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.

    • 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.