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.

  • GameGod@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • Diplomjodler@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • irmadlad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    but the noise of the platters was not acceptable

    Sometimes, being medically deaf is a bonus. LOL

  • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • CameronDev@programming.devEnglish
      41·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • thelittleblackbird@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    2 months ago

    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.