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.
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.
That depends on the usage, see: https://www.xda-developers.com/smr-hdds-are-fine-for-your-nas-until-you-try-to-resilver/
If you keep this issue in mind and avoid resilvering / balancing they can work just fine in a media storage NAS.
They use a lot less power too. For small home NAS they are really an often overlooked option.