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!

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    47·
    8 months ago

    SSDs are by nature going to be more power-efficient than platter drives, as they have zero moving parts.

    An SSD could have higher peak power draw due to a significantly higher throughput, but will not be less efficient at converting power into transferred data.

    • ShortN0te@lemmy.mlEnglish
      93·
      8 months ago

      That argument is not valid. Just because it has moving parts does not mean it has a higher power draw. Look at your CPU for example.

    • Septimaeus@infosec.pubEnglish
      4·
      7 months ago

      Not sure what everyone is arguing about here. Clearly SSD is better for intermittent r/w, whereas HDD can be more efficient at continuous r/w (especially in terms of watts/TB)

      Just looking at specs should be enough to see that. SSDs can idle in ready state at close to 0 draw (~0.05w) whereas HDD requires continued rotation to remain ready. So consider an extreme case of writing for 1 minute then maintaining ready state for the rest of the day. For that the SSD will be far more efficient, obviously.

      • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        Classic mob mentality. OC could never be wrong, so let’s dogpile on the first person to disagree.

        • Septimaeus@infosec.pubEnglish
          2·
          7 months ago

          Maybe yeah. Also got the sense from the strong opinions that this is a preexisting debate, presumably in the context of continuous workloads or cached arrays with minimal spindown intervals. In that context it’s true that rotational disks still often win in energy efficiency and robustness (assuming we’re comparing them to consumer SSDs and not the latest enterprise u.2 stuff that’s rated for continuous work).

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
      42·
      8 months ago

      What you claim here with so much confidence is simply false. Those are two totally different technologies, so it is comparing apples and oranges. And yes, I actually tested it and power optimized HDDs (for laptops) tend to use a bit less power than SSD. I was surprised as well.

      • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        45·
        8 months ago

        Byte-for-byte less energy usage?

        An SSD can have a higher power draw over a shorter period of time, but not necessarily use the same amount of energy. Remember that power is energy over time.

        • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
          92·
          8 months ago

          You are moving goal-posts. Maybe you are right, but it is still false to claim something is always using more power because it has moving parts.

          And of course I didn’t only test it for 5 minutes, but rather the impact over a longer time period with the same typical workload of a home server/NAS (i.e. a lot of idling).

          • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
            43·
            8 months ago

            I’m not moving goalposts, I’m trying to explain more clearly the exact thing I said before. Feel free to read my original comment more carefully.

            • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
              82·
              8 months ago

              I did and you are still wrong. Maybe you should read more carefully what you wrote ;) You didn’t specify in what way they are more “power-efficient”. And the second sentence is pure conjecture with no real basis on facts.

              Edit: Ok maybe you will understand it this way: if your workload is never exceeding the data-transfer speed that the HDD can deliver then the additional speed of SSDs is useless (a very common situation with NAS). So then you need to consider which technology is using less power over time under these conditions, and moving parts or not is not the relevant metric there.