Sleep state and disk activity

When a Win10 PC goes into 'Sleep' state (I asssume hibernate would behave
the same) what do the disks and cooling fans do? Do they immediately spin
down, or do they stay spinning until if and when the 'Spin Down Drives'
timer expires if it is set? And do the fans just stay running regardless?

I was thinking about energy conservation and my PC, which I normally leave
on 24 hrs a day. As such, it is consuming around 500 watts per hour. In
thinking about it, I realized that the majority of that energy has to be
being used to keep my multiple hard drives spinning. Hence the question. As
I see it there will be very little energy savings if the CPU goes to sleep
but the drives stay running.

I know it doesn't seem like much, but 24/7/30 operation has a measurable
impact on that monthly electrical bill.

On 4/28/2018 4:08 PM, Tim wrote:
When a Win10 PC goes into 'Sleep' state (I asssume hibernate would behave
the same) what do the disks and cooling fans do? Do they immediately spin
down, or do they stay spinning until if and when the 'Spin Down Drives'
timer expires if it is set? And do the fans just stay running regardless?

I was thinking about energy conservation and my PC, which I normally leave
on 24 hrs a day. As such, it is consuming around 500 watts per hour. In
thinking about it, I realized that the majority of that energy has to be
being used to keep my multiple hard drives spinning. Hence the question. As
I see it there will be very little energy savings if the CPU goes to sleep
but the drives stay running.

I know it doesn't seem like much, but 24/7/30 operation has a measurable
impact on that monthly electrical bill.

What happens when you put your ear to the drive and hit the sleep switch?

Tim wrote:
When a Win10 PC goes into 'Sleep' state (I asssume hibernate would behave
the same) what do the disks and cooling fans do? Do they immediately spin
down, or do they stay spinning until if and when the 'Spin Down Drives'
timer expires if it is set? And do the fans just stay running regardless?

I was thinking about energy conservation and my PC, which I normally leave
on 24 hrs a day. As such, it is consuming around 500 watts per hour. In
thinking about it, I realized that the majority of that energy has to be
being used to keep my multiple hard drives spinning. Hence the question. As
I see it there will be very little energy savings if the CPU goes to sleep
but the drives stay running.

I know it doesn't seem like much, but 24/7/30 operation has a measurable
impact on that monthly electrical bill.

If you want to know what the PC really uses, get one of these.
Set the meter to "Watts", not "VA", as "Watts" is what
you are billed for by the power company.

http://www.p3international.com/manuals/p4400_manual.pdf

These use the same power measurement method as whole-house
digital power meters. The meter uses sigma-delta
converters running at around 1MHz or so, to measure
60Hz power. The power measurement chip then takes
the power factor it's measured into consideration,
before telling you the "resistive" "Watts" component
the power company bills you for. You don't pay for
reactive power, on home billings. Only industrial
users pay for both (as a means to penalize them for
drawing too much reactive power). Reactive power
"sloshes back and forth" between you and the power
company. The wires have to be "made slightly thicker"
because of it. That's why the power company doesn't
like it (one of the reasons).

Modern ATX power supplies have Active PFC. This converts
all the PC power usage to "resistive". The Active PFC
is a "good deal" for the power company, but because
you're not billed for reactive power, the Active PFC
does nothing to help your power bill. Active PFC was
created to help the power company :-) If you have
Active PFC on your PC, the Kill-A-Watt should show
"0.99" when you flip to the "Power Factor" measurement
range. The PC should be almost purely resistive. But
while that number is "impressive", stick to the "Watts"
button, as that's all that counts in $$$ wastage.

*******

If the fans are spinning on your PC, that's not sleep.

S3 Sleep, the fans stop spinning. Only the RAM sticks
are powered, and they draw 1W per DIMM in auto-refresh.

The Kill-A-Watt meter, will accurately measure "Sleep"
power as well as "Running" power. And give you much
better numbers to do your $$$ wastage calcs.

My "big" machine, idles in S0 running state, at 100W.

My Celeron 300 from the year 2000, idles at 150W.

This is why it's not recommended to convert older
PCs into "servers", unless your electricity is
particularly cheap.

