[StillBored]

I generally run linux on my NAS, but power consumption is always one of my big priorities for my home NAS. I also shoot for the lowest possible idle power. I don't care if it consumes 250W when I'm using it, only that when I'm not using it it better be just a few watts. That is why i traditionally use Atom (c2000) or ARM hardware. Combined with disk spindown (custom script), turning off everything not in use (extra network ports, etc) My idle power is ~25W. I've only got 12 disks but the big power draw right now is the marvell SATA chips on my motherboard, which don't have any kind of link power saving controls (that I've found yet). I've got another motherboard using a G4400 that idles closer to 12W (total system power), but doesn't have ECC or a BMC..

Anyway, I use a little script which monitors activity against my MD device (yah software RAID, another discussion) and sends full spindown commands to the drives. I've been experimenting with a full drive powerdown, and full port power down (different machine). If I weren't using the NAS as a DHCP/DDNS/etc server I would probably put it into S3 standby and then wake it on CIFS/NFS/RPC inbound.

I'm also using cheap x540 based 10G boards, which add about ~5W a port, but I turn them off on an idle timer and fail-over to a 1G port that I can't measure the power on.

Bottom line, a home NAS device isn't a server that needs to run 24-7. Its not hard to tweak stuff to pull the idle power way down. Given a long enough timer (say 1-2 hours) you will only notice the machine resume/spin up once a day when you initially sit down at your desktop.