do you (recommend to) switch the NAS for a night?

aldapooh

Hi,

is there any benefit in switching off / powering off NAS for a night?
I used to do so for 10+ years via scheduling as I do not use NAS during nights/early mornings. 
But is there any benefit in that with modern HDDs?

Thanks!

mMontana

During these 10+ years how many hard drives died before you were ready to change them?

Mijzelf

I don't switch off my NAS at night, but that is mainly because it has some other tasks to do.

Theoretically a disk wears out most by spinning up and down and by temperature changes caused by switching on and off. But as long as your NAS isn't somewhere where the disk cool down to below freezing, I don't think the practical life will be influenced.

For spinning up and down typically something like 100000 times is specified. At the moment you are at once in 3 hours, which means 34 years. Putting the spin down time to 1 hour instead of half an hour will have more impact than keeping the NAS on, at night.

Further I wouldn't switch on the NAS on schedule, but on demand, by using wake on lan. That would save more electricity, and prevent the NAS from being switched on for nothing, in my case.

aldapooh

mMontana said:

During these 10+ years how many hard drives died before you were ready to change them?

Hi,

actually not a single one (yet). Ok, my NAS is only 8 years, not 10 (I just checked when I bought it : September 2013) and exactly back then I got two 3 TB Toshiba/Hitachi HDDs which are still fine and working. I had a schedule and my NAS is only switched on for 8 hours per day, as I do not need it in other hours.

But maybe it is time to reconsider my habit...

aldapooh

Mijzelf said:

 instead of half an hour will have more impact than keeping the NAS on, at night.

Further I wouldn't switch on the NAS on schedule, but on demand, by using wake on lan. That would save more electricity, and prevent the NAS from being switched on for nothing, in my case.

Hello Mijzelf and thank you for your advice.

I found a setting "Turn Hard disk after XX minutes" on Power Management tab.
On my NSA325 it is set to 30 minutes by default, and on NAS542 it is set to 15 minutes only.
Which one would you recommend? What is the best pattern here?

Checkbox "Wake up on LAN" is enabled on both devices.

mMontana

Congratulation for the lifespan of your hard drives. 8 years are... quite a lot.

Therefore...

If your habits about using the NAS are not changing, why change the behavior. Shutdown the device at the time you don't need it, then wake it up when you need it. Personally won't follow this pattern, but anyway if it suits you, keep it doing that.

Moreover, i suggest you against reducing the time of shutting down hard drives: could potentially double the numbers of spindown/spinup.

Last but not least: if you're not planning to phase out your NAS325, change one or both disks (depending of your RAID arrangement, if any) as soon as possible. After 8 years one could face issues or fault, even the increased job of rebuild could lead to unhappy ending.

aldapooh

mMontana said:

Last but not least: if you're not planning to phase out your NAS325, change one or both disks (depending of your RAID arrangement, if any) as soon as possible. After 8 years one could face issues or fault, even the increased job of rebuild could lead to unhappy ending.

thanks mMontana.

do you by any chance know what is a maximum volume size/HDD size Zyxel NAS25 (firmware NSA325_4.81(AAAJ.1)) supports? I do not want to lose any space by creating 2 volumes so I would like to understand what is a single maximum volume space supported here?

thanks and best regards, -A

aldapooh

Mijzelf said:

 instead of half an hour will have more impact than keeping the NAS on, at night.

Further I wouldn't switch on the NAS on schedule, but on demand, by using wake on lan. That would save more electricity, and prevent the NAS from being switched on for nothing, in my case.

Hello Mijzelf and thank you for your advice.

I found a setting "Turn Hard disk after XX minutes" on Power Management tab.
On my NSA325 it is set to 30 minutes by default, and on NAS542 it is set to 15 minutes only.
Which one would you recommend? What is the best pattern here?

Checkbox "Wake on LAN" is enabled on both and works fine for me.

Thanks, and regards, -A

Mijzelf

Which one would you recommend? What is the best pattern here?

Depends on your usage. The goal is -I suppose- to minimize spin up/downs to save the disks (and prevent the spinup waiting time), and yet maximize the time it's spinned down, to save electricity.

When you use the NAS mainly for media streaming, the disks will be spinning during the stream, and when no new stream is started within 15 minutes after the stream ended, it probably won't happen in the near future, so 15 minutes is fine.

When you use it as working directory for office work, it's perfectly possible that you open a document each half an hour. So in that case half an hour would be too short, and an hour would be better.

When it's mainly a backup medium it will only be used once a day, or something like that. In that case 15 minutes is fine. Shorter would also suffice.

do you by any chance know what is a maximum volume size/HDD size Zyxel NAS25 (firmware NSA325_4.81(AAAJ.1)) supports? I do not want to lose any space by creating 2 volumes so I would like to understand what is a single maximum volume space supported here?

The technical maximum for a volume is 16TiB. (Caused by the max of 2^32 4k clusters in an ext4 filesystem). The practical max for a disk is 16TB, because the NAS doesn't support more than one volume on a disk. The supported max for a disk is AFAIK 4TB, and so the supported max for a volume is 8TB, in case of raid0 or jbod. Yet sata = sata, and the embedded Linux kernel has no real limit for harddisks. If you search this forum you'll find people having successfully used bigger disks in their NSA3xx.

I don't see how you would loose any space by creating 2 volumes?