The way modern machines work, is the "peak" to "idle"
ratio is a lot higher. If I stuck two Vega 64 cards
in a PC with a HEDT (156W) processor, one of those
could hit 756W "playing Crysis". And the whole machine
would idle at 160W or so. My big machine idles
at 100W, because it has a $40 video card in it :-)
If I had a copy of Crysis, it would run at about 5 FPS
on the $40 card.

Summary: Your PC doesn't really idle at 500W :-)
You'll need to work on your S3 Sleeping skills.

*******

Here are some random links on Power/Sleep/Savings.
Powercfg utility, is available in Win7/8/10 at least.

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/7638...er-efficiency/

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html

(Check out your tick boxes... The "Sleep" is S3 sleep.)

https://www.tenforums.com/attachment...ton_does-2.png

HTH,
Paul

On 04/28/2018 9:38 PM, mike wrote:
On 4/28/2018 4:08 PM, Tim wrote:
When a Win10 PC goes into 'Sleep' state (I asssume hibernate would behave
the same) what do the disks and cooling fans do? Do they immediately spin
down, or do they stay spinning until if and when the 'Spin Down Drives'
timer expires if it is set? And do the fans just stay running regardless?

I was thinking about energy conservation and my PC, which I normally
leave
on 24 hrs a day. As such, it is consuming around 500 watts per hour. In
thinking about it, I realized that the majority of that energy has to be
being used to keep my multiple hard drives spinning. Hence the
question. As
I see it there will be very little energy savings if the CPU goes to
sleep
but the drives stay running.

I know it doesn't seem like much, but 24/7/30 operation has a measurable
impact on that monthly electrical bill.

What happens when you put your ear to the drive and hit the sleep switch?

When my system goes into sleep mode which is set for 20 minutes of none
use, The HDs and fans all shut down and the Monitor goes into standby mode.
In this state
the system only draws a few watts. Your estimate of 500 watts seems
awful high for an Idling system unless you have a large number of drives.
If it is drawing 500 watts then at 10 cents a KWH you could be looking
at $35.00 a month, depends on your price for electricity.
Do yourself a favour and buy yourself a Kill A Watt meter and take a
series of measurements under sleep and running conditions which will
give you a better Idea of what is really happening, The newer higher end
models will even calculate your energy costs for you.

Rene

mike wrote in news
On 4/28/2018 4:08 PM, Tim wrote:
What happens when you put your ear to the drive and hit the sleep
switch?

Now I feel like an idiot. I never thought of doing that.

On Sat, 28 Apr 2018 23:08:14 GMT, Tim wrote:

I was thinking about energy conservation and my PC, which I
normally leave on 24 hrs a day. As such, it is consuming around
500 watts per hour.

You're confusing units of energy with power. 500 watts seems like a
lot, you could always switch the machine off, especially at night if
you're asleep.

mechanic wrote in
:

On Sat, 28 Apr 2018 23:08:14 GMT, Tim wrote:

I was thinking about energy conservation and my PC, which I
normally leave on 24 hrs a day. As such, it is consuming around
500 watts per hour.

You're confusing units of energy with power. 500 watts seems like a
lot, you could always switch the machine off, especially at night if
you're asleep.

Funny, I always thought that watts were power. And just to let everyone
know, I have a power monitor on the output of my UPS, so the 500 watts is
an accurate number. Currently, I have four HDDs spinning in my system that
account for a good part of that number

I leave my system on 24/7/365 for several reasons. One, when I have
torrented LEGAL things like the latest Ubuntu distro, I leave it up so that
others can use my seed. Two, my working environment takes a little while to
set up every time my system loads, and I would just as soon not have to do
that every day. And three, my system also acts as a server for my tablet so
I don't have to download everything to the tablet if I want to use it. Even
64gb isn't a whole lot when talking about watching videos.

Tim wrote:

When a Win10 PC goes into 'Sleep' state (I asssume hibernate would
behave the same) what do the disks and cooling fans do?

During Sleep State when the Deep State takes over.

