> but enabling acoustics and power saving really helped on the seeking noise level.
Do you know what's the approximate power draw (in Watts) of each drive with these settings enabled? I'd like to move to a lower power system sometime in the next year, but I'll also need to add some more drives. Power is extremely expensive where I live.
I wonder if the power saving features reduce the drive lifetimes (because of quicker spindowns)... might not be a good idea for an always on NAS.
So I just recalled I had a DC-capable clamp meter, and I was able to isolate the disk on the last stretch of a power connector chain.
I tried running with both the power management set to "Level 128 - Minimum power usage without Standby (no spindown)" and Acoustics Managment to "Maximum", as well as "Disabled" for both. Didn't make a noticeable difference on power draw, at most 0.1A more during writes, primarily just noise.
Idle
5V 0.27A
12V 0.40A
Write
5V 0.53A
12V 0.50A
So that's just over 6W idle and 8.7W under load. I'm surprised about the high idle draw, both due to being significantly higher than the specs[1] and due to them running so cool. Did they spin down the disks to get the 4W figure perhaps? I did check my clamp meter against my electronic load and it reads pretty accurate.
I didn't manage to test reads properly, since the disks are part of a ZFS pool and it spreads the reads all over, along with aggressive caching.
Toshiba datasheet says 8.1W under Q1 4k random R/W, I did my testing with streaming writes and queue depth around 10, so my write figure seems reasonable.
For idle the datasheet says 4.53W typical, however I admit my disks were idle only for a few minutes when I did my readings as dinner was almost ready, so possible they would go lower after longer idle periods.
I recently built a NAS that sits 50cm away from me so noise was my #1 priority. During my research I realized that there are really two types of NAS drives:
- the enterprise ones that are meant to sit in a datacenter. They offer the best performance but are noisy and power hungry.
- the SOHO ones, that are often 5400 rpm. They are lower performance but optimized for noise and power consumption.
I ended up with ST6000VN001 and the noise level is very reasonable.
Do you know what's the approximate power draw (in Watts) of each drive with these settings enabled? I'd like to move to a lower power system sometime in the next year, but I'll also need to add some more drives. Power is extremely expensive where I live.
I wonder if the power saving features reduce the drive lifetimes (because of quicker spindowns)... might not be a good idea for an always on NAS.