Power
A home NAS stays on 24 hours a day so it can serve nothing at all between 2 and 7 in the morning. This guide covers the two ways to save electricity, noise and wear without giving up having the NAS there when you need it.
Everything is in Control Panel → Power off and restart.
Automatic power off and power on
The NAS powers off at the time you set, on the days you set, and comes back by itself in the morning.
Before it goes, it writes into the motherboard's own clock the time it has to switch the machine on. That does not depend on the network or on anyone else: it is the same circuit that keeps the time while the machine is off.
The rule that is not up for discussion
If there is a power-on time and the alarm cannot be programmed, the NAS does NOT power off.
A NAS that powers off and never comes back leaves its owner with no data and no way to switch it on from outside. Burning one more night of electricity is, by a very wide margin, the lesser evil. When this happens the NAS says so and stays on.
It does not power off with something running either
With a backup —or an antivirus scan— running, that night's power-off is skipped and you are told. Cutting a backup in half to save a few cents of electricity is a bad trade. You can turn this off if you would rather it always powered down.
Before you trust it
Test it once with a time that is close by. Not every motherboard honours the clock alarm: the NAS checks that the ORDER is accepted, but it cannot know whether that BIOS is really going to wake up. Set it five minutes ahead, let it power off and see whether it comes back. If it does not, leave the power-on time empty and switch it on yourself (or with Wake-on-LAN).
Wake-on-LAN
This leaves the network card listening while the machine is off, so you can switch it on from your phone without waiting for the scheduled time. You need a "Wake on LAN" app on the phone and to be on the same network.
If the card does not support it, the panel says so —and also says that scheduled power-on does work, because that one does not depend on the network.
On many machines you also have to enable it in the BIOS ("Wake on LAN", "Power on by PCI-E"). The NAS does its part and does it again on every boot.
Putting the disks to sleep
Spinning disks stop on their own when nobody is using them. Less noise and less electricity on a NAS that spends the night with nobody asking it for anything.
Two things that disappoint if nobody says them:
- A busy NAS never puts them to sleep. If it records cameras, has containers writing or a virtual machine switched on, someone is always touching the disk. That is not a fault: there simply is not one quiet minute.
- Do not go below 20 minutes. Stopping and starting them all the time wears them out more than leaving them spinning, and the first access after they go to sleep takes a few seconds —which feels like "the NAS is slow" exactly when you open a folder.
SSDs are left alone: they do not "spin down" and sending them this saves nothing.
It is applied again on every boot. It is an order to the disk, not a system setting: without repeating it, sleep would work until the first power cut and then quietly stop working. The panel takes care of that.