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.

  • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    9 hours 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
      7·
      8 hours 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.

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

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

        • gkak.laₛ@lemmy.zipEnglish
          4·
          8 hours 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·
          8 hours 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).