Yes, do enlighten me, I really have not come across home user who need 24/7 access to their NAS due to mission critical requirement. So far those I know run NAS 24/7 so that they can access their files over the internet and share files over their home network.
No lah ... I don't mean consumers CANNOT have 24/7. What I mean is that 24/7 are usually are for mission critical stuffs. Yes ... of course if we have a NAS running 24/7 ... we could access to it etc lah.
"Sleep mode" ok lah ... I also set my PC to "Sleep mode" when not in use.
Okay, since you want to know, then I shall share my 2 cents worth. If I sound too direct in this post, it's not targeted at you but rather I hope anyone reading this can wake up from their fantasy. The biggest reason to why some don't find it's necessary for NAS to run 24by7 is in my sincere opinion "ignorance".
Upon reading the word "ignorance" it seems pretty offensive, however, I must say I was ignorant too. Because of this ignorance, I lost one of my previous 3D works of 100,000 polygons of a very detailed Tamiya 3D model draw using 3D Studio Release 4 on the times when Pentium Pro in still new in the era.
I observed you have used the words "mission critical" in the context of Enterprise environments. However with respect with what I have lost, I call it Legacy and I will exchange for my ignorance with this Legacy any day, any time. That is mission critical to a company can be also apply to a normal consumer. The fact that you bother to store something for "this" long into a storage and you use it from time to time means it matter to you in some way. The measurement to this is cost. If I am in a business and data are important to the extent of affecting my business, I will not only buy a good backup plan, but also insurance on the data. For consumer, if you are not willing to invest in data protection, then be prepare to lose your time and effort to generate or acquire those information that you store in your storage system. They may not a life and death matter, but in some sense, they will affect your life causing regrets or inconvenience. As such you can definitely attach a cost to such a lost. If I can afford a good backup and redundancy strategy in the past, I wouldn't have lost my previous effort and works which can add up to my resume today and also what I can show to my next generation of what I have achieved previously. Can I say my lost is priceless in this sense ? Will it be mission critical to my life ? As you can see, it all boils down to dollars and cents if you really want to give an amount to it.
10 years ago, in order to achieve the notation of data redundancies and backup strategy, one will need to be a system guru and its probably in the five figures range to achieve what can be achieve today. As such, my ignorance back then was probability not as ignorant today given that its a 5 figure sum that I was looking at. Here I will first share how much it cost to maintain an idling NAS at 24by7 with 3x WD Green + 2x WD Red. 51 Watts, that's all! Review the image below when the electrical consumption is captured during NAS idle time.
At 51W, it's 38kWh in 31days. Based on PUB's most recent electrical tariffs for household of 21.04cents/kWh, it's equivalent to near $8/month. Okay, perhaps it will be inaccurate to say that everyone can afford this amount, but if you can visit Macdonald at least once per month, I say you can afford it. If you can afford more than 1K worth of electrical appliance, including your big PSU running at few hundreds watts, I'm sure you can afford it. If you don't know that it's this cheap to run a 5 bay with 5 loaded harddisks NAS, then you are classified under "ignorance".
One thing is people seems to underestimate the meaning of data protection. They thought as long as they keep a few copies, they are safe. They thought as long as they weekly perform backup, they are safe. With per storage unit just reached an all-time high 4TB, is one harddisk going to be sufficient ? What about the idiom of "Never put all your eggs in one basket?" It seems there is no lack of users with such concepts.
So what is the value of running a NAS 24by7 given that it seems relatively affordable to do so in today's technology and costing for a consumer. First, like I have quoted below, do you know when is the most vulnerable moment where a light bulb burst ? Read up from here at
Light Bulb Failure Causes
After you know how a bulb works, you can in some way relate to how electrics pass through electronics when the temperature is cold. Not it will not just burn like a filament, but under the same scientific reasonings, it is reasonable to assume the stress upon the silicon tunnels when a sudden rush of electrons pass through these conduits is probably stressful. Machines are not humans, the notion that they require resting is irrelevant. In fact, what they need is Consistency. Do you have a harddisk that cease to function after collecting dust in one corner of your house. I have quite a good number of such harddisk. It seems like long time not using them doesn't do them any good. Perhaps the silicon in them have corroded over the years, but surely rest is not relevant to them. They erode over time and rather than having them eroding, doing nothing, why not make them work for you ? Do you think 5400rpm is going to erode your harddisk platters away ? Trust me, the material on the surface erode faster than the mechanical motion in them. Harddisk are best operating at temperatures around 40 deg celsius and I will let them do so all the time.
During these 24by7 times, what are this storage going to do ? A few things actually
1) It will be doing automated backup daily without user intervention
2) It will be performing daily SMART tests daily without user intervention
3) Monthly, it will be performing background disk scrubbing to identify any failing sectors without user intervention
4) As my laptop is used daily for work and personal too, backup is done automatically to the NAS per hour without my intervention. It's as simple as plugin my network cable and just let things run.
5) This is optional but my NAS seems to do a lot more than just a NAS, so these are irrelevant to storage purposes.
I am a normal consumer, I'm not running any business critical business. But because I appreciate the integrity of my data and I want to know that what I wrote into the NAS is safe, I have to at least have these mechanism available to best notify me in situation that the storage may fail, I can replace the harddisk as soon as possible. Today I'm not taking chances for my resilvering operations. I run RAID 6 to ensure in the event during resilvering operation encounter a URE, it will still be possible for a complete recovery.
I have so often read about people that asked for recovery service. These people don't know that there is such redundancy and backup strategy, I don't blame them. If they know about it and not doing anything about it, serve them right.
I have also read about people performing manual backup from time to time, but I have read people admit they do fail to do it periodically because it's an hassle or who knows you could be out for weeks for a tour, or you are just so damn tired coming back from work and rather just leave the data in your laptop sleep over the night. If you are not concern about your data, why even backup. If you feel its an hassle to do backup day in day out, why make yourself do it manually when it can be an automated process ? The whole idea is the extra effort to get something automated doesn't cost you a bomb, it just cost you time to think about the process.
Next is the backup and backup but never knows if your backup works or that data you backup 10 months ago is still readable. I'm impressed that the confidence level is so high for so many people whom is not scrubbing their disk from time to time. So how often you want to do it ? Daily or annually ? I do it monthly because I think it's good enough. In any case a disk scrub will takes hours and can easily reach over a day if you have a large array. So are you going to run this process with your system on over night ? Does it takes hundreds of dollars to have such operation ? I understand it's not everybody's knowledge to know how, but at least it seems like a good question to ask about the integrity of your data in the storage right ?
Thus for the above few opertions about data storage and the cost to run it 24by7, I hope it make sense to everybody what is the advantage of running a NAS 24by7 and how it benefits you at the end of the day having it run 24by7 doing what it's meant to do - Protect Your Data.
With the advancement of data storage technology, having storage size growing so fast and so much reasons to put your data consolidated into a single place, it makes sense to plan properly on how you want to protect these information.
