I am looking for your views on this, as I am thinking about setting up a schedule so that my unraid server will go to sleep at night and then wake around noon the next day, 

 

the reason for this, is to reduce my eletric bill as at the moment it is shotting up like a rocket and I am looking for ways to reduce my bills.

 

the way I will wake the unraid up is via a Home Assistant to which I will create a rule to trigger the command from.

 

I am looking at the following docuemnation which I will use to base my sleep and wake up commands from.

 

https://wiki.unraid.net/Setup_Sleep_(S3)_and_Wake_on_Lan_(WOL)

I actually do something similar except I do a full shutdown rather than putting the server to sleep.   I then have a setting in the BIOS to power the server on again in the morning.   Is there any reason you want to do a sleep rather than a full shutdown?

On 2/21/2022 at 4:45 PM, itimpi said:

I actually do something similar except I do a full shutdown rather than putting the server to sleep.   I then have a setting in the BIOS to power the server on again in the morning.   Is there any reason you want to do a sleep rather than a full shutdown?

no there is no reason why I choose sleep over shutdown, as I was looking at different ideals, and at the moment I am not sure if my motherboard can do schedule power up's. this is something I have to look at.  

 

can you also inform me, that with the powering down and back up each day - have you experience any issues with unraid ?

3 hours ago, chris_netsmart said:

can you also inform me, that with the powering down and back up each day - have you experience any issues with unraid ?

Seems to work fine for me.

 

The option to power up at a specified time was an option in my BIOS.   Some people go for the option to wake on LAN traffic, but I did not want this as I could have a random device on the LAN waking up the server in the middle of the night.

4 hours ago, itimpi said:

Seems to work fine for me.

 

The option to power up at a specified time was an option in my BIOS.   Some people go for the option to wake on LAN traffic, but I did not want this as I could have a random device on the LAN waking up the server in the middle of the night.

Forgive me for this newbie question.

 

How do you set up unraid so that the array starts when booted? In my installation it requires an admin username and password

2 hours ago, Shahmatt said:

Forgive me for this newbie question.

 

How do you set up unraid so that the array starts when booted? In my installation it requires an admin username and password

Disk settings, Enable auto start.

 

Unless you have encrypted drives, in which case you will need a bunch of extra work to enable auto start, and some security considerations as well, since the whole point of encryption is to not allow unauthorized access to the data on the drives, and auto start negates that if no one has to enter credentials to see the data.

9 hours ago, JonathanM said:

Disk settings, Enable auto start.

 

Unless you have encrypted drives, in which case you will need a bunch of extra work to enable auto start, and some security considerations as well, since the whole point of encryption is to not allow unauthorized access to the data on the drives, and auto start negates that if no one has to enter credentials to see the data.

Thanks. Will give this a try later today. I had not realized that the disks and dockers start running even though the display requires a user login.

thanks for you help, I need to read my Motherboard Manual and set this up.

Is there a way to trigger sleep if the server has been inactive for a time (like on Linux, Windows etc)

I have a server that powers up every few days & runs handbrake then sits there until i check to see if it's done and i kill it (i just cut it's power with a smart plug that way i can turn it on the same way) and a backup server that i manually power when i think about it with the same sleep issue.

This setup has been ok but it's dumb as a rock

I could probably do a WOL schedule fine but i can't find any way of to put the server to sleep automatically.

I know most setups wouldn't need it but it's a pretty standard feature, it would increase the use cases that make sense to deploy Unraid. (I currently have 3 unraid licences and if i could automate more tasks that number would go up) I don't want the big boxs running 24/7, that's why i have the low power ones.

The ideal solution would be to wake a big box when one of the little boxes has a task for it (a file in the handbrake folder is my main example)

((maybe that sort of automation would be better controlled under Home Assistant but if anyone here has any insight that would be cool))

Mostly though I want to know HOW DO I GET IT TO SLEEP WHEN ITS BEEN IDLE FOR (insert time value) and why isn't it just a setting in the settings tab (i'd be happy with a user script but it should be a standard feature even if it's off by default)

On 8/3/2025 at 3:48 PM, mdrodge said:

Is there a way to trigger sleep

since the link at the top is outdated and just lands you at the overview maybe this will help the next guy.

I still think it should be a toggle in the power mode tab under settings but fine i guess. i'll try when i get a chance.

Setup Sleep (S3) and Wake on Lan (WOL) | Unraid Docs

The following are my notes for setting up my Unraid server to sleep to

Edited August 4, 2025Aug 4 by mdrodge