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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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.
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.
An M.2 PCIe card can make most old computers into a good SSD NAS.
https://www.startech.com/en-eu/hdd/quad-m2-pcie-card-b
I have a few different makes of these and have been surprised by how big PSU I had to put (versus on-the-wall measured wattage) for them to not occasionally randomly fail and cutting a drive off until reboot. I guess it’s spikes they don’t handle well. Besides that, the cards themselves obviously add some overhead in that department. Something to consider if low-power is a priority.
There has also been one or two drives that just wouldn’t work at all with either card, but were fine in individual slots. Vaguely suspecting drive firmware there.
They do serve their purpose well but just to add some catches for anyone eyeing them. Startech is the brand I had the least glitches with FWIW but keep in mind that’s just one anecdote.
Also ask yourself if you really need PCIe4 because the PCIe3 models are quite a bit cheaper, cooler and more stable.
Oh, and make sure your motherboard supports PCIe bifurcation. Especially for older computers that’s not always a given.
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.
I had a fun one when I put an 8x card forking into two nvme drives in a mobo that I thought compatible. No matter what, only one of them connects. Turned out:
- The 8x slot didn’t bifurcate at all
- The secondary 16x slot could do up to 8x4x4. Which is the same as no bifurcation for an 8x card in that slot.
- GPU only works in the primary slot
You think you think of everything…
I repeat myself but check out Odroid H4+.
4 SATA ports and if you split one m2 port you can also put 3 pcie3 nvme (you could split one port up to 4 but just one lane per drive is bit sad).
Same idea as the cheapo miniPCs on Ali except you actually have a shot at BIOS upgrades and not as dodgy supply chain.
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h4-plus/
If you put BIOS in power efficiency mode it can run fanless as long as the ambient temperature isn’t balming.
If it’s really just for NAS this is still more than you really need. You could get away a lot cheaper and leaner with something like the ARM-based HC4.
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/
Or check out Jeff Geerlings PiNAS shenanigans.
The Beelink looks all right. Personally I prefer the flexibility of non-soldered RAM but I guess it’s mainly a question of how much of an out-of-box experience you are looking for.
Seeed Studio reServer is also nice, though that’s on the beefier and pricier side.
The H4 plus honnestly looks great. I do have a 3d printer so an custom NAS enclosure would be easy to manufacture. And 4 SATA ports for ssd should be more than enough. Thank you!
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.
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
aptwas 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
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).
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters LVM (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping NAS Network-Attached Storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PSU Power Supply Unit Plex Brand of media server package SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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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.
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.
