How to automatically turn your Synology NAS on or off?

One of my priorities is to minimize power consumption in our home. In this guide I will tell you how to reduce power consumption from your Synology NAS by having the NAS to turn off automatically in periods where it’s not used, e.g. during the night or even midday. And even though power consumption is greatly reduced when the NAS goes into “sleep mode” when it’s not directly used (according to Synology's website from 22W (Access) to 10.8 W (disk sleep)), there are still electricity to be saved by turning off the NAS completely in time periods where it is still not is used. In this post I will show how to create power schedules on your Synology NAS (firmware is "Synology DSM3.2" but the process should be similar in other versions)... 

In other words, I will in this post describes how you can automatically have your Synology NAS to turn on and off automatically at specific times (and days).

1) Log into your NAS as administator. Then press the little arrow in the upper right corner and then select "Control Panel" in the menu that appears:

2) In the menu that appears, select "Power" in the third line.

3) Now select the tab "Power Schedule". To create certain switch on/off times press "Create".

4) When you press "Create" a new window appears where you can create a rule defining when your Synology should start up or turn down. Here you can define whether the rule should apply to all days in a week ("daily"), on weekends ("weekend") or only on weekdays ("weekdays") or you can customize exact which day a specific rule should apply to. Suppose that I want to define a rule to start up my NAS every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at 7:00 AM. I start by selecting "Startup" in the top left corner. In the dropdown menu "Date" I select the desired days as shown below. In the drop down menu "Time" you’ll be able to define at which time you want the rule to be activated (on the selected days). In my example I’ll set this to 7:00 AM. To end simply press OK, then press "Save".

Now you have created (and saved) your new rule and can continue to tailor the rules to your specific needs and wishes. Personally, I've decided that I would like to turn off my NAS - and thereby reduce power consumption – in the middle of the day (on weekdays) and during the night (every day). So I have configured my Synology’s power schedule so that my NAS is turned on within the following time periods (you can see the rules I've set up in Figure 3):

Weekdays: 7:00 to 9:15 and 17:00-24:00

Weekends: 9:00-24:00

In this way, I "only" have my Synology turned on for 76.25 hours out of the 168 weekly hours. In other words, I only have my NAS turned on for 45% of the time on a weekly basis - namely, during the periods where I have defined that there could be potential for me or my girlfriend using it. Of course it is still possible to manually turn Synology on and off if the need should be different one particular day. And the booting time is only about a couple of minutes for the NAS, so this is a very satisfying solution for me knowing how much electricity I save by not having my NAS turned on all the time. I hope you will be able to benefit from this post by managing when your Synology is turned on and off, and thereby thinking about the environment as well as your wallet.