Hey there selfhosted community.
Does anyone here have experience with silent or mostly silent storage solutions? I would like to implement a NAS solution for my homelab and home.
I tried a fully fledged consumer NAS (QNAP with Seagate 12 TB NAS drives) but the noise of the platters was not acceptable. Currently I have a external WD drive attached via USB to my mini PC/server but I would really love to implement some kind of redundancy in the form of a NAS from where the critical files would be backed up to Hetzner for offsite and on external drives.
I don’t need a ton of space. My most critical items are photos. As silent operation is very important I started looking into ssd NAS solutions. Does anyone have experience with Beelink ME mini? Other solutions I looked into where either overkill or horrendously expensive.
I would really like to pull the trigger on a solution here before the prices for storage will skyrocket in the future.
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Have you tried a non-tech solution, like putting the drives into some noise absorbing materials, or isolating the sound with the hard case, things like that? That may sound not really obvious, but my guess is that you can at least get some noise off with a solution like this.
I won’t go with SSDs for a NAS as it’s very expensive. But if money of no concern, that Beelink thing looks impressive.
There are plenty of NAS systems that use M.2 SSDs. Those should be pretty much silent. You might even have to sell only one kidney to afford the drives.
As others said, spin down the drives when they’re not in use. Make sure power saving is enabled on the drives and tune them to spin down after some appropriate amount of time. (hdparm lets you customize it on Linux)
Consider also sleeping the NAS when not in use. You can try using Wake-on-LAN to remotely wake it up when you need to use it. Saves on electricity and heat! You could also sleep it on a schedule, in case you need to be online for backups to run at particular times.
Regarding NAS loudness volume: I can give you some advice as mine is in my bedroom.
Choose quiet drives. I deployed 4x Toshiba N300 15TB He HDDsin RaidZ2
Maybe mod the drive cages: Use something like sticly velcro strips (soft side) on all sides that HDD/caddies touch the caddy and case/chassie.
Move your intensive access times to late night (4am for example) or when you are at work/gone from home.
Use a soft surface. I have placed the NAS on soft foam from packing materials to reduce vibrations.Happy storing :)
but the noise of the platters was not acceptable
Sometimes, being medically deaf is a bonus. LOL
I’d DIY it (maybe with FreeNAS, about which I know nothing) instead of buying a proprietary NAS in a box. What’s the point of self-hosting if you’re going to be at the mercy of someone else’s software anyway? If you’re DIY’ing, there are 3.5" drive enclosures with soundproofing stuff in them that should keep the drive pretty quiet. Or if you can afford enough SSD’s for your storage requirements, then use those.
I dunno about recommending FreeNAS (Known as truenas now). It is basically an appliance OS, and unless you are using enterprise level hardware, they want nothing to do with you.
I’m currently using it, but it was a very unpleasant experience setting it up.
What was unpleasant for you? TrueNAS just works for me and was no hassle at all to setup on my DIY N100 NAS.
Annoyingly, disk discovery. It refused to use my disks, claiming they didn’t have serial numbers. I could see the serial numbers in the frontend and the console, but their middleware just hated them.
I am using a USB multi-disk drive thing, which didn’t work properly on an old kernel, but it should have been fine with the new kernel.
I reported the bug, which didn’t really get addressed, and then had to build my array using the command line tools (which aren’t documented).
Set it up on my uGreen DXP4800+
The most unpleasant thing was to configure the LED health indicator and learning how it works.
Usually 2.5" hdd tends to be more silent. But they are definitely worse from a nas perspective and not so in the ratio €/gb.
The solution with non mechanical disks is by far the most silent, but prepare the wallet and probably a kidney too.
Don’t use them.
Very easy to pick SMR HDDs by accident.
You don’t want those inside a NAS.
My setup is an old Dell Wyse thin client and 4 external USB drives. The thin client is basically silent. The drives only make sound when they’re active, and spin down when idle. The thin client has an Intel CPU with QuickSync so it can even transcode with Plex. For data redundancy between the hard drives, I use lsyncd to make a poor man’s mirror setup.
Works great. Lives in a cabinet in my living room.
