do MD's have to stay on all the time?

[ggmce]

Is it practical to turn MD's on as needed, or do they take too much time to boot up? To save energy, I would like to only turn the MD in a room when I need it (similar to what I do now, when I want to watch TV in the Master Bedroom I turn the TV on)?

[merkur2k]

no, MDs only need to be turned on when you are using them. be aware that any hardware (such as tuner cards, hard drives, etc) will only be available to the rest of the system if the MD is turned on though.
boot times can be a problem, but thats up to you if its too long or not. i know there was someone on the past that had his on timers to turn on and off at certain times.

[Schmich]

What's the bottleneck on MD boot times btw? The network speed?

[bongowongo]

And mem-speed MD, Network connection and core specs.

[Marie.O]

If your system is working fine with suspend mode, you can change the shutdown from H to S in web admin. Thanks to sambuca, this will suspend your MD, and the wake up is down to <30sec iirc

[ggmce]

That sounds great, thanks again for the information, this is great...

GG