Hiya,
I have a bit of a dilemma with my DIY NAS rig. I thought I was being clever by getting the cheapest 8TB seagates in existence for a RAIDZ1 pool, but I have to conclude they’re Fucking NoisyTM. I’m very sensitive to the noise, unable to relocate the rig further away from my sleeping space and I never need the spinning drives at night anyway.
I run Proxmox with the drives passed through to a TrueNAS VM. I’m willing to turn this setup upside down to get a super convenient way to put the drives to sleep and wake them up exactly when I want to. Heck, I’ll write my own webapp to do it if I need to, but I rather ask around first because this has to be a reoccurring thing.
I know it’s possible to put drives to sleep with Linux. I know it reduces their lifespan and I don’t care, I need to sleep. :) I’m unsure how exactly it should be done when the drives are passed through to a VM.
Do you put your drives to sleep? What tricks have you used to achieve this conveniently? Let me know!
E: Should have clarified, but there are other, SSD-backed services on the same machine that need to stay online regardless of what is going on with the spinning drives.
E2: Thanks all! Ended up dismantling the VM disk passthrough setup and going with hd-idle for now. It does what it says on the tin and even works nicely together with smartmontools even though it warned against it. Still need to setup network shares via LXC and recreate all the snapshot tasks I had going on in TrueNAS. But that’s non-urgent. I may well also look into better insulation soon, the case is indeed not ideal as it is right now.
I have a bit of a dilemma with my DIY NAS rig.
Does your setup have any way to do noise insulation? I suspect the answer is no but figured I’d throw it out there, surprisingly noise insulation helps more than you’d think. I have a bunch of drives inside a desktop case with insulation panels built in and the drives themselves are in there with rubber anti vibration screws/mounts. Barely ever hear anything from the drives (granted my WD Reds are probably quieter than your current Seagates).
Just something to think on whether it’s an option for your current NAS rig or a future configuration.
I’ll consider this!
I tried to post this video directly, but it got removed. So, here is how to make your own sound-dampening baffle box for a home server:
Why don’t you buy a different enclosure for the drives? I have a Fractal Designs Define 6 and I dont hear any of my drives even sitting a foot away from it. The case cost me less than a single 8TB drive, and can hold around 12 3.5" drives, so it seems to be the most economical solution over running your drives into the ground by having them spin up and spin down regularly.
I could see making sure the NAS’ case is a well built/sealed one to reduce noise. I have 4 of those Seagate enterprise drives in a mesh case and boy are they loud lmao, so I get where OP is coming from.
This could be an option I guess - however the current case is a HP z440, which is SO convenient for building in that I need an extra good reason to get rid of it. Zero screws, just latches. Carrying handles.
But how often are you really in there fiddling with things to the point that not needing a Philips screwdriver outweighs your need to sleep each night?
Maybe try adding some Dynamat or other noise reducer inside the case to achieve the same result.
I’m possibly biased by the amount of initial fiddling with all the disks and pcie cards and hunting down where the noise was coming from. Will keep in mind.
Putting drives to sleep reduces their lifespan? I thought it was some calculus involved where if they were offline for long enough to offset the cost of the spinup during a time period it was fine. Either way I have an unraid server with 6 disks being put to sleep after 4 hours inactivity and been running that for years. Have had to replace 2 pre owned drives and 1 new WD red that was under warranty in several years.
Yeah, I’m planning to spin them down so infrequently that it shouldn’t matter in the long run.
Insulation.
Or replace the drives.
