Since the hard drive within the Linkstation is not directly accessible (or it least wasn’t intended to be), I’ve not found any information on power consumption of a Linkstation with alternative drive configurations. However, I did learn that the Linkstation does not support drive spin down, so within that 17w of power consumption is an opportunity for savings. I’m surprised that Buffalo hasn’t baked that in. Perhaps with a new version of the firmware it will be made available.
I doubt they will ever bake that in. If they use a 3.5” harddrive (as they must given the capacities they showcase) then setting it to spin-down often is unfortunately a big trade-off with lifetime. You can ruin a 3.5” HD with spindowns in about a year unless its very carefully setup, which is hard. And as this would be within a 2 years warranty time that many manufacturers state, I doubt they implement that risk.
By the way, did you measure the 17W or is that an advertisement figure? I found precise energy consumption values to be really hard to find and sometimes overoptimistic. Unfortunately not many people look at this, so its often not advertised and if it is it may not always be true, because not many people check that.
That 22-30W I stated for my MiniITX I measured with a consumer-grade electronic watt meter as no values are stated by the manufacturer. Not accurate to the % margin likely but also not systematic “tuned” to look nice. I would bet if the manufacturers did give values then they would use “hand-picked” setups with stripped down options to give an especially appealing value.
Nevertheless, the 17W are quite good if they are right. Even if its in reality a bit over 20W its still good and perfectly in line with what the NSLU uses wuth such a HD.
A shame one cant easily replace the harddrive of a Buffaloo. It would be tempting to place 2.5” drive in with an adapter and then have a 10W unit.