Drives only consume power on reads and writes, if your NAS spins them down as it should (and apparently QNAP doesn't, which I didn't know).
not really. not all drives spin down by themselves, by default. and even if they do, it'll happen relatively long after reads and writes, a the while it'll consume power.
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.
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
I wonder if they can be "spinned down" like hard drives. their startup time would be much faster, so it's shutdown could even be on a tighter schedule. I mean probably they dont have an internal idle timer, but who cares if you can just have something like hd-idle that shuts it down according to a better schedule.
In my experience using a PC as a NAS, the power draw isn't necessarily the drives as they spin down when idle.
that's not always the default setup, especially with enterprise drives. also if you have some kind of monitoring, that can keep the drives from going down (for that, use linux hd-idle instead of drive internal idle timer), and it can also wake them up (for that, prometheus node exporter's smart collector first checks whether a drive is up, and only then collect stats). Interestingly, checking temps with smartctl always spins up my drives, while linux hwmon can give me live temp stats even while the drives are down
@Cowbee@lemmy.ml@yogthos@lemmy.ml china is an authoritarian dictatorship, a surveillance state with no private life whatsoever. china is not communist, and attempts at free speech is punished
@Cowbee@lemmy.ml@yogthos@lemmy.ml china is an authoritarian dictatorship, a surveillance state with no private life whatsoever. china is not communist, and any attempts at free speech are punished
I have good news. I have just read the Proxmox 8.4 changelog, and they added support for using virtiofs with VMs, so now using it does not seem to require hacks anymore! But the limitation with databases probably still applies.
I run proxmox, and proxmox manages the zfs pool, there are VMs for important and convenience services, where important only hold things needed for the machine to work (so networking related) and metrics. I also have a desktop VM for the occasional use, and you can install opnsense later if you want an advanced firewall for VLANs and maybe internet too.
the storage is made accessible through virtiofs shares, but setup is quite hacky, and some things don't like it (like it can't store any kind of databases) because virtiofs works technically like a network filesystem, and does not support some consistency features (yet?). maybe ceph would be a solution, it is natively supported by proxmox.
if I were to build a new one, I would try out TrueNAS, it's newer linux based version. I heard that can run VMs too if needed. I suspect that it can be more user friendly, but I haven't used its web interface yet ever.
not really. not all drives spin down by themselves, by default. and even if they do, it'll happen relatively long after reads and writes, a the while it'll consume power.