First Serious NAS and I need some advice on power consumption

[wasdthemighty]

Hello everyone,
first time posting here :)

I have a simple question that I'd like to get an opinion on, I'd like to give you a panoramic first of my situation:

Here is my hardware:
CPU: i7-4790
RAM: 4x 4Gb modules of HYPERX 1866MHz
MOBO: ASUS Maximux Hero VII
STORAGE: PCIe Card with generic 256Gb M.2. SSD for the boot;
2x Samsung Sata SSDs 500Gb ( I think they are 870EVOs );
11x 2Tb Sata HDD 7.2K Rpm ( Various Brands );
COOLER: Artic Freezer eSports DUO
PSU: Thermaltake 500w modular
FANS: 3x 120mm fans + 1x 140mm fan from NZXT + 3x 120mm fans from Arctic
OS: Truenas Scale ( Truenas Core would not recognize my PCIe sata expansion card on boot giving the error "Root Mount waiting for CAM" )

Usage:
-Long term storage of Videos and Projects I worked on;
-Long term storage of media that I will watch using PLEX;

As you can see I don't need the NAS to be on 24/7, I would just turn it on when I need to save or get some file from it ( for 2/3 hours every weekend ) and when I want to consume some media using plex ( 2 hours every couple of days )

Qbservations:

I've then calculated the cost of running the NAS 24/7 ( https://imgur.com/a/yx4gdRx ) and it's absolutely out of my budget ( energy costs quite a bit here in Italy ).
I've used the website: https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator with the following settings ( https://imgur.com/a/fHaeM0w )

Questions:

Does the website outervision.com calculate the power usage when the PC is IDLE or does it calculate it as if I was running the pc on "full beans" 24/7?
Given my utilization, should I turn on and then off the nas only when I need to? ( I think this would damage the drives but I'd like your opinion on it );
Is there something I can do to mitigate the power usage?

If someone has any suggestions please let me know :)

NOTES:

1. I just purchased a wattage monitor from Amazon which will arrive on friday so I can calculate precisely how much the nas is SUCCING from the wall when in IDLE;
2. I know I could have bought a sinology or similar nas that would use way less power but I really like building PCs aswell as experimenting and troubleshooting.

 

[Arwen]

Note that power consumption will be higher during a ZFS scrub. If you leave your server off most of the time, when you finally do power it on, and it's been long enough since last scrub, it will run a scrub. And use more power at the time. (Assuming you enabled regular ZFS scrubs...)

Not using ZFS scrubs on a regular basis, defeats one of the data protections that ZFS supplies, disk bit rot detection. It is worse if you have a lot of files that you don't read often. I have 2TB of videos, so their is no chance I will read every file completely before they are damaged, (using ZFS' detect problem on read). Scrubs take care of that.

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On the issue of powering down, I don't have an opinion other than perhaps you have too much server, and not enough embedded style computer. My own media server is a "fitlet", generation 1. Runs perhaps 5 watts unless it's running a ZFS scrub. (This "fitlet" runs Linux with ZFS, not TrueNAS).

 

[Nick2253]

Modern computers are actually amazingly good at reducing power demands at idle, though with your desktop-based hardware, you may need to fiddle with the settings a bit. Getting rid of unnecessary hardware and ensuring that lower power states are enabled for the CPU will be a big step. You might also look at underclocking your memory. Some also say to underclock your CPU, though from my experience, underclocking a CPU gets you the same savings as using the correct low-power states. You may see a savings from disabling some of the cores on your i7 processor, but you'd want to make some measurements to confirm.

As a point of reference, one of our hypervisors is a dual Xeon w/ 128GB of memory, and the server idles at around 120W of power load.

If your power costs are prohibitive, then the prudent move my be to buy more appropriate hardware, as @Arwen suggested. Overall, that may indeed be the most cost effective strategy.