102/104 Win Compatibility

wquatan wrote:
StephenB wrote: On my network I need to send it via a WoL utility. So I manually wake the sleeping device. That would be annoying. In the assumption I want to watch a movie, it might be necessary to start a PC just to wake up the NAS for the tv-set.

If the player doesn't automatically send WoL, that is correct.

Even if the player does automatically send WoL it takes several seconds for the NAS drives to spin up again after it is woken up. (This also applies to disk spin-down. The NAS isn't asleep, but it still takes a while for the drives to spin up so you can access your content).

My advice is to leave the main server up whenever you normally use it, and focus your most aggressive power-saving measures on the clients and secondary servers. On the main server, disk spindown with a long timeout (perhaps an hour) is one way to reduce power use off-hours. Power-down schedules are another, though you want to be somewhat conservative on the schedule.

Using WoL to wake the NAS makes sense if the NAS is a backup device (as do more aggressive power-down schedules). Though even there, the disks use most of the power, so spin-down with a long timeout gets you most of the gain.

Personally, I leave the Pro up 24x7 and use my Pro to wake my PCs. An add-on to let me do this through a Web interface. Generally I am doing this while away from home (following up the wake-up with remote desktop connection). I also use the WoL feature of the Pro to wake up the PCs for their automated backup. I could use the same feature to wake up the RN102 (before I back up some folders on the Pro up to it), but at present I am not doing that.

Unfortunately OS6 doesn't currently let you send WoL packets as part of a scheduled backup job.