Michael Chare wrote:


One advantage of the ReadyNAS Duo is that it can be programmed to go to
sleep at night, and then wake up. I am not sure if any PC would do that.
It will also spin-down the disks are a period of inactivity.


All PCs can be set to spin down the hard drives after a preset period of
inactivity. If running Windows, most will support waking from
hibernation at a given time on instruction from the Windows task
scheduler, and the cron daemon in Linux has similar functions. You need
to enable the option in BIOS, usually, as it's normally off by default.

Most external USB drives automatically spin down after a period of
inactivity, too.

Most, if not all, PCs using ethernet networking can be set to "Wake on
LAN" in the BIOS, so any attempt to contact that machine will wake it
up. Set it to standby at a given time, then use "Wake on LAN" to start
it in the morning. It's not totally shut down, but power draw is low.
Hibernating is a better option as far as power is concerned, but may not
reliably start in time to prevent network timeouts. Using the Wake on
LAN method ensures that the machine starts whenever it's needed, without
user input.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.