I don't have a Synology, is it really 45W 24/7?! Is 45W the lower power mode number? I'm assuming it has a mode where the cpu sleeps and the disks spin down, and it must spend most of its time in that mode. If not, I'm very confused why they are so popular
https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8231/wd-red-10tb-nas-hdd-r... has the drive power consumption at 0.5W when "sleeping", which is hopefully most of the time. You'd hope a Synoplogy would put the disks to sleep. All in all, surprisingly high power for something that's meant to be on 24/7.
Being WD Red (Plus) drives, they don't support hibernation (not supported in firmware), so they're spinning 24/7, though supposedly using only 5.5W doing it.
So in theory the NAS should be able to go as low as 20W, but in reality it rarely does, at least not when running the drives in raid. Because it uses the same drives as its root/boot partition, anything that logs will write to disks, essentially keeping them active most of the time.
Over a weeks usage, my DS918+ rarely dipped below 40W, and the average consumption was 44.8W over that week. There could be an easy "fix" for it, as the 918/920 models have 2 NVME bays, so in theory if Synology would allow it, those could be used for boot/root, allowing the spinning rust some rest every now and then.
Instead i've turned it off, and replaced with a small ARM device with an SSD.
I'm also experimenting with a NUC7CJYH with a large Seagate Barracuda drive and a USB stick for root/boot, and that averages a power consumption of about 5W over a week being used for daily backups. I tried with a RPi 4 with a bus powered USB drive, and that ended up at 4W, so if power consumption is "almost equal", the NUC has a lot more power.
