As we have more than 1x NAS, we use them to warm-up the room and that works! (18 to 19 degrees centigrade at the moment) And don't mind the noise, it is quite bearable unless you are sitting on top of the NASses. Word of caution on WoL, that is standard that is only available on 1GBe ports, normally. WoL is not supported on 10GBe ports (not part of the standards, I've checked) and possibly also not on 2.5GBe & 5GBe ports as the standards did not foresee that. However, some brands (of switches etc) might support WoL on 2.5GBe/5GBe, check the documentation!
As always, I really carefully watched the video, because your topics are always interesting. One thing you forgot to mention for not so experienced users - WOL working only when all devices are on the same network. AFAIK (please correct me if I'm wrong) you can't use WOL from remote location via Internet.
If implemented correctly any WOL device should wake with as little as a simple ping sent to it. So as long as your gateway is set correctly to pass such things on to your NAS from the internet WOL should work.
@@ReneSkotte Or one could simply give their NAS a fixed IP address and then stick it into the DMZ along with enabling ICMP passthrough. Granted there are no longer protections for your NAS via NAT or other although one's NAS should always be setup to protect itself from the outset once it is exposed to your gateway's WAN.
WoL doesn't require any specific protocol it only works by sending a specific codeword (6-times 0xff + 16-times the mac address + a optional password) somewhere within the network stack so that it's routed to the devices interface. It could be UDP, ICMP or whatever it doesn't even matter whether it's a layer 2 or higher protocol (as long as having no response isn't an issue) it doesn't even matter whether it's a multicast, unicast or broadcast. The general reason why people think it only works on the same network is because after a while the ARP translations expire (making it impossible to send a layer 3+ aka. IP packet to the interface without ability to use a broadcast). If you have a static ARP entry on your Gateway (so that even if the device is off the router can permanently translate a IP to a MAC address) and a UDP port forwarding to any port you simply would have to send the magic codeword and it would turn on. Some ISP routers may even allow you to automatically send a WoL packet if the device is accessed via a port forwarding, and in the worst case it's not too difficult to find a simple PHP WoL script online that you can simply throw on a local webserver.
I went to 2.5 HDD... They are slower, but combined with SSD caching still faster then my network. 40% down in energy consumption, but it only makes sense from an economic / ecologic point of view, if you need new drives anyway. Otherwise its spending pounds to save pennies 🙂
For me it depends on your use case as SSD can actually be significantly cheaper if you considercauses for replacement. As an example my Synology DS620slim NAS devices (I run 2 of them) are populated with 5 x 2TB and 5 x 4TB Samsung 860 EVOs respectively plus 1 x 1TB 860 EVO. Considering these all come from 2018/9 and other small form factor servers I probably would have needed to replace the HDDs within that time regardless as I am not a big fan of running consumer grade 2.5" HDDs 24/7 for years on end. WD doesn't offer a 4/5TB 2.5" Red so I'd be sort of stuck with the Seagate Barracuda. Given my usage is very low impact on overall endurance the weak point then becomes the mechanical nature of HDDs and their spinning platters… possibly even more so if the HDDs are powering off/on all the time. So over a 6-8 year use timeframe I feel SSD is then costing around 1x extra as I will not need to replace anything plus the added bonus of significantly lesser energy usage as well as zero noise. Not to mention the gap closes even further if you feel you need SSD caching, something that isn't required if everything is SSD from the outset.
Interesting, as was a bit concerned about this you have given me some help with your suggestions. More so as was thinking of purchasing said NAS and hard drives. Thank you
Unfortunately, most apps and plex on qnap prevent drives going to idle or standby. It is a pain as I only use plex some parts of the day, for example. Also, I do power down, but it is a real pain to.then schedule scans and raid scrubbing, etc, at the right times.
Slightly OT... Robbie, would you consider doing a video on the economics of 4 bay vs 6 bay or 8 bay NAS ? I have a Synology DS920+ with 4 x 6 Tb drives running SHR which are getting quite full. I was planning to replace one of them with a single 16 Tb. But, using the Synology Raid calculator, I find that if I replace just one of the 6 Tb drives with a 16 Tb, the new drive will be recognized as a 6 Tb drive. So, I need to install in 2 x 16 Tb drives to get the benefit of the larger drive. And I will now have 2 x 6 Tb drives ( 12 TB total ) , which are otherwise quite serviceable, sitting on a shelf gathering dust. BUT... had I purchased a 6 or an 8 bay NAS, I could have just added the 2 x 16 TB drives AND kept 12 Tb of the old drive capacity. That is several hundred dollars / GBP's of storage cost. I haven't checked on the prices of said 6 and 8 bay NAS yet. And, further to the above bit of arithmetic, if I was running Raid 5 for example, I would have to replace ALL 4 of my 6 Tb drives, not just 2 of them. With a 6 or 8 bay NAS, I could have added additional 6 Tb drives until I ran out of bays. My next NAS is definitely going to be 8 bays as I would rather not use an expansion unit.
