4 ms·

And dividing your cost of the Synology plus harddrives + power required by year, how many years before you break even with a cloud storage plan ? Add to that th

And dividing your cost of the Synology plus harddrives + power required by year, how many years before you break even with a cloud storage plan ? Add to that the cost of a local backup drive and the cost of your time. Being based in Europe, where power costs €0.7/kWh, of course doesn't help, but powering a 4 bay Synology here costs around €23/month (45W x 24 x 30,5 / 1000 x 0.7), and that's the power costs alone. I have around 10TB of cloud storage (including backup storage), and i pay €22/month for that, so even before factoring in the hardware cost I'm saving money on the cloud. I have a small ARM machine running to synchronize cloud data locally in "real time", which has a USB drive attached for local backups, and the machine also makes cloud backups of the mirrored data. It uses around 4W idle, so costs are around €10/year, but of course doesn't offer much in the way of redundancy, but still i manage to live up to the 3-2-1 backup principle with data being primarily stored in the cloud, backed up locally as well as backed up to a different cloud provider. That being said, if your use case is more than 10TB, the cloud starts getting expensive, and the Synology might make sense.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> Being based in Europe, where power costs €0.7/kWh, of course doesn't help, but powering a 4 bay Synology here costs around €23/month (45W x 24 x 30,5 / 1000 x 0.7), and that's the power costs alone. This is crazy expensive. what is the 30.5 / 1000 ?
- 8fingerlouie 4y ago
  45W for 24 hours for 30.5 average days per month to get Watt Hours per month, then divide by 1000 to get kWh then multiply by € per kWh.
nsteel 4y ago
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
- 8fingerlouie 4y ago
  The load for the Synology model itself varies, but is usually around 10W - 20W. Add to that the load provided by the hard drives themselves, which is usually around 4W - 9W per drive. Low estimate is 10+4x4 = 26W High estimate is 20 + 4x9 = 56W. Wall measurements from my own DS918+ model with 4x8TB WD Red are 40W (idle) - 48W (full load on drives) - 52W (CPU load and some drive load).
  - nsteel 4y ago
    https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8231/wd-red-10tb-nas-hdd-review/index.html 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.
    - 8fingerlouie 4y ago
      The "major consumption" from a 4 bay nas is usually from the drives. I used WD official documentation for my consumption figures (https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-plus-hdd/product-brief-western-digital-wd-red-plus-hdd.pdf https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...), which state 5.5W idle, 8.8W access. 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.
maccard 4y ago
It's always good to remember these costs but I think €23/month on power is a bit much. My workstation with a 3970x threadripper idles at less than 45w when not in use.
- 8fingerlouie 4y ago
  The measurements (45W) was the average power consumption at the wall by my DS918+ equipped with 4 x 8TB WD Red drives. WD Red drives do not support spin down, so at most they're idle. Synology does publish power consumption for each model, i.e. for the DS920+ (https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS920+#specs https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS920+#specs) model they state : - 32.17W access - 9.69W HD Hibernation But, they also specify that the drives used for their calculation is Power consumption is measured when it is fully loaded with Western Digital 1TB WD10EFRX hard drive(s). And looking up power consumption of that particular model we get - read/write 3.7W - idle 3.1W - standby 0.6W so for the "access" vaule we can subtract 4x3.7W (14.8) and see that the device itself uses 17.37W. Then lookup the power consumption of your drives, i.e. WD80EFAX (https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-plus-hdd/product-brief-western-digital-wd-red-plus-hdd.pdf https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...), and find - read/write 8.8W - idle 5.5W - standby 0.8W So you add the 4x8.8W (35.2W) to the 17.37W and arrive at 52.57W for "access".
pkulak 4y ago
It's not about cost. I'm privileged enough to not have to worry about a couple dollars one way or the other per month. It's about owning my own photos. It's about knowing that if Google gets some bug up their butt and shuts down my account, I haven't lost every photo I've ever taken of my kids.
- 8fingerlouie 4y ago
  I've chosen to "counter" that by mirroring data at home (without redundancy), and making local as well as remote versioned backups. If my cloud provider of choice locks me out, i can simply restore my files to another provider from either of my backups. As for photos, i also make yearly Blu-Ray M-disc archives of the past years photos (or more frequent if i have a disk worth of photos). Identical sets stored in different locations (>100km apart), without any encryption, archiving or compression, and instead relying on physical security to protect them. Alongside the Blu-Ray discs i also keep a couple of USB hard drives with a mirror of my entire photo library (at time of archival) that is rotated whenever i deposit a new archive Blu-Ray disc. These drives use a simple file system. I can't at present remember if it's ExFAT or Ext2, but it's one of them, and it was chosen (at the time) because it is relatively easy to recover data from in case the filesystem gets corrupted. The hard drives are then subjected to a full (non destructive) surface read/write test, updated with the latest photos and stored. The surface test may be overkill, but there was a discussion some years back, that drive firmware will detect and correct weak magnetic sectors on the drive itself when it read data, which is what i'm trying to accomplish, simply a refresh of the storage medium.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

