I am glad I’m not alone in my thoughts on this subject of data storage.

I understand how you feel about things being ‘on’ all the time as my wife has similar views on turning things off. The reality is that with modern low power modes and sleep states the DS1812+ is very power efficient for what it is. I actually have a second Netgear ReadyNAS that I backup to which only powers on Sunday night for the backup then powers off for the rest of the week. You can do the same power on / off scheduling with the Synology devices if you like, although ours is used a lot more than we thought for streaming music and movies daily.

In real terms my DS1812+ with four 3TB disks uses 45w in use and 18w standby. The calculation below shows the average use of our device to be very reasonable in terms of costs.

Daily power use
2h @ 45 watt = 0.09 kWh
22h @ 18 watt = 0.39 kWh

0.48 kWh @ 11.8p (1 kWh of electric for me) = 5.7p per day

I went with a Synology device in the end as I had administered a previous device at work and it was very reliable and I was impressed with the quality of their DSM software that manages the device. I chose the DS1812+ in particular because it allows me to host two 4x RAID 5 arrays.

Hope that helps

Niall

I’ve struggled with the very same thing so your post here mirrored my thoughts.

The problem with NAS is that it’s online storage, and it really is ‘on’ all the time. I’d really prefer offline storage or storage that I can bring online only when I need to do something with it. Saving energy is the primary reason. I feel guilty about running a massive NAS system 24×7 when I’ll only be accessing it say once a week on average when I do something with our family photos and videos. So did you explore offline storage options at all?

Also, how much power in kWh does your Synology unit end up using over say a month or so? I’m sure the cost in $ isn’t much, but I’m curious how much it amounts to?

Also, why’d you end up going with the DS in the end?

Thanks!