I am smarting up my home with lots of ZigBee thingies and decided to add a ZigBee smart monitor to my selfhost setup.
Its a desktop box with a core i7 9th gen, 48gb ram, no monitor.
I used to have 4xSSD 4TB + 2xHDD 6TB. Three RAID1 for a total of 4+4+6=14Tbs.
Power was sitting at 50W.
I restructured my storage: 1 RAID5 with the 4 SSDs (12tb) and removed the 2 HDDs.
Power went down to 38W!
I am amazed.
In the future will run just 1 hdd for storing backups and keep it spinned down 99% of the time.
PS: the above wattage is during transcoding, so with high CPU and disk usage…
Fair enough. But even if you don’t run on PV and actually do transcode 24/7/365, it’s still only 5€/month. They idle at around 1/3 to 1/2 that though, which is arguably better for the disk than being turned on/off all the time, so you still get the bulk of the savings while extending disk lifetime.