Good thinking! Your 920+ is awesome but I understand the frustration of running out of comfortable storage and bays! I am looking for Syno to revamp their 1621+ and I'll by that, populate with four HD's in SHR2.
Just throwing it out there but have you considered going with a 2nd 4 bay NAS? The reason I mention it is that I have noticed that people often seem to concentrate on HDD failures only. NAS devices themselves also fail. If you commit yourself to an 8-bay NAS and you fully populate it with a single SHR pool then you commit yourself to always needing an 8-bay NAS just to get your data back upon a NAS failure. If you had multiple NAS devices the 2nd NAS could then always be used as either additional storage and/or an on/off-site backup of critical data.
@@IntoxicatedVortex Excellent point. The idea of going 8 bay is purely for the longer term economics of it vs the 4 bay. But, I do have a 2nd 4 bay NAS. A QNAP which gives me that same backup capacity and being a different make sort of hedges my bets on systemic failure. Plus, it's a great learning experiment by having two different makes. I learn the pros and cons of each. The second NAS is in my detached garage which is hard wired.
does keeping a NAS or other appliance in a sleep or hibernate mode apreciably increase the longevity of the hardware? or would the power cycling actually be more stressful for the PSU and motherboard.
BTW, stop-starting mechanical HDD's may affect their durability. You might save on energy but might lose on the lifespan of that drive. Our record currently stands at 21 years uninterrupted .. Granted, that is walking the thin line of failure but we like a good challenge.
Agree. The consensus of user communities out there is to turn off hibernation and scheduled power on/off and keep the NAS running 24/7 is better for durability of the HDD.
Interesting. I have 8 bay nas with 4 filled hdd. From usually i pay 30$ bill without a nas, when my nas on 24/7 nas it goes up to 50$. Almost doubling what i usually paid for.
My drives on my 920+ never seem to hibernate. I have 2 setup on their own volume. I have a 4th disk setup with a second volume with the Surveillance Station recording to that drive, so I wouldn’t expect that one to hibernate. But I guess Surveillance Station keeps the other drives from hibernating as well?
Lower speed Nas helps. A 1gb ethernet uses less power than 10gb. Also pre-transcoding video can help reduce power, or choosing power friendly video formats. Most folks should have a ups with a Nas, so maintain that. Look to totally kill the power during off time to save vampire power of the Nas psu during program off time using smart switches
wol seems to be the only alternative provided by the nas to use as low energy as possible. but id rather use an android controlled energy plug. i dont want to use energy at all if im not using it
Also, when letting the disks spin down or the NAS to power off you put extra wear on the drives shortening their life-span. Maybe you could save a bit on electricity but more than likely the premature failure of the disks will eat that up....
I use a dual bay Nas, on bay 1 I have an SSD where I keep frequent used files, synch mobile phone and so and a bigger HDD in bay 2 for less frequent used files and let them enter sleep mode.
Maybe a nice experiment; Get a set of solar-panels, fair size batteries (100h?) an (1000W?) inverter and make the NAS run only on solar power. You probably need 400 ~ 500 Watt solar-panels to and both power the NAS and charge the batteries at the same time. But that's just a mind-melting idea I've been thinking about if that feasible. (of course the solar panels might be prohibitively high) Makes a nice coonversation-peace over a beverage of choosing ;-)
What, never have to worry about adding more solar panels or wind turbines ? Or adding more batteries ? Nope, you never have to worry about cost when you produce your own power. Not.
@@DavidM2002 it was a joke, though a legit one if you produce your own power you only pay the up front cost not the rising cost of power that is going on now, and all these things are getting better as time goes on anyway so it is gonna be awesome!
Then you can also use Home Assistant's energy functions to combine with WoL, scheduled on/off, and conditional on/off to optimize efficiency and schedule high demand tasks to run when the sun is shining. Granted, this is not "pay off" if you have cheap grid power, but it can increase uptime and potentially improve component reliability by adopting a DC system with less fluctuation/distortion than AC grid power. My network is completely off-grid, and this strategy helps tremendously and does offer cost savings when compared to the inefficiency of backup generators.
As we have more than 1x NAS, we use them to warm-up the room and that works!
(18 to 19 degrees centigrade at the moment)
And don't mind the noise, it is quite bearable unless you are sitting on top of the NASses.
Word of caution on WoL, that is standard that is only available on 1GBe ports, normally.
WoL is not supported on 10GBe ports (not part of the standards, I've checked) and possibly also not on 2.5GBe & 5GBe ports as the standards did not foresee that.
However, some brands (of switches etc) might support WoL on 2.5GBe/5GBe, check the documentation!
