NAS Power Consumption - Average Calculations

[Soloam]

Hello, I was wondering! NAS are 24/7 systems, for some company's that is not a problem, but for small businesses and home use, all dollars spend on a 24/7 are a lot! In average what is the watt that your systems are consuming? And what is the hardware (number of disks and cpu for example)? Lets make it a average value, that would be idle for most systems. We can try to make a small "Power Consumption Repository" :P

Best Regards to all

 

[tvsjr]

The power consumption is so highly variable that you're better off calculating it as you build the system. There are vast differences between some of the Atom-based 4 drive systems around here, my 36-drive monster, and others who are running more than 100 drives in multiple JBOD arrays. My system (in sig) can vary more than 300 watts based on system load alone (two 115-watt TDP processors).

 

[Soloam]

I was trying to make a average power consumption to home use, so that people could have some starting point on what would be the expense on having a system like this 24/7 online. Your system looks like a bit overkill to most common home FreeNAS user :)

 

[jgreco]

You can actually start by looking at the power supply sizing sticky, which has various discussions of idle power consumption along with some reasonable ballpark estimates. For an E3 system, for example, it probably comes out to around 45 watts plus 6-8 watts per drive, assuming you've purchased a high efficiency power supply and your system is idle.