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Forum Discussion
Pro6 reduction of power consumption
I have several Netgear Pro6 systems. They were upgraded to RaidOS 6.10, Intel E7600 CPUs and 4GB ram and are working great (had to recap the Seasonic power supplies since the caps were bulging). I also have an Ultra 6. I noticed the Ultra 6 uses (without drives plugged in) 19.5 watts while the Pro6 with E7600 CPUs and no drives plugged in uses 55-60watt. With the original Intel E2160 CPU the power consumption is not much different. I would like to downgrade the CPUs on the Pro6s I have to a single core model which uses as little as possible electricity. I only use them for storage, nothing fancy and since Ultra6 is fast enough with that Atom a single core Celeron in Pro6s should also be fast enough. Anyone knows what CPU should I look for ?
3 Replies
the Pro6 with E7600 CPUs and no drives plugged in uses 55-60watt.
Are the system fans spinning at full speed when you check this?
The power used by the CPU itself is small fraction of the system idle power. The E2160 should be using only 1-2 watts when idle. Based on your measurements, it sounds like the E7600 idle power is about the same as the E2160. So I don't think you'd save much (if anything) by downgrading the CPU to something slower than the E2160.
A more effective strategy might be to put these NAS on a power schedule (so they are off when you aren't using them). My backup NAS are all on power schedules. Or replace them over time with new ARM based NAS using NVMe drives.
Hi Stephen,
Yes, the fans are spinning hard, at full speed I think, although I took care to also upgrade the BIOS of the Pro6 before upgrading to RaidOS 6 (I know older BIOS was known to cause this). The temps are also low (36 degree Celsius system and 40 degree Celsius CPU which do not seem to justify the fan speeds. Even with the NAS powered off it still uses 4.5Watt while the Ultra 6 with identical power supply but different motherboard uses 1.5 watt when off. The amount of data I have makes impractical to switch to NVME at the moment, I have 24 drives of 3TB each Raid 1+0 distributed over 5 NASes (4 Pro6, 1 Ultra6). I would rather try to buy some larger capacity drives (18TB, Helium based Ultrastars), consolidate the smaller drives and retire some of the Pro6 systems but budget is tight. At least spinning down the drives when not in use works fine.
The temps are also low (36 degree Celsius system and 40 degree Celsius CPU which do not seem to justify the fan speeds.
The system boots from the disks, so when powering up diskless the system is running the boot loader in the flash. That loader has no thermal management, so the fans run at full speed.
Even with the NAS powered off it still uses 4.5Watt while the Ultra 6 with identical power supply but different motherboard uses 1.5 watt when off.
Not particularly surprising, since the Pro-6 -100NAS was launched in 2008, and the Ultra 6 was launched in 2011.
I have 24 drives of 3TB each Raid 1+0 distributed over 5 NASes (4 Pro6, 1 Ultra6).
So about 36 TB total capacity? Are some of these NAS used for backup?
Fewer larger disks certainly makes sense to me. You can phase this in over time (purchasing in pairs), you don't need to purchase all at once.
In the short term, you'd be able to retire some NAS now if you switched to X-RAID/RAID-5. Three 6x3TB arrays would give you 45 TB of storage.
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