As always, I really carefully watched the video, because your topics are always interesting. One thing you forgot to mention for not so experienced users - WOL working only when all devices are on the same network. AFAIK (please correct me if I'm wrong) you can't use WOL from remote location via Internet.
If implemented correctly any WOL device should wake with as little as a simple ping sent to it. So as long as your gateway is set correctly to pass such things on to your NAS from the internet WOL should work.
@@IntoxicatedVortex that's interesting 🤔 Can you tell us more about it in the next video?
I have many years ago used WOL from outside my home, as far as I remember you need to forward UDP port 7 and 9 in your router to the internal IP.
@@ReneSkotte Or one could simply give their NAS a fixed IP address and then stick it into the DMZ along with enabling ICMP passthrough. Granted there are no longer protections for your NAS via NAT or other although one's NAS should always be setup to protect itself from the outset once it is exposed to your gateway's WAN.
WoL doesn't require any specific protocol it only works by sending a specific codeword (6-times 0xff + 16-times the mac address + a optional password) somewhere within the network stack so that it's routed to the devices interface. It could be UDP, ICMP or whatever it doesn't even matter whether it's a layer 2 or higher protocol (as long as having no response isn't an issue) it doesn't even matter whether it's a multicast, unicast or broadcast.
The general reason why people think it only works on the same network is because after a while the ARP translations expire (making it impossible to send a layer 3+ aka. IP packet to the interface without ability to use a broadcast). If you have a static ARP entry on your Gateway (so that even if the device is off the router can permanently translate a IP to a MAC address) and a UDP port forwarding to any port you simply would have to send the magic codeword and it would turn on.
Some ISP routers may even allow you to automatically send a WoL packet if the device is accessed via a port forwarding, and in the worst case it's not too difficult to find a simple PHP WoL script online that you can simply throw on a local webserver.
I went to 2.5 HDD... They are slower, but combined with SSD caching still faster then my network. 40% down in energy consumption, but it only makes sense from an economic / ecologic point of view, if you need new drives anyway. Otherwise its spending pounds to save pennies 🙂
For me it depends on your use case as SSD can actually be significantly cheaper if you considercauses for replacement. As an example my Synology DS620slim NAS devices (I run 2 of them) are populated with 5 x 2TB and 5 x 4TB Samsung 860 EVOs respectively plus 1 x 1TB 860 EVO. Considering these all come from 2018/9 and other small form factor servers I probably would have needed to replace the HDDs within that time regardless as I am not a big fan of running consumer grade 2.5" HDDs 24/7 for years on end. WD doesn't offer a 4/5TB 2.5" Red so I'd be sort of stuck with the Seagate Barracuda. Given my usage is very low impact on overall endurance the weak point then becomes the mechanical nature of HDDs and their spinning platters… possibly even more so if the HDDs are powering off/on all the time.
So over a 6-8 year use timeframe I feel SSD is then costing around 1x extra as I will not need to replace anything plus the added bonus of significantly lesser energy usage as well as zero noise. Not to mention the gap closes even further if you feel you need SSD caching, something that isn't required if everything is SSD from the outset.
Interesting, as was a bit concerned about this you have given me some help with your suggestions. More so as was thinking of purchasing said NAS and hard drives. Thank you
Unfortunately, most apps and plex on qnap prevent drives going to idle or standby. It is a pain as I only use plex some parts of the day, for example. Also, I do power down, but it is a real pain to.then schedule scans and raid scrubbing, etc, at the right times.
Slightly OT... Robbie, would you consider doing a video on the economics of 4 bay vs 6 bay or 8 bay NAS ? I have a Synology DS920+ with 4 x 6 Tb drives running SHR which are getting quite full. I was planning to replace one of them with a single 16 Tb. But, using the Synology Raid calculator, I find that if I replace just one of the 6 Tb drives with a 16 Tb, the new drive will be recognized as a 6 Tb drive. So, I need to install in 2 x 16 Tb drives to get the benefit of the larger drive. And I will now have 2 x 6 Tb drives ( 12 TB total ) , which are otherwise quite serviceable, sitting on a shelf gathering dust. BUT... had I purchased a 6 or an 8 bay NAS, I could have just added the 2 x 16 TB drives AND kept 12 Tb of the old drive capacity. That is several hundred dollars / GBP's of storage cost. I haven't checked on the prices of said 6 and 8 bay NAS yet. And, further to the above bit of arithmetic, if I was running Raid 5 for example, I would have to replace ALL 4 of my 6 Tb drives, not just 2 of them. With a 6 or 8 bay NAS, I could have added additional 6 Tb drives until I ran out of bays. My next NAS is definitely going to be 8 bays as I would rather not use an expansion unit.
Good thinking! Your 920+ is awesome but I understand the frustration of running out of comfortable storage and bays! I am looking for Syno to revamp their 1621+ and I'll by that, populate with four HD's in SHR2.
