SAS drives for home NAS

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

jang430

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
264
22
28
51
So while I'm waiting for some deal to be available on ebay, why are others not concerned that SAS drives consume more power than SATA?

I also read they don't spin down? Won't all these translate to significant additional power usage? How much watts do a regular SAS2 drive consume?
 

Jiaxinxi

Member
Aug 23, 2017
73
34
18
53
I don't know about the exact wattage per drive. I have 12 3TB HGST SAS drive on SC846 chassie. when fully loaded. Power consumption is 160W on Idle. Then I took 10 out, 115W on idle. So it is about 5W per drive.

Another thing I found is that SAS drive doesn't have rich S.M.A.R.T information like the SATA drive.
 

Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
2,642
1,496
113
I used low density TB drives for backup server.
I have 4 backup servers , only power on during backup. So power usage is not a concern.
Cheap and reliable enterprise drive is good.

The one other backup medium is tapes, I stop using tapes 15 years ago.

To reduce power usage, I used 14TB drives in the 24x7 server.
My important files are mirrored across 2 disks.
99% of my storage is media files. I do not use raid , backup nightly.
 

jang430

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
264
22
28
51
Thanks @Jiaxinxi . If that is the case, it should be acceptable to me. I bought 20 drives of 3 TB SAS yesterday, 13 USD each. I think it's a pretty sweet deal. Though I'll be using it on unraid, in which spin down of sas is currently not supported.

As far as I know, not near line SAS.

Thanks for the input of others as well.