How can i educe electricity costs for my always-on home NAS

LauriTilkanen

Hi everyone,

I’m from Finland, where electricity prices have been rising sharply lately, especially during the colder months. I run a home NAS server that’s on 24/7 because I rely on it for backups, media, and file sharing. It’s an essential part of my setup, but with the increasing electricity bills, I’m starting to worry about the cost of keeping it running non-stop.

I’ve been tracking electricity prices on sites like porssisahkohintanyt.fi to try and use power more efficiently, but the NAS just can’t really be turned off without losing access to important data.

I’m hoping to hear from this community if anyone has tips on how to optimize a home NAS setup to reduce power consumption. Maybe there are specific hardware choices, power-saving configurations, or smart scheduling tricks that could help me keep costs down without sacrificing availability?

TheGodfather

LauriTilkanen Depends on how much storage and how many slots you need. Thin clients can be very energy efficient. For example the Dell Wyse series can get down to 3W idle.

GrouchyGrape

LauriTilkanen it's hard to make recommendations without knowing your general needs and current setup

NetRunner88

What NAS ? What is its power consomption ?

mar2112

Use a raspberrypi and solid state disk.

Eirikr70

It very much depends on what you use your NAS for. I have chosen an SBC (x86 architecture) instead of a NAS, also for energy-consumption reasons. You might also grab a Raspberry Pi as suggested by mar2112 depending on the use you have for it. Another possibility would be to turn it off most of the time and wake it on LAN with an always-on low-energy device.
In other terms, there are many solutions, depending on your needs, your existing setup and your will to change it.