I’m looking for some quiet, and power-efficient drives for a NAS, with an emphasis on quiet since they’ll live under my desk.
My question is, am I making a mistake by shelling out a bunch of cash for IronWolf drives? Would I be better off shucking some drives? Are shucked drives usually quieter/more power-efficient? Louder/less power-efficient? Is there some specific brand or product category I should be looking at if I care about noise? I don’t care too much about performance as long as it’s not SMR or something. This is mainly a media server that will also be used to store family photos and important documents. I’m not editing off of it or anything like that. Total storage goal would be somewhere between 8 TB and 20 TB after RAID is accounted for.
I wrote out a bunch of context, and then realize that it’s mostly irrelevant. It took a while to write though, so here it is if you’re curious:
I was given an old Dell Optiplex 7020 with room and power for 4 up to 4 hard drives, so I bought 2 14TB Seagate Exos drives to put in it. Wow are they loud! I’m thinking of sending them back and getting some quieter ones. My old NAS has 2 4TB Seagate IronWolf drives in it, and they’re much quieter. I was thinking of a couple of options:
Get 4 more 4 TB drives. Put them in RaidZ2, copy the array over from the old drives to the new drives, and then use raid expansion to use the old 4TB drives to bump it up to a 6-drive vdev. Pros: would probably be cost-efficient initially. Cons: power usage, would need to find a case and PSU that can run 6 drives
Get 2 8 TB drives, put them in raidz1 with each other. Copy data over, then use the old drives in raid 0 together as another device to expand the raidz1 vdev.
Pros: fewer drives, so less power usage. Also, I’d feel cool if it worked.
Cons: I don’t know if 8 TB drives are usually loud. Are they? Does anyone have experience with the noise level of Seagate IronWolf 8 TB drives? Also, I don’t know for sure that it’s even possible to use 2 devices in RAID 0 as a single device in a vdev. I think it is though.
Just buy a bunch of SATA 2TB SSDs and put them in RAIDZ1
Pros: Quiet, fast, power efficient
Cons: Expensive
I did a lot of research on the topic a few months ago for the same use case. It is quite difficult to find out though, as manufacturer‘s numbers are hard to interpret and different sizes of the same hard drive model can have different acoustic performance. A few things I found out:
NAS drives (like ironwolf) are in general quiter than enterprise (e.g. exos) ones (but also slower)
Smaller drives are quiter.
Lower RPMs are quiter.
Helium filled drives are quiter (which is a bit paradoxical as these are larger too)
The acoustics of the case matter a lot too (a small NAS might be more rattly than an actual pc case)
For power efficiency you probably also want to stock to NAS over enterprise drives. Though larger capacities are better too as a smaller number of drives will be more efficient anyway. Plus spinning down the drives when not in use will help too.
Because I was on a bit of a budget I got a pair of 16TB toshiba enterprise drives. They are pretty noisy but quiter than the EXOS at work (as far as the conparison is fair in a different room and case). But I spin them down after a few minutes so most of the time they‘ll be idling. I have a ssd in my nas for more volatile data.
I read that shucking usually gets you enterprise drives, but obviously there are no guarantees here.
If price were no concern, I‘d get the biggest ironwolves that are CMR and 5400 rpm.
I have a simple “NAS”(really just a thin client) running 16TB of 2.5" USB HDDs on my desk.
The pros are they are cheap and decently quiet(you might want some vibration-dampening anyway).
The cons are that they are slower than proper HDDs(perfectly fine for media).
Thanks for the help! I snooped around some more, and came across something I didn’t expect but in retrospect maybe should have: datasheets! Based on what I’m reading here, the 4 TB 5400 RPM drives have much lower noise and power usage than anything larger, so that’s the way I’m going to go.
Little late to the party, but I have nine x 1TB SSD drives in my QNAP NAS. It is three feet from me, on a shelf above my monitors, and is inaudible. Power draw is miniscule and I have it on 24/7. When prices come down on the 2TB models I’ll upgrade them.
If you go with HDD, get carriers with rubber isolation mounts. That alone will remove the majority of noise and give you a much better experience.
I found the seeking noise of some 3,5" HDDs really annoying, so I used 2,5" HDDs but even those I wanted far away from me. I hope to have only passive components in the future, so no moving parts like fans or anything. The pump for custom loop watercooling would need to be in another room. I like it quiet so I can concentrate as I’m easily distracted.
So 2,5" HDDs are worth considering when SSDs are too expensive.
A question for those, that have knowledge on this topic. Like the topic author, I’m “bringing things together in my head” in terms of making a media server. I got away from using HDDs for my main system, where I had a 1TB 7200 WD drive.
Even with a good Phanteks p600s case (similar story with NZXT with its noise reducing panels case), I could still register the sound of the HDD running (or even idling). Moving away from HDDs was a gamechanger.
But I want to have a storage for random stuff. Currently, I wanted to start off with a few 2TB drives, but upgrade if needed (not even going NAS here). And a regular 2TB ssd (not even a good one) seems to cost 3-4 times than a good Barracuda or IronWolf.
Still thinking about the “housing” - be it Sinology or a regular PC case with a Pi or a some outdated x86.
So the thing I wanted to ask here - what would be the “best practice” here? Is there any worth in trying to find a beQueit case or something, or Sinology has decent solutions? I found a 2 drive Sinology solution (don’t remember the model, sorry), but it looked to be a “plastic toaster-like shape”, which I really doubt knows about noise absorbtion.
I’ve had much better luck with getting very quiet WD Red (non-“Pro”) drives than Seagate, but it’s been a several years since I last compared.
hdparm -M128Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) setting can help reduce seek noise if supported by the model of drive.
Don’t ignore power consumption figures… You can get a nice quiet drive, only to find you need to add fans because one model runs much hotter than others in the lineup.
If you’re really sensitive about noise, and can’t keep enough distance between it and your ears, you would have to be crazy not to just go with SSDs these days.
The drawback IMO with 2.5" drives is that the larger ones are SMR (I think all of them over 1 or 2 TB), so not suitable for RAID and just crappy write performance in general.
Install fans that are making a constant white noise to drown out the hdd seek noise
This might sound stupid and counterproductive, but for an example in our open floor office they play white noise via speakers to drown out noise of people chatting, clicking keyboards, etc, etc. The mind begins to filter out the constant white noise. It really feels strange when once in a while the speakers stop and suddendly you hear every little noise. It’s very distracting.
I know everyone’s experience with this is different, but just to add another data point: I have a 4-bay NAS with a single bay filled with IronWolf 8TB HDD and when there is no read/write going on it kind of audible from a ~5 meter distance in the night (when there is no ambient noise). But when I watch something in my TV (where it is streaming directly from the NAS through a server which connected with NFS – not sure how relevant this is --) and mute it, oh man, you need to see how the drives spin like crazy.
It doesn’t bother me that much but if I would have started that build now, I would probably gone with either a lower RPM drive or full stack SSDs (2x4TB SSDs would probably serve me well while not being unreasonably expensive) (I am using about ~5 TBs, so I don’t need to much storage and i don’t really care about retention [only movies and tv shows]).
