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.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    17·
    2 days ago

    I tried a fully fledged consumer NAS (QNAP with Seagate 12 TB NAS drives) but the noise of the platters was not acceptable.

    If you have a NAS, then you can put it as far away as your network reaches. Just put it somewhere where you can’t hear the thing.

    • koldanor@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      51·
      2 days ago

      Yeah I would do that if I could but unfortunately we would hear the thing regardless of where I would set it up in the flat.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        10 hours ago

        Okay, this is unfortunately DIY, but if you’re willing to spend time:

        Get a plywood box and put it in there.

        If you hear vibrations, put sorbothane between the NAS and the box.

        If you need more sound absorption, put acoustic foam on the inside.

        If you need more cooling, drill two holes, mount a case fan, and run the air through some kind of baffle. Like, maybe attach insulated flex-duct, like this:

        https://www.amazon.com/Hon-Guan-Silencer-Reducer-Ventilation/dp/B07HC8CXQG

      • tburkhol@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        I realize you’re looking for new toys, but ‘anywhere in the flat’ includes ‘under a pile of pillows.’ Otherwise, for personal photo-sized storage, just put a couple 2.5mm format SSDs in the QNAP.

        • felbane@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          1 day ago

          under a pile of pillows

          maybe not literally though, hard drives do need some cooling…

    • DaGeek247@fedia.io
      5·
      2 days ago

      I have used this card for a couple years.

      Pros:

      • five m.2 sata slots
      • single slot pcie, and short / not extending past top of slot
      • incredibly cheap
      • mine has been reliable
      • no extra power needed
      • no pcie bifurcation or other special motherboard features required (works in anything)
      • the individual drives do show up as individual drives in Debian for me and can be accessed separately (not a hardware raid card)

      Cons:

      • pcie 3.0x2 speed in an x16 slot (2GBps)
      • doesn’t support m.2 pci
      • doesn’t support booting from the installed drives

      If all you’re looking for is cheap, quiet, storage, and you don’t mind losing out on total read/write speeds, thisll actually do great just about anywhere.

    • joulethief@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Worth noting that cards such as this (with mote than one M.2 slot) require the mainboard to support PCIe bifurcation – which most old boards likely do not.

      Edit: Cards with just one slot do not require this feature so you can plug them into any board that has a free PCIe slot. Unless you also want to boot from them, in which case you might need to modify your UEFI. I went that route and succeeded, but be aware of the risks involved.

  • GameGod@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    2 days 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.

  • wltr@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • Diplomjodler@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    2 days 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 days ago

    but the noise of the platters was not acceptable

    Sometimes, being medically deaf is a bonus. LOL

  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    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 :)

  • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 days 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
      61·
      2 days 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.

      • mpramann@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        51·
        2 days ago

        What was unpleasant for you? TrueNAS just works for me and was no hassle at all to setup on my DIY N100 NAS.

        • gkak.laₛ@lemmy.zipEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          Not OP, but at least for me when I tried it:

          There was no way to use or even just mount and migrate my existing storage (btrfs+LVM). LVM wasn’t even installed, and when I tried to install it, I got an error saying that apt was disabled on the system, which means I was basically locked out of doing anything more than what they allow you to do on your own hardware.

          It seems like it’s technically open source, but having all the vendor lock-in features and lack of control of a proprietary solution

          The only use case seems for it to be used as a black box appliance:

          • on a new system
          • with empty hard drives
          • only with ZFS
          • without having any control on your own system, except enabling samba etc and maybe installing the predefined Docker containers that they allow you from the web interface

          I knew it is supposed to be only an appliance, but with how much people recommended it, I didn’t thing it would be this closed of a system; I think I’ve read about people doing more things with even just their Synology hardware

        • CameronDev@programming.devEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          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).

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        Set it up on my uGreen DXP4800+
        The most unpleasant thing was to configure the LED health indicator and learning how it works.

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    21·
    1 day ago

    Fine, I write an extensive bit of help with links to QNAP docs and a few other things, and you downvote.

    Fine, how about I just delete it, and ya all go figure it out without my help.

  • smeg@infosec.pubEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • thelittleblackbird@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    2 days 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.