Synology NAS: Turn It Off At Night, Or Run It 24/7 (All The Time)?

With electricity prices higher than Elon Musk on Joe Rogan’s podcast(am I allowed to say that?), people have rightly been going around their homes turning off unused appliances. But what about your Synology NAS? It’s basically a computer, right? And people often turn their computers off at night – so it stands to reason that your NAS should be turned off nightly, too.

Well it’s not always that easy: some devices are designed (and indeed, optimized) to run 24/7. Is this also true of Synology NASes? Let’s find out.

Key Points

Should You Run Your Synology NAS 24/7? (The Short Answer)

While turning your Synology NAS off every nightwillsave some electricity, you will not be able to access any of your files when it is off. PlusSynology NASescome with a number of power-saving features that will reduce power consumption – especially when the NAS is not in use.

For me, the decision (of whether to turn the NAS off at night or not) comes down to how frequently you use your NAS, and what you use it for:

Let’s explore these benefits in a bit more detail.

The (Potential) Benefits To Shutting Down At Night

Some people argue that any mechanical or electronic device will need a break from time to time, and so shutting down your Synology device will help the NAS – along with the hard drives orSSDs installedin it.

Sincehard drives have a lifespanof 3-5 years (for example), you could argue that shutting them down every night will prolong their life. After all, if they are rated for 40 months of 24/7 running, if you only run them for 12 hours a day, they could last for 80 months instead.

That’s the theory, at least. In practise, turning drives on and off can (slowly) damage them – which I explore later on.

What is undeniably true is that youwillsave electricity by turning your Synology NAS off when you are not using it.

A Synology NAS will use 20-50 watts of electric, although this varies a lot depending on your exact Synology model and how many drives it has (a 2-bay DS220+ NAS might only use 20-25 watts, whereas an 8-bay NAS will use closer to 40-50 watts).

If we calculate this at 30 watts of energy use,energy cost calculatorswill show us that this equates to 24 pence a day at the UK’s current energy prices:

While £7.20 per month isn’tmassive, it is still decently expensive – especially if you only use your NAS between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday (for example). If you instead ensured that your Synology NAS was only turned on between these times, it would equate to 480 minutes a day and change the total cost to just 8 pence a day (or 40 pence a week, i.e. under £2 per month):

Going from £7.20 per month to under £2 per month is clearly a big saving, especially if you have multiple NASes.

How To Shut It Off At Night

There are a few ways to shut your Synology NAS off at night:

With all that said, it’s often easier – and better – to keep your Synology NAS running all the time.

Reasons To Constantly Run Your Synology NAS

I am personally a fan of running my Synology NAS 24/7: I never turn it off at night. There are three main reasons for this:

If you do decide to keep your NAS running overnight, there are still ways that you can reduce power consumption when it’s not in use.

How To Save Power While Running The NAS 24/7

Synology ship their NASes with multiple power-saving features when you might want to consider using, especially if reducing electric usage is a priority for you.

Enable Disk Hibernation

Synology NASes are designed with a few layers ofhibernation features for different parts of your NAS. By default, your internal drives – and any external (USB) drives will go to sleep after 20 minutes of inactivity. You can check (or modify) this within “HDD Hibernation” within “Hardware & Power”:

This means that if nothing is using the drives, the hard drives will spin down – reducing overall power consumption. Of course, if you have various packages installed, there might be constantly hitting the drive – meaning that this hibernation mode does not kick in.

Still, it is a fairly useful benefit – especially if you mainly use your NAS for file access (because when you stop accessing files, the drives will go into hibernation after 20 minutes).

Use Wake-On-Lan

Themajority of Synology NASessupport WOL (wake on LAN), which is a useful power recovery feature – because it can also save you power. If you would ideally like to switch your NAS off overnight, but you are concerned in-case someone might want to occasionally access your NAS then,WOL is perfectfor you.

WOL functionality appears in a number of systems, and in Windows (for example) the computer can turn on automatically if local LAN traffic is detected.

Translated:“if local LAN traffic is detected”is just a fancy way of saying that your PC ‘monitors’ the ethernet cable that is plugged into it, and if it detects a new ‘request’ to access the computer (e.g. to retrieve files), it will then start up.

It’s worth pointing out that WOL works slightly differently with Synology NAS devices, though. The NAS won’t automatically start-up when network traffic is detected.Instead, it monitors ‘requests’ from a wake-on-LAN application (like theDS Finder appor Synology Assistant) for its exact IP and MAC address. It willthenturn on. In other words, simply trying to access your NAS from a PC won’t turn it on – but accessing it via one of Synology’s appswillturn it on.

You can enable this useful feature under the “General” tab of “Hardware & Power” within the DSM control panel:

If your NAS has multiple LAN (ethernet) ports though, make sure that you tick the right option here. For example if your ethernet cable goes into LAN 2, be sure to tick “Enable WOL on LAN 2” not on LAN 1 – otherwise WOL will not work for you.

Low Power Drives To The Rescue

A final way that you can reduce your Synology’s power consumption is by purchasing specific low power drives for it. Western Digital, for example, sell “WD Green” drives – or drives with “GreenPower” which they claim are “low power” and reduce overall power consumption.

Drives of all types (hard drives, SATA SSDs andM.2 NVMe) can all use 5-10 watts of electric, so the fact thatWD Green drives use half this poweris good to know.

After all, if you have a four-bay NAS, you could save 20 watts by switching to a ‘green’ (low power) drive. This could translate to £5 per month of electric saved, which is naturally important to consider.

Warning:some people argue that WD Green drivesshouldnotbe used inside NASes, especially because their power saving mode can cause problems inside RAID arrays. You should always double check theSynology compability listwhen buying hardware for your NAS, in-case the expected product isn’t recommended. If you already use WD Green drives inside your NAS, make sure that you keep off-site backups at a minimum.

Equally, M.2 NVMe drives tend to use less power than SATA drives (whether that’s a HDD or SSD), so you could also consider moving to NVMe drives if your budget allows. Not only willfile transfer speeds be faster, but your energy consumption will also be lower.

Related Reading:Synology NAS Says ‘This Site Can’t Be Reached’: How To Fix This

Tristan has been interested in computer hardware and software since he was 10 years old. He has built loads of computers over the years, along with installing, modifying and writing software (he’s a backend software developer ‘by trade’).Tristan also has an academic background in technology (in Math and Computer Science), so he enjoys drilling into the deeper aspects of technology.Tristan is also an avid PC gamer, with FFX and Rocket League being his favorite games.