Thanks for including energy usage in the article. I carry USB-C SSDs around the house for backups and storage of archived files. Of course this is a bit of a hassle and I played with the idea of either buying or building a NAS. My current standby consumption for all computer stuff (access points, router, switches, a dozen or so microcontrollers and various SmartHome stuff, but not TVs, running computers or gaming consoles) is already above 100w and I would really like to bring this number down. An extra 30-60w makes it really hard to justify the purchase of a NAS ( that I don’t really need). I thought at least the synonogies would use way less power when not in use, so thanks for making me aware of this.
Yeah, I've never thought much about power consumption, but I've done a few write-ups of previous builds, and I received a lot of questions about power draw, so I decided to measure it on this one. I was surprised at how much power the system consumed, and it will be something I think about more up-front on future builds.
If you are not after speed, then you can do a redundant array of cheap nodes. Instead of using raid, just shove in an 8-12tb disk in a number of thin clients.
The key is that they spend most of the time turned off.
I agree and plan to buy a Kill A Watt P4460 meter. My HPE Gen 9 servers were free, but I still would like to know the operating cost of a single server.
