[acranox]

Don’t forget about power. If you’re trying to build a low power NAS, those hdds idle around 5w each, while the ssd is closer to 5mw. Once you’ve got a few disks, the HDDs can account for half the power or more. The cost penalty for 2TB or 4TB ssds is still big, but not as bad as at the 8TB level.

[j45]

5w to mw is huge, but at the same time the total cost of ownership over 3/5 years depending on the cost of the hardware may not pay off in a 5w spread, especially with SSD premiums.

When it comes to self hosted servers for example, using tiny computers as servers often gets you massive power savings that do make a difference compared to buying off-lease rack mount servers that can idle in the hundreds of watts.

[markhahn]

such power claims are problematic - you're not letting the HDs spin down, for instance, and not crediting the fact that an SSD may easily dissipate more power than an HD under load. (in this thread, the host and network are slow, so it's not relevant that SSDs are far faster when active.)

[philjohn]

There's a lot of "never let your drive spin down! They need to be running 24/7 or they'll die in no time at all!" voices in the various homelab communities sadly.

Even the lower tier IronWolf drives from Seagate specify 600k load/unload cycles (not spin down, granted, but gives an idea of the longevity).

[olavgg]

I experimented with spindowns, but the fact is, many applications needs to write to disk several times per minute. Because of this I only use SSD's now. Archived files are moved to the Cloud. I think Google Disk is one of the best alternatives out there, as it has true data streaming built in the MacOS or Windows clients. It feels like an external hard drive.

[1over137]

Letting hdds spin down is generally not advisable in a NAS, unless you access it really rarely perhaps.

[sixothree]

I've put all of my surveillance cameras on one volume in _hopes_ that I can let my other volumes spin down. But nope. They spend the vast majority of their day spinning.