Comment by mrb
13 hours ago
"I was 8.5W over"
As I suspected :-) Also note that by measuring "36W POE consumption" you are excluding the AC-DC conversion losses from the switch's PSU which further makes the comparison a bit unfair. IOW your POE equipment draws more than 36W at the wall.
The only fair comparison is looking as only your NAS idling with drives (35W you claim, and I still believe it's closer to 40W) vs the OP's NAS with 4 drives (which should be 57W, or 67W minus 10W for his two extra drives). Then if the OP used a better sized PSU he might cut out another 10W or so (see my "PS" above) then you are comparing your 35W (or 40W) with his 47W which of course is still in your favor and a testament that Ubiquiti did a great job optimizing the UNAS Pro. But this 12W (or 7W) difference hardly matters for someone running a single NAS at their house. This extra power is around $1 or $2 monthly at average US domestic electricity rates.
"by measuring "36W POE consumption" you are excluding the AC-DC conversion losses from the switch's PSU which further makes the comparison a bit unfair. IOW your POE equipment draws more than 36W at the wall."
I'm aware of that, but the wall measurement is still 96W before the UPS, so it's basically just pushing numbers around the same budget. The switch is the only place i have to measure "poe power consumption", so i quoted that number.
"35W you claim, and I still believe it's closer to 40W"
I have 4 x 8TB WD Red Plus drives in there, quoted by WD to be consuming 3.4W idle, so 4x3.4 = 13.6W, and a couple of Samsung QVO 8TB drives, which idles at ~45mW. Assuming the UNAS pulls 20W by itself, adding the drives lands us at 33.7W, right in the ballpark of my measured 35W.
Part of my "astonishment" was also that i run my entire "infrastructure" for 30W more than OPs NAS idles at (66.7W vs 96W).
And yes, 7W is probably peanuts, but when you're paying €0.35/kWh, it all adds up. I came from a full self hosted setup, proxmox, multiple NAS boxes, etc, and was using ~350W idle, when power spiked in 2022 to €$1.12/kWh (peak pricing, 17-21, with an average price some days of €1/kWh). I initially turned everything off, and with just the Mac mini, router, switch, APs, cameras, various hubs, i was at 67W.
The UNAS has been added since (after power prices stabilized), which took the idle power consumption to 96W. And no, the UNAS is not pulling 29W. I've removed a couple of cameras, replaced a couple of APs, even removed an AP, so it's not direct comparison, other than in terms of total power consumption for price comparison.