NAS Windows

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Baloo449

New Member
Mar 17, 2015
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Thank you guys for your replies (Deci, EffrafaxOfWug, PigLover, NeverDie)
Some of your statement helped to clarify my comprehension of this subject at first sight, but then raised a couple more subsidiary questions. But focusing on the main point that running a pico PSU for this project would not be 100% safe, so I will go for an ATX PSU.
Essentially, the questions are revolving around the boot up time and mode of the HDDs. As the system is installed on a SSD drive, why would the spinning disk eat up all that power at boot time ? Would they consume 84w (14w each * 6 from NeverDie's power consumption sheet) every time the would get off the sleeping mode ? Why this sheet mention 12v consumption and 5v ? When is it 5v and when is it 12 ? These questions are for a better understanding of energy consumption.
So do you have any ATX model to recommend ? Currently looking for a 250-300w gold or platinum PSU. Does it even exist ?
 

Deci

Active Member
Feb 15, 2015
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Every time the drives come out of sleep/power on they will draw the most current they are ever going to draw, getting the platters up to speed is what consumes the most power, after they are spinning they consume a heap less power.

Does the motherboard etc support staggered spinup? this helps to get around the problem by spinning up the drives one by one instead of all at once.
 

NeverDie

Active Member
Jan 28, 2015
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USA
As the system is installed on a SSD drive, why would the spinning disk eat up all that power at boot time?
Think about it: each disk has to go from not-spinning to spinning at its specified RPM. That takes energy. Once a disk is at its rated RPM, all it has to do to maintain that RPM is expend enough energy to overcome friction, which is considerably less.
 
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Baloo449

New Member
Mar 17, 2015
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@Deci and NeverDie : thx for these clarifications. But how can I know if the MB supports staggered spinup ?
I've never ever seen this parameter as far I can remember ? is it in BIOS ?
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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As others have said, it's accelerating the platters to crazy RPM that sucks up all the power, once inertia's been overcome you only need to apply power to overcome the friction.

Rule of thumb in my experience is that you only get staggered spin-up from enterprisey HBAs or RAID cards; bog-standard motherboards and/or SATA chipsets don't support it. Would be loved to be proved wrong however! High-end server boards with their own integrated RAID or HBA's are another matter of course.

Startup peak power draw for my 8-drive system is about 120W, its idle power draw is ~65W with all the drives still spinning. The charts list power draw on both the 5V and 12V lines because a) hard drives use the 5V for their electronics and 12V for the motors (hence why the vast bulk of the power consumption is on the 12V rail) and b) all power supplies are not created equal; a particularly daft example would be a ludicrous power supply that might be able to provide 1.21 jiggerwhats on its 12V rail but only 0.0001mW on its 5V rail; even though it has plenty of power at 12V it won't have enough to power the rest of the drive so you'd still end up with no drive.