I've finally started the migration from the old Slug- which draws about 15W combined with an external USB drive- to a Terastation. The later has 4 x 400GB drives (configured as RAID5). The Terastation draws a peak of 90W at power up, and 49W while idle. Based on those two data points, I'm guessing the typical hard drive draws somewhere around 10-15 watts. Unfortunately, the Terastation doesn't have an internal disk spin down feature while idle- you need to mount an external drive to do so. (Booo, Buffalo! Other NAS's support that feature.) Just for kicks I might stick a USB thumbdrive on the thing and measure the wattage once the disks can spin down, and kill that annoying hum from 4 spindles. Plus it'd be a great experiment in how long flash memory in thumb drives can handle repeated R/W activity from all the swapping!
Wednesday Jun 06, 2007
I've finally started the migration from the old Slug- which draws about 15W combined with an external USB drive- to a Terastation. The later has 4 x 400GB drives (configured as RAID5). The Terastation draws a peak of 90W at power up, and 49W while idle. Based on those two data points, I'm guessing the typical hard drive draws somewhere around 10-15 watts. Unfortunately, the Terastation doesn't have an internal disk spin down feature while idle- you need to mount an external drive to do so. (Booo, Buffalo! Other NAS's support that feature.) Just for kicks I might stick a USB thumbdrive on the thing and measure the wattage once the disks can spin down, and kill that annoying hum from 4 spindles. Plus it'd be a great experiment in how long flash memory in thumb drives can handle repeated R/W activity from all the swapping!
Posted by jiop on June 06, 2007 at 05:57 PM PDT #