DS218+ Power Settings

Channels DVR Server
#1

Greetings to the group, long time reader, first time poster. I just recently switched over completely from WMC to Channels and I am loving it! I ran a short test on an older DS115 and the DVR ran great (no transcoding, not sure I'll even need that). But just to get something better for the long haul, I did invest in a 218+ and 1 Ironwolf 6TB drive. Just set it all up last night, and she's running well so far.

On to the question:

I want to make sure I have the power settings correct for the 218+. I would like it to consume as little power as possible. I'll try to include a screen shot of the current power settings. I ran the same power settings on the DS115 when testing on that unit, and everything worked fine.

Current power settings on the DS218+ are to hibernate the disk after 20 minutes of inactivity. I have no other specialized power settings in place at this point. Obviously powering down the unit itself on any type of schedule would mean potential missed recordings (I'm assuming). I'm also assuming that just disk hibernation is OK and won't interfere with any scheduled recordings at all?

I have also noticed that the fan on the 218+ never actually completely shuts down, even when the disk is hibernating. I saw in another post over here (https://community.getchannels.com/t/synology-ds218/5680/12) that another user was able to modify a DSM config file to get the fan to shut down. If that's an option without hurting anything else, I would be interested in more information on how to accomplish that.

As many other users have said before me, hats off to the developers on a very solid product all around!

DS218%20%20Power%20Settings

#2

IME the DS218+ doesn't hibernate (reliably, at least) worth spit. If you read Synology's old (read: "more useful") forums you'll see lots of complaints about erratic, or outright non-performing, power-saving settings.

After messing with it repeatedly over a couple months, and finding what these settings would do is mainly result in the drives "sleeping" for minutes at a time, I decided the starts following the short-term stops were probably doing more harm than good and turned it all off.

Then I decided to utilize Synology's Surveillance Station software, so it's active, full time, now, anyway.

#3

for a short amount of time, the hard drives consume a lot of power... this is on spin-up. After that, not really so much. Frequent spin-ups are not good for the drive. This is the most likely time for a drive to fail. A hard drive is designed to be constantly spinning. And you aren't really saving that much electricity by turning it off.

Lets say that the drive uses 3watts while spinning idle...

If your energy cost is $0.12 per Kw-hour, and the drive is idle for the whole year, you would pay an electric bill of $3.15 per year to run that drive. And the drive will last much longer not frequently doing power down and spin up.

But the drive is probably being used to read/write something for at least half the time in each day, so let's say its actually only idle for half the year. This would cost $1.58 per year for the time spent idle as opposed to powered down.

So hibernation for your single drive is saving approximately $1.58 per year, while also shortening the life of the drive... when the drive dies, you will need to replace it, negating the money saved by hibernation.

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#4

Great answer by @djcastaldo . I would agree, you probably don't want those drives spinning up and down.

I recently ran a calculation of at it costs to run specific appliances 24x7x365. My blended electricity cost works out to roughly 11.5 cents per kWh, taking into account the different rates for seasons and time of day. On an annual basis, this works out to roughly $1 per Watt per year. This is consistent with @djcastaldo.

I own a DS218+, and hooked up a Kill-a-watt, and measured a pretty consistent 21W total consumption. I didn't check when drives were thrashing or CPU was spiked, but that rarely happens anyway. I'm running 2x WD Red 6TB drives.

So my annual power bill for my NAS is ~$21. It is not worth trying to shave off a few $, if the result is less reliable drives.

#5

Awesome, thanks everyone for the replies! I pay $0.13 per kWh, with no rate changes based on time of day or season or anything else, so I'm right in the same ballpark.

Based on the information provided, I will just change the settings to NOT hibernate the hard drive. That should also get rid of any delay that I sometimes see now waiting for the disk to spin up when accessing the DVR system.

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