I didn’t pay much attention to power consumption when I first set up my Synology NAS at home. I was more excited by the possibilities the NAS enabled in my workflow and personal life with file management and photo backups. But over time, as I started considering power backup solutions for my unit, I realized how much of an impact the NAS has been causing on my power bill. While the NAS itself isn’t rated to eat up a lot of electricity, I could still use some frugality to make it much more efficient — and even cut my NAS power bill almost in half. These are the changes I made to my setup to hit that goal.

7 Aggressive HDD hibernation

Those things don’t need to spin at all times

While the NAS itself may not draw much power, the spinning hard drives do — and it could add up pretty quickly, especially if you have a large NAS with eight or more drives installed. These drives are designed to keep spinning constantly, waiting to respond to any system query instantly. But most times, that’s unnecessary, and the drivers could get some off time.

Setting the HDD hibernation to 15 minutes in DSM’s control panel brought a noticeable drop in idle power draw. Of course, I had to do some trial and error to ensure I wasn’t hindering any critical apps, or an inessential program was waking up the drives repeatedly. Once done, the drives spent several hours asleep every day, aside from their scheduled downtime.

6 Disabling unused services and packages

Quite an obvious solution

Synology’s DSM comes packed with first-party tools and features — from a media server and surveillance to a backup tool and a photos app. It’s an impressive package that helps you get started, but it's also wasteful if you aren’t using a lot of them. So, I went through my installed packages and disabled anything I wasn’t actively using.

I also turned off universal search (it stung a bit, but I sure can live without it) and indexing for most shared folders, which not only reduced CPU load but also helped the drives stay in hibernation longer. This cleanup reduced disk access and trimmed down the overall power draw. And the NAS ran quieter and cooler, considering how harsh Indian summers are on my NAS each year.

5 Smart power scheduling

Turns out, I could do without 24/7 NAS access

I tried to treat my NAS like an enterprise server that lets me find that long-lost work file I randomly wanted to see at 3 AM. But I never needed to do that. Still, my NAS continued to run without a break. So now, it runs on a power schedule. It shuts down at 1 AM on weekends, a reasonable time even for late-night movie sessions, and is ready to use before my office time each morning.

Those few hours of downtime cover my sleep time and protect the NAS and those drives from constant, unnecessary use. If I need to access the NAS during its scheduled downtime, I can always wake it remotely, even from my phone, with Wake on LAN or WOL.

4 Moving automated downloads and backups

Automation could use some scheduling, too

Poorly timed automation for various tasks could also lead to excess power use. I had backups and file sync jobs running at odd hours, like when I wasn’t using the NAS. Clubbing those tasks during active use could avoid extra HDD use, and it sure did.

These tasks take hours and keep the drives awake for longer, preventing hibernation. So, I reorganized all scheduled tasks to run around the evening. This way, these tasks could run in the background as I wound down my work and went into the evening hours until the NAS’s nightly shutdown time.

3 Using SSDs for critical apps and caching

It’s more than about speed

SSDs are usually installed to improve transfer speeds and caching. But in doing so, they also take the heavy load off those power-hungry NAS hard drives, and it also helps that SSDs themselves are comparatively quite a bit energy efficient.

DSM lets you set up SSD caches to quicken access to frequently used files, and you can also dedicate SSD volumes for apps like Synology Photos or indexing services. Doing this kept those apps from constantly waking the HDDs, letting them spend longer in hibernation.

2 Tracking power usage with a smart plug

What you measure is what you control

When I first tried to find out how much power my NAS was drawing at different times of the day, I didn’t have a reliable way to measure it. The easiest way to get those figures handy was to turn my NAS into a smart plug with energy monitoring.

Now, I have access to real-time and historical data on how much power the NAS is actually drawing. This helped me optimize my process for maximum efficiency by tracking how each change I made to the NAS impacted its efficiency. You can obviously do without it too, but if you are as pedantic as I am, I’d recommend it to help you bring down that hefty power bill.

1 Using a more efficient UPS

Sometimes, NAS isn’t the one to blame

This did come as a surprise to me since I hadn’t considered my uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to be a factor initially. I had reused an old unit for my NAS without realizing it was oversized and inefficient for the small load of my NAS and router.

It was drawing more power than the two devices needed, even when idle. I had the option to connect the NAS to my home inverter, but I instead decided to give them a separate unit of their own. The new lower-capacity UPS was close to what my NAS and router needs, and brought down the power draw a few meaningful notches.

Power efficiency saves you cash

I use my trusty Synology DS920+ as my primary NAS. That’s why many of my tricks are meant for a Synology NAS only, as they work around the tools and options DSM offers. But it is easy to find similar feature alternatives from other NAS options as well. Meanwhile, there is so much more you can do to bring down your NAS’s power consumption with some universally applicable techniques, no matter which NAS OS you’re on.