Tim wrote:
mechanic wrote in
:

On Sat, 28 Apr 2018 23:08:14 GMT, Tim wrote:

I was thinking about energy conservation and my PC, which I
normally leave on 24 hrs a day. As such, it is consuming around
500 watts per hour.
You're confusing units of energy with power. 500 watts seems like a
lot, you could always switch the machine off, especially at night if
you're asleep.

Funny, I always thought that watts were power. And just to let everyone
know, I have a power monitor on the output of my UPS, so the 500 watts is
an accurate number. Currently, I have four HDDs spinning in my system that
account for a good part of that number

I leave my system on 24/7/365 for several reasons. One, when I have
torrented LEGAL things like the latest Ubuntu distro, I leave it up so that
others can use my seed. Two, my working environment takes a little while to
set up every time my system loads, and I would just as soon not have to do
that every day. And three, my system also acts as a server for my tablet so
I don't have to download everything to the tablet if I want to use it. Even
64gb isn't a whole lot when talking about watching videos.

Give us a hardware inventory of what is inside your PC.
We can do the arithmetic here, and work up power numbers.
Hard drives are between 5W and 12W for example, for anything
made in the last 15 years or so. Sticks of RAM, you can get
numbers from the datasheet (for Kingston products).

Something doesn't add up here.

Perhaps the UPS display is ******** ? Maybe
the units are VA on the display, instead of
Watts ? Working out units of VA is a doddle
for hardware, which means if I wanted to wow you
with a bogus measurement, that's what
I'd do. Take the bogus current (measured by a
bad measurement circuit), "multiply by 120" and
not even bother to measure the voltage, then
show you a number.

One way to tell, is:

1) Put a regular computer with a non-Active-PFC
supply to sleep. A "bad" meter will register
100W while the computer sleeps, due to mis-interpreting
the distorted current flow waveform. (I know, because I've
done these experiments with my regular multimeter.)

2) Now, connect up a Kill-A-Watt and re-measure.
When the PC goes to S3 sleep, the power will register 5 watts.
The Kill-A-Watt meter knows how to do the math "perfectly".
Ordinary multimeters are dual slope, 1-reading-a-second
types, which simply don't have the sampling rate to be
integrating anything properly. The sigma-delta converters
on the Kill-A-Watt, "follow" the load waveform using a
running clock rate of around a megahertz. This should
allow the math to be in the 1% range of the true value.
Or whatever the spec is for digital whole-house power
meters.

It's unlikely that the UPS is doing things right.

*******

If the barrier to your using a Kill-A-Watt is price,
your Public Library just may offer loaners.

https://seattle.bibliocommons.com/it...30_kill_a_watt

"Available in some locations

Total Copies: 39
Available: 13
On Hold: 3
On the shelves now at: Central Library"

It's crazy, what a set of services the Public Library offers...
Some even have power meters, to help patrons remove old (pig)
equipment. The power company may be subsidizing this.

Paul

On Sun, 29 Apr 2018 12:31:13 GMT, Tim wrote:

Funny, I always thought that watts were power.

You got that right, but quoted watts per hour which isn't.

On Sun, 29 Apr 2018 12:31:13 GMT, Tim wrote:

mechanic wrote in
:

On Sat, 28 Apr 2018 23:08:14 GMT, Tim wrote:

I was thinking about energy conservation and my PC, which I
normally leave on 24 hrs a day. As such, it is consuming around
500 watts per hour.

You're confusing units of energy with power. 500 watts seems like a
lot, you could always switch the machine off, especially at night if
you're asleep.

Funny, I always thought that watts were power.

Watts are volts times amps (and also times power factor for AC
current). It's not a quantity of energy: it's a rate of flow of
energy. If you want a quantity of energy you use watt hours or
kilowatt hours. You should have said "it is consuming around
500 watts per hour", except that it probably isn't.

500 watts sounds like a peak figure, probably derived from the rating
of your computers inbuilt power supply. The actual power drawn by your
computer at any particular time depends on the demands of the
individual components in use. Depending on your computer it probably
draws about 30 watts when resting and if you put it in sleep mode it
is probably down to about 1 watt.

