Does no one care about power consumption? Mechanical disks use, in my experience, 7-15w all day all the time just idling. If you live in a high energy cost area the ROI on going SSD can be as low as 3-4 years. If you can afford it, splurge for SSD. I spent ~$800 on two 8tb SSDs and I’m very happy with the choice.
Power costs would have to be bonkers for it to matter.
8TB NAS HDDs are <$200, so even if it uses 15W vs 3W, that’s 12W difference, or 8-9kWh/month. If you pay a ridiculous $0.40/kWh, that’s $40/year. That means the SSDs would pay for themselves after ~15 years, and I’m guessing you’d replace/upgrade them long before then.
But NAS drives use a lot less than 15W, usually around 4-6W idle. So the payoff period is probably closer to 30 years… My electricity is more like 0.12-15/kWh, so it’s never going to pay back for itself.
My SSDs use negligible power at idle, I only noticed a 1w increase when I installed two. Almost ‘free’. Also your 0.14kwh is almost certainly just the cost to generate the power minus the delivery fees. Where I live the delivery fees double my true per kWh cost. Double check your bill and divide your monthly consumption by your monthly payment to find the real cost.
stated rate - $0.09-0.10/kWh for “block 1”, 0.10-0.12 for “block 2” (they charge more the more you use)
calculated average rate (inclusive of all fees and credits) - $0.14/kWh
And here’s my previous bill (all summer usage w/ AC and whatnot):
usage - 522 kWh
total - $80.17
stated rate - $0.09/kWh for “block 1,” $0.117/kWh for “block 2”
calculated average rate - $0.154/kWh
That’s why I gave the $0.12-0.15/kWh range, because it depends on time of year, total usage, etc. It’ll probably be closer to $0.12/kWh next month since we’d use hardly any electricity (we use natural gas for heat).
The average cost per kWh in the U.S. as of January 2024 is 15.45 cents
That said, I heard that our local electricity company wants to hike rates, and that seems to be about $0.03/kWh. So my range would go up to $0.15-0.18/kWh, which still isn’t that crazy.
If you live in a high energy cost area the ROI on going SSD can be as low as 3-4 years
~$800 on two 8tb SSDs
2 x 8tb HDDs is roughly $200USD
I don’t know what kind of electricity prices you’re paying, but to hit a 3 year ROI on your SSDs, you’re paying at least $2.2USD/kWh, assuming the full 15W (232kWh/year total) consumption of the HDDs and assuming negligible power consumption from the SSDs.
Edit2: and to be fair I did take refurb HDD price. a refurb SSD is around $300 USD for 8tb, bringing the minimum power cost per kWh down to ~$1.7USD/kWh for a 3 year ROI.
When I bought them 2 years ago power in MA was $0.46 per kWh, this included transmission costs and all the other fees. 15W cost me $4.80 a month, so $57.6 a year and $230 over 4 years. At the time 14TB mechanical disks were about $300 so it was about a $270 ‘premium’ for solid state over mechanical so I exaggerated the ROI, but to me the 2x price premium was worth it for silence and no latency on retrieving my data. So in summary the ROI for me was more like 8 years, ignoring the many advantages of SSD.
Any quality brand SSD (Samsung, Kingston, WD, etc) is going to be more reliable in every way compared to mechanical disks, they just cost a lot more right now. Do NOT buy off brand, random Chinese SSD, you will regret it.
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Does no one care about power consumption? Mechanical disks use, in my experience, 7-15w all day all the time just idling. If you live in a high energy cost area the ROI on going SSD can be as low as 3-4 years. If you can afford it, splurge for SSD. I spent ~$800 on two 8tb SSDs and I’m very happy with the choice.
It takes several SSDs to make up the capacity difference between an HDD.
I run 62 16TB HDDs. To make up the same capacity in SSDs I need 2-4x the bays. I don’t know of any cheap systems that can hold ~250 bays of ssds.
So an SSD that may only take 1-3w all day… 2-4x that is already equal to the HDD regardless. You’re not going to make any ROI metric here.
Power costs would have to be bonkers for it to matter.
8TB NAS HDDs are <$200, so even if it uses 15W vs 3W, that’s 12W difference, or 8-9kWh/month. If you pay a ridiculous $0.40/kWh, that’s $40/year. That means the SSDs would pay for themselves after ~15 years, and I’m guessing you’d replace/upgrade them long before then.
But NAS drives use a lot less than 15W, usually around 4-6W idle. So the payoff period is probably closer to 30 years… My electricity is more like 0.12-15/kWh, so it’s never going to pay back for itself.
My SSDs use negligible power at idle, I only noticed a 1w increase when I installed two. Almost ‘free’. Also your 0.14kwh is almost certainly just the cost to generate the power minus the delivery fees. Where I live the delivery fees double my true per kWh cost. Double check your bill and divide your monthly consumption by your monthly payment to find the real cost.
Here’s my current bill:
And here’s my previous bill (all summer usage w/ AC and whatnot):
That’s why I gave the $0.12-0.15/kWh range, because it depends on time of year, total usage, etc. It’ll probably be closer to $0.12/kWh next month since we’d use hardly any electricity (we use natural gas for heat).
Thats friggin bananas. Do you live somewhere with lots of hydro power? Your cost is less than 1/3 mine…
Nope, I live in Utah, US, which is mostly coal, natural gas, and solar, in that order, and we’ve been scaling coal back significantly and replacing it with gas and solar (and a little wind). We’re about average for the US:
That said, I heard that our local electricity company wants to hike rates, and that seems to be about $0.03/kWh. So my range would go up to $0.15-0.18/kWh, which still isn’t that crazy.
2 x 8tb HDDs is roughly $200USD
I don’t know what kind of electricity prices you’re paying, but to hit a 3 year ROI on your SSDs, you’re paying at least $2.2USD/kWh, assuming the full 15W (232kWh/year total) consumption of the HDDs and assuming negligible power consumption from the SSDs.
Edit: average power consumption for HDDs read/write operation is usually around what you claim them to idle at, with actual idle consumption below.
Edit2: and to be fair I did take refurb HDD price. a refurb SSD is around $300 USD for 8tb, bringing the minimum power cost per kWh down to ~$1.7USD/kWh for a 3 year ROI.
When I bought them 2 years ago power in MA was $0.46 per kWh, this included transmission costs and all the other fees. 15W cost me $4.80 a month, so $57.6 a year and $230 over 4 years. At the time 14TB mechanical disks were about $300 so it was about a $270 ‘premium’ for solid state over mechanical so I exaggerated the ROI, but to me the 2x price premium was worth it for silence and no latency on retrieving my data. So in summary the ROI for me was more like 8 years, ignoring the many advantages of SSD.
Are SSDs reliable enough for this use case?
Any quality brand SSD (Samsung, Kingston, WD, etc) is going to be more reliable in every way compared to mechanical disks, they just cost a lot more right now. Do NOT buy off brand, random Chinese SSD, you will regret it.