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!
If you go for SSD another thing to think about is the TBW on them. Buying a low endurance SSD might save some electricity but will cost more in SSDs over time. Example:
Crucial P3 Plus M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB (2.67W on your link) has 440TBW compared to Kingston Fury Renegade M.2 NVMe SSD Gen 4 2TB (4.92W on your link) with 2000TBW.
Those few watts you save on using the Crucial P3 Plus will be less than the extra cost in buying new SSDs earlier.
The site I checked TBW on has the Kingston Fury at $9.4 more than the Crucial P3 Plus.
I think proper datacenter 3.5’’ HDDs will give you the most efficient Wattage per TB disk space
Seagate Exos X20 Harddisk ST20000NM007D 20TB SATA-600 7200rpm is supposed to have
Power Consumption 5.4 Watt (idle) | 9.4 Watt (random read) | 6.4 Watt (random write)
In general, one should check how much power actually costs versus buying a new device.
Even in Germany, having something draw 1W 24/7 costs something like 20 cents. It’s really not worth the hassle or money to micro optimize and buy something like an SSD.
Costs 20 cents per what? That’s about 0.7kWh per month so I’m guessing it’s per month?