> Being based in Europe, where power costs €0.7/kWh, of course doesn't help, but powering a 4 bay Synology here costs around €23/month (45W x 24 x 30,5 / 1000 x 0.7), and that's the power costs alone. This is crazy expensive. what is the 30.5 / 1000 ?

8fingerlouie 4y ago
45W for 24 hours for 30.5 average days per month to get Watt Hours per month, then divide by 1000 to get kWh then multiply by € per kWh.

nsteel 4y ago

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

8fingerlouie 4y ago
The load for the Synology model itself varies, but is usually around 10W - 20W. Add to that the load provided by the hard drives themselves, which is usually around 4W - 9W per drive. Low estimate is 10+4x4 = 26W High estimate is 20 + 4x9 = 56W. Wall measurements from my own DS918+ model with 4x8TB WD Red are 40W (idle) - 48W (full load on drives) - 52W (CPU load and some drive load).
- nsteel 4y ago
  https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8231/wd-red-10tb-nas-hdd-review/index.html 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.
  - 8fingerlouie 4y ago
    The "major consumption" from a 4 bay nas is usually from the drives. I used WD official documentation for my consumption figures (https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-plus-hdd/product-brief-western-digital-wd-red-plus-hdd.pdf https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...), which state 5.5W idle, 8.8W access. 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.

maccard 4y ago

It's always good to remember these costs but I think €23/month on power is a bit much. My workstation with a 3970x threadripper idles at less than 45w when not in use.

8fingerlouie 4y ago
The measurements (45W) was the average power consumption at the wall by my DS918+ equipped with 4 x 8TB WD Red drives. WD Red drives do not support spin down, so at most they're idle. Synology does publish power consumption for each model, i.e. for the DS920+ (https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS920+#specs https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS920+#specs) model they state : - 32.17W access - 9.69W HD Hibernation But, they also specify that the drives used for their calculation is Power consumption is measured when it is fully loaded with Western Digital 1TB WD10EFRX hard drive(s). And looking up power consumption of that particular model we get - read/write 3.7W - idle 3.1W - standby 0.6W so for the "access" vaule we can subtract 4x3.7W (14.8) and see that the device itself uses 17.37W. Then lookup the power consumption of your drives, i.e. WD80EFAX (https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-red-plus-hdd/product-brief-western-digital-wd-red-plus-hdd.pdf https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...), and find - read/write 8.8W - idle 5.5W - standby 0.8W So you add the 4x8.8W (35.2W) to the 17.37W and arrive at 52.57W for "access".

pkulak 4y ago

It's not about cost. I'm privileged enough to not have to worry about a couple dollars one way or the other per month. It's about owning my own photos. It's about knowing that if Google gets some bug up their butt and shuts down my account, I haven't lost every photo I've ever taken of my kids.

8fingerlouie 4y ago
I've chosen to "counter" that by mirroring data at home (without redundancy), and making local as well as remote versioned backups. If my cloud provider of choice locks me out, i can simply restore my files to another provider from either of my backups. As for photos, i also make yearly Blu-Ray M-disc archives of the past years photos (or more frequent if i have a disk worth of photos). Identical sets stored in different locations (>100km apart), without any encryption, archiving or compression, and instead relying on physical security to protect them. Alongside the Blu-Ray discs i also keep a couple of USB hard drives with a mirror of my entire photo library (at time of archival) that is rotated whenever i deposit a new archive Blu-Ray disc. These drives use a simple file system. I can't at present remember if it's ExFAT or Ext2, but it's one of them, and it was chosen (at the time) because it is relatively easy to recover data from in case the filesystem gets corrupted. The hard drives are then subjected to a full (non destructive) surface read/write test, updated with the latest photos and stored. The surface test may be overkill, but there was a discussion some years back, that drive firmware will detect and correct weak magnetic sectors on the drive itself when it read data, which is what i'm trying to accomplish, simply a refresh of the storage medium.