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.

    • DaGeek247@fedia.io
      3·
      6 hours ago

      I have used this card for a couple years.

      Pros:

      • five m.2 sata slots
      • single slot pcie, and short / not extending past top of slot
      • incredibly cheap
      • mine has been reliable
      • no extra power needed
      • no pcie bifurcation or other special motherboard features required (works in anything)
      • the individual drives do show up as individual drives in Debian for me and can be accessed separately (not a hardware raid card)

      Cons:

      • pcie 3.0x2 speed in an x16 slot (2GBps)
      • doesn’t support m.2 pci
      • doesn’t support booting from the installed drives

      If all you’re looking for is cheap, quiet, storage, and you don’t mind losing out on total read/write speeds, thisll actually do great just about anywhere.

    • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
      6·
      13 hours ago

      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.

      • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        10 hours ago

        Ah yeah - always a good idea to verify support on the motherboard. I think AMD mbs are usually better on the bifurcation front than Intel ones.
        The Startech card I linked is backwards compatible with PCIe 3.0 M.2 NVMe cards, they mention that they’ve tested with Samsung 970 EVO for example, so you can still fill it up with older, cooler M.2 cards even if it supports PCIe 4.0.

    • joulethief@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      13 hours ago

      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.

      • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
        5·
        12 hours ago

        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…