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…

  • thehatfox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    Power costs vary a lot around the world, depending on where OP lives every little saving can help.

    • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      Constantly turning it on/off will probably kill the disk faster than the power savings can make up for it, compared to just having it idle when not actively used.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        Consumer harddisks are made to be spinned up and down occasionally. Don’t do it every five minutes… But I’ve been doing it for years and years with my server that spins up the disks once or twice a day, once I access some of my archived files. And it’s perfectly fine.

        • Shimitar@feddit.itOPEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          The hdd spin on once every night for backup, then off after a bit by the timeout.

          That should not be a critical issue.

          • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
            1·
            5 days ago

            Yeah, most PCs get turned on and off like once per day. For example at most offices or at home. That’s perfectly within normal use.