And just to let everyone
know, I have a power monitor on the output of my UPS, so the 500 watts is
an accurate number. Currently, I have four HDDs spinning in my system that
account for a good part of that number

I leave my system on 24/7/365 for several reasons. One, when I have
torrented LEGAL things like the latest Ubuntu distro, I leave it up so that
others can use my seed. Two, my working environment takes a little while to
set up every time my system loads, and I would just as soon not have to do
that every day. And three, my system also acts as a server for my tablet so
I don't have to download everything to the tablet if I want to use it. Even
64gb isn't a whole lot when talking about watching videos.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

On 4/29/2018 5:31 AM, Tim wrote:
mechanic wrote in
:

On Sat, 28 Apr 2018 23:08:14 GMT, Tim wrote:

I was thinking about energy conservation and my PC, which I
normally leave on 24 hrs a day. As such, it is consuming around
500 watts per hour.

You're confusing units of energy with power. 500 watts seems like a
lot, you could always switch the machine off, especially at night if
you're asleep.

Funny, I always thought that watts were power. And just to let everyone
know, I have a power monitor on the output of my UPS, so the 500 watts is
an accurate number. Currently, I have four HDDs spinning in my system that
account for a good part of that number

I leave my system on 24/7/365 for several reasons. One, when I have
torrented LEGAL things like the latest Ubuntu distro, I leave it up so that
others can use my seed. Two, my working environment takes a little while to
set up every time my system loads, and I would just as soon not have to do
that every day. And three, my system also acts as a server for my tablet so
I don't have to download everything to the tablet if I want to use it. Even
64gb isn't a whole lot when talking about watching videos.

You can't do any of that stuff when the computer is asleep.

Serving files on your local network is better done by plugging
a drive into the usb port on your router...or using a dedicated NAS.

Seeding torrents is your donation to the community.
Seems that it's costing you $400/year. Thank you for your service.
The good news is, if you live in a cold climate AND have resistance
electric heating, that 500W is not wasted.

500 watts seems like a LOT.
If frugality is your goal, you need a serious reconfiguration of your
computing resource.
If you're willing to give up the torrent seeding, there are things
like "wake on lan" that can let you wake your main computer from
your tablet for watching videos.

If you want help, we'd need a lot more info about what you have.

On Sat, 28 Apr 2018 23:23:20 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Tim wrote:
When a Win10 PC goes into 'Sleep' state (I asssume hibernate would behave
the same) what do the disks and cooling fans do? Do they immediately spin
down, or do they stay spinning until if and when the 'Spin Down Drives'
timer expires if it is set? And do the fans just stay running regardless?

I was thinking about energy conservation and my PC, which I normally leave
on 24 hrs a day. As such, it is consuming around 500 watts per hour. In
thinking about it, I realized that the majority of that energy has to be
being used to keep my multiple hard drives spinning. Hence the question. As
I see it there will be very little energy savings if the CPU goes to sleep
but the drives stay running.

I know it doesn't seem like much, but 24/7/30 operation has a measurable
impact on that monthly electrical bill.

If you want to know what the PC really uses, get one of these.
Set the meter to "Watts", not "VA", as "Watts" is what
you are billed for by the power company.

I second that idea. I find 500 watts hard to swallow... Maybe if you
have an old CRT and include that, plus enough drives for a small
server farm..

Near as I can tell the fans are off and drives are off. The case is
silent. On my main desktop the 5 volt or one of the 5 volt power
supplies keeps ticking along since I can use the USB ports to charge
devices in standby and while off. (as long as it is plugged in)

It may be a function of the MOBO or BIOS more than the OS.

Eric Stevens wrote:


500 watts sounds like a peak figure, probably derived from the rating
of your computers inbuilt power supply.

Good catch.

That could indeed be where this idea is coming from.
A value copied right off the label of the ATX supply.

Paul

On 4/29/2018 4:02 PM, Paul wrote:
Eric Stevens wrote:


500 watts sounds like a peak figure, probably derived from the rating
of your computers inbuilt power supply.

Good catch.

That could indeed be where this idea is coming from.
A value copied right off the label of the ATX supply.

Paul
This quote from the OP suggests otherwise:
And just to let everyone
know, I have a power monitor on the output of my UPS, so the 500 watts is
an accurate number. Currently, I have four HDDs spinning in my system that
account for a good part of that number