Some thoughts on power management in a NAS

⚡ Power Management for HDDs in NAS (spindown / APM / standby)

Here are some of my thoughts on power management in a NAS, mainly in regards to HDD spindown.

👍 Potential benefits

  • Energy savings: The obvious one — less power and heat. But with modern NAS-rated disks (like Seagate IronWolf Pro), the savings are modest compared to the potential downsides.
  • Noise reduction: Some users in a quiet environment appreciate drives spinning down when idle.
  • Slightly less wear on bearings: Theoretically less continuous rotation, but… (see below).

👎 Potential downsides

  • Start/stop stress: Frequent spin-up/down cycles actually increase wear. NAS-rated drives are designed to run 24/7; stopping and starting them can shorten lifespan.
  • Latency on access: Every spin-up adds several seconds delay when you or a service tries to access the disk. This is especially annoying with apps that expect instant availability.
  • Background tasks: NAS devices (like QNAP, Synology, OMV) often run indexing, SMART checks, RAID scrubbing, or logging — meaning disks rarely stay idle long enough to benefit.
  • RAID rebuild risk: If a disk is spun down and another fails, the wake-up latency can complicate or delay rebuild processes.

🛠️ Special case: archival / cold storage

  • If your NAS is mostly used as a backup target or cold archive (disks idle for days/weeks), spin-down can make sense.
  • For anything used daily (media server, VMs, databases, file share), it usually causes more trouble than benefit.

✅ Summary

Aside from saving a little bit of power (and noise), I see no real advantage to enabling aggressive HDD power management on NAS-grade drives like Seagate IronWolf Pro. In fact, for a NAS that runs 24/7, it’s generally better to let the drives spin continuously — that’s what they’re designed for.

👉 Power management only makes sense if the NAS is used for infrequent archival storage where disks can truly stay spun down for long periods.

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