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Cake day: November 25th, 2025

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  • spinning-down hdd’s when they’re not in use

    I’ve just been through this recently. I decided to have my 2 backup HDDs spin down when not in use (99% of the time). I ran into an issue though where I needed them to wake up for SMART tests (which SMART didn’t trigger). Tried a few things that didn’t work so just set them to spin all the time. There’s about a 1-2w difference when they’re spinning all the time. So it’s just not something worth worrying about IMO (In the UK with high energy costs that comes out to 1.3 pence per day roughly).









  • MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.ziptoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldNew OS on ugreen DH4300
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    1 month ago

    My server is usually between 30w-40w (that’s about 20-25p per day electricity cost in the UK at 25p/kwH).

    That’s with the aforementioned processor/ram, a Gigabyte A520M motherboard, 1 case fan, the stock cooler, a 120gb 2.5" SSD, 2 4TB 3.5" HDDs and 1 8TB 3.5" HDD (all drives always spinning).

    It’s running OpenMediaVault as OS and 5 docker containers 24/7 (Flatnotes, FreshRSS, Kavita, qBittorrent and RecipeSage). Other than that I use it for media access from a MiniPC running Debian w/ Kodi accessing it via SMB (the server doesn’t transcode).



  • I have Seagate Barracuda drives in my NAS because I didn’t know about CMR vs SMR before I bought them.

    2 of them are backups, the other spins all the time. The bulk of my storage is video files with infrequent adding of new stuff. The active drive has qBittorrent seeding from it 24/7 so it can be a bit noisy.

    Other than that, you’ll see lower transfer speeds from SMR drives but nothing to worry about if it’s small writes or infrequent copying of large video files. It also takes an age to run a long SMART self test - 18hrs on an 8TB HDD that is 75% full (this’ll get worse as it gets closer to full).

    So SMR drives aren’t ideal but they’ll do the job for a “write once, read many times” style of storage. I wouldn’t buy them at all for a RAID setup. If you can, you’d be better buying refurbished enterprise drives but I have no idea what availability there’ll be where you are.