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.
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.