Just throwing it out there but have you considered going with a 2nd 4 bay NAS? The reason I mention it is that I have noticed that people often seem to concentrate on HDD failures only. NAS devices themselves also fail. If you commit yourself to an 8-bay NAS and you fully populate it with a single SHR pool then you commit yourself to always needing an 8-bay NAS just to get your data back upon a NAS failure. If you had multiple NAS devices the 2nd NAS could then always be used as either additional storage and/or an on/off-site backup of critical data.
@@IntoxicatedVortex Excellent point. The idea of going 8 bay is purely for the longer term economics of it vs the 4 bay. But, I do have a 2nd 4 bay NAS. A QNAP which gives me that same backup capacity and being a different make sort of hedges my bets on systemic failure. Plus, it's a great learning experiment by having two different makes. I learn the pros and cons of each. The second NAS is in my detached garage which is hard wired.
does keeping a NAS or other appliance in a sleep or hibernate mode apreciably increase the longevity of the hardware? or would the power cycling actually be more stressful for the PSU and motherboard.
BTW, stop-starting mechanical HDD's may affect their durability. You might save on energy but might lose on the lifespan of that drive.
Our record currently stands at 21 years uninterrupted ..
Granted, that is walking the thin line of failure but we like a good challenge.
Agree. The consensus of user communities out there is to turn off hibernation and scheduled power on/off and keep the NAS running 24/7 is better for durability of the HDD.
thanks for the video! very important video now that all the new NAS use more energy.
Because of this video I just enabled WOL and auto-power-off on my DS1019+, if it works as expected I'll keep it that way, thanks!
Interesting. I have 8 bay nas with 4 filled hdd. From usually i pay 30$ bill without a nas, when my nas on 24/7 nas it goes up to 50$. Almost doubling what i usually paid for.
My drives on my 920+ never seem to hibernate. I have 2 setup on their own volume. I have a 4th disk setup with a second volume with the Surveillance Station recording to that drive, so I wouldn’t expect that one to hibernate. But I guess Surveillance Station keeps the other drives from hibernating as well?
Lower speed Nas helps. A 1gb ethernet uses less power than 10gb. Also pre-transcoding video can help reduce power, or choosing power friendly video formats.
Most folks should have a ups with a Nas, so maintain that. Look to totally kill the power during off time to save vampire power of the Nas psu during program off time using smart switches
My TrueNAS is difficult to access, so I shutdown using a web browser on my phone, then restart with WON also on my phone.
wol seems to be the only alternative provided by the nas to use as low energy as possible. but id rather use an android controlled energy plug. i dont want to use energy at all if im not using it
With nas can used native file manager and download from my ftp seedbox server in nas but i control all this from my phone ?
Also, when letting the disks spin down or the NAS to power off you put extra wear on the drives shortening their life-span. Maybe you could save a bit on electricity but more than likely the premature failure of the disks will eat that up....
The amount of platters is often not published. At least for Western Digital it isn't.
I use a dual bay Nas, on bay 1 I have an SSD where I keep frequent used files, synch mobile phone and so and a bigger HDD in bay 2 for less frequent used files and let them enter sleep mode.
Redundancy!? 😱
External hdd backup. But the Nas never enter sleepmode for long, and everytime it access the ssd, it also wake up the hdd, sadly. So it's pointless.
Maybe a nice experiment;
Get a set of solar-panels, fair size batteries (100h?) an (1000W?) inverter and make the NAS run only on solar power.
You probably need 400 ~ 500 Watt solar-panels to and both power the NAS and charge the batteries at the same time.
But that's just a mind-melting idea I've been thinking about if that feasible.
(of course the solar panels might be prohibitively high)
Makes a nice coonversation-peace over a beverage of choosing ;-)
Also, solar/battery setups can be further efficiency optimized by using a 12/24v DC PSU
so pathetic. Brits destroyed their energy grid and now they are "saving" on NAS. ON NAS, KARL!
so ... produce your own power and you dont have to worry about power consumption in terms of cost! gotcha :D
What, never have to worry about adding more solar panels or wind turbines ? Or adding more batteries ? Nope, you never have to worry about cost when you produce your own power. Not.
@@DavidM2002 it was a joke, though a legit one if you produce your own power you only pay the up front cost not the rising cost of power that is going on now, and all these things are getting better as time goes on anyway so it is gonna be awesome!
Then you can also use Home Assistant's energy functions to combine with WoL, scheduled on/off, and conditional on/off to optimize efficiency and schedule high demand tasks to run when the sun is shining.
Granted, this is not "pay off" if you have cheap grid power, but it can increase uptime and potentially improve component reliability by adopting a DC system with less fluctuation/distortion than AC grid power.
My network is completely off-grid, and this strategy helps tremendously and does offer cost savings when compared to the inefficiency of backup generators.