Hello, I have my Roon Nuc up and running as per the Roon recommended NUC. This runs my whole house and the whole family streams to Auralic Aries, Sonos and Yamaha Musicast.
My question is, is it possible to tell the NUC to turn on and off at a specified time ? I see in the Bios setting that you can set a time for it to wake but so far I haven’t been able to make this happen.
I have a Synology NAS and that power cycles every day I would like my NUC to do the same thing, ie. Turn on at 8am and off at 12 midnight
Apart from that it’s running like a dream and we are all loving it
Honestly, this will save you very, very little electricity and also shorten the life of the NUC. Electronics don’t like power cycles. It’d be one thing if the NUC was pulling a TON of Watts. But when it’s idle, it’s probably cranking a whopping 2-3W, maybe 5W at the most…
The CPU (with assistance from the OS) will automatically manage the idle states based on load. When it’s not streaming anything, it will go to into low idle, as demand will be very low. Even if its streaming, it can have different cores in different idle states depending on load (so streaming to just one zone might have 1 core in full power, another at partial power, and the remaining two at minimum power). Even at max power, these NUCs have a TDP of 15 Watts. Actual draw will be a bit more, since there are other things in the system that need power (like the RAM, hard drive (but SSDs use a fraction of the power that HDDs draw), etc). But at max load (which Roon will pretty much never hit unless you are doing several zones of heavy DSP), according to anandtech, they only get up to ~40W: https://www.anandtech.com/show/10121/intel-nuc6i5syk-skylake-ucff-pc-review/6 (note that this article is for the previous generation NUCs, and the 7th gen are supposed to be more power efficient).
The system’s thermal management will also automatically manage the fans. I don’t have a NUC, so I don’t know if it will outright turn them off in its lowest thermal stress state, but some systems do. If it doesn’t, then it will have them run at minimum speed, which should be pretty inaudible and draw very little power. (This is assuming you are using fans with PWM 4-pin connectors, as the NUCs state they do not do the older 3-pin voltage regulated fan speed control.)
The NUC contacts the Roon (License) servers once every hour and besides that only cares for itself. It won’t need much power doing this. I haven’t yet measured what my NUC draws when supposed to be idle - maybe I’ll do that. But it won’t be much I guess.
Thanks for all your comments, I have played with the bias but I cannot seem to get it to turn on automatically and I’m not using Windows so I guess I can’t set a shut down schedule, but what your all saying make sense
I just worry leaving it on all the time because I know everything has a life span and I was just trying to extend it working life
Interesting topic!
I am also wondering that I should turn on/off my NUC7i7 by time table, using IFFFT driven IR switch with LAN IR remote controller product.(It’s just a plan, I’m not sure work or not at ROCK.) My main worry was the heat of CPU, SSD and RAM, not power consumption…
But everyone in this topic recommend 24/7 running!? If it so, I would like to apply it because much easier solution.
Makes me wonder if I should be leaving my NAS drive on 24/7
I shut it down at midnight and start it at 7am and put the Harddrives to sleep after 15 mins idle
Would what your all saying apply to this also ?
Generally speaking: switching modern consumer grade computing devices off over night will probably not have a noteworthy impact on the life expectancy of the device. Those devices rarely brake down because they got power cycled a couple of times a day. While there’s some physical stress involved during a power cycle it’s to be doubted that it will shorten the life span of the device in a way you’ll notice. The device will be obsolete for other reasons long before it reaches it max. power cycle count.
For the NUC the question merely is: is the power saving worth the hassle to set something up or not. Not powering it down regularly won’t give you another decade of life time for the NUC.
A WD Red hard drive - quite common for a home NAS - “withstands” 600,000 load/unload cycles per design. Depending on how often a drive actually unloads (sleep/wake, power down/up) it still would last years. It’s the same here: if the NAS just sleeps, how much power does it still draw doing actually nothing? Is it worth the setup effort for powering it down and up again?
