design choice. Thanks for that tidbit, I was considering one for my next NAS.
if it’s for drive health stats, and the device runs linux, hd-idle could help. it only counts actual block device (so, storage) access as activity
edit: https://github.com/adelolmo/hd-idle
They run a custom vendor-locked distro named QTS, so they’re not really as easy to modify as a normal system, I don’t think you can even install programs like that.
I’ll definitely bookmark it though if I ever get around to building my own solution, thanks!