Syntology NAS – Disk swap Q

I know there are some NAS experts on here, so (hopefully quick) Q.

My ds920 has 4 x 4gig Seagate Ironwolf drives installed. They are stupidly noisy (the heads spin even if there’s no process/activity). It needs to live in the house and I can’t stick it in a cupboard as it needs air to vent. The noise is driving us mad. I can’t even turn it off at night as I’m running HASSIO/DNS/VPN on it.

NAS is configured with SHR (Syn RAID-5). I have already tested removing a drive and re-adding it to the single storage pool. That works, takes a while to re-sync but it’s doable.

Preferred option. Buy some lower speed but quiet WD-RED drives and either hot swap them (they are same capacity but lower speed which prob be okay) or just start again and restore from a backup. Keep Seagates as emergency spares.

Other option. Buy a ONDROID appliance to run HA/DNS/etc and turn off NAS at night.

We do need the NAS for file store/shared drive.  And I like the OS/functionality/doing all the ‘stuff’ in on box, but those drives have to go (full disclosure, I did research the drives before I bought them, read they were noisy and still bought them because I’m an idiot)

How much space are you using? 4TB SSDs are under £200 each now and would make the disk noise completely go away.

And fwiw, my 2-bay Synology is living in a cupboard, on top of quite a warm PoE switch, it’s been OK so far.

interesting @simon_g – not thought of that. We have 4x4TB but we could make do with 12TB for now for sure.

I also have an older 2 bay Syntology which is mostly quiet. Both are in a cabinet (but no fan) and never seen any warnings in terms of temp. Wasn’t sure sticking them in a cupboard was a good idea tho!

Right I’ll go look at SSDs.

Hmm they are quite a bit more. I wouldn’t be able to hot swap them which would make finding a temp home for 8 TB of data a thing… But I can probably use old NAS for most of that.

If I did, maybe I wouldn’t run SHR/RAID. No moving parts and I do also have an off site backup. Dunno tho, that sounds a step too far.

I have 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives in my Synology.  There is some noise when indexing, bit or whirr/click, but overall inaudible in the house.  Perhaps have a look at logs or power settings?

I purchased some WD Red drives but returned them as they were SMR. Before you go down the WD route have a look at which models are SMR v CMR and decide if SMR works for your application.

Running Home Assistant on a fanless Raspberry Pi 4 without difficulty. It’s not doing anything particularly complicated. I gave up on keeping copies of movies and music in lieu of Apple Music and Netflix. Old movies are still on an external drive which I power up very rarely when I want to watch one of them.

Perhaps have a look at logs or power settings?

I think mine are the pro – googling it suggest it’s a known issue. I’ve got everything turned off (even turned indexing off for a bit), HDD should go into shutdown but it never does and I can’t see any processes that would cause the disks to spin all the time.

SMR v CMR

Well this is new 🙂 Shall have a look.

Running Home Assistant on a fanless Raspberry Pi 4 without difficulty.

This is what I had before. The SD card failed (again a known problem than I found out about afterwards) so wanted something with an internal drive really. We use HA for a lot of stuff and I’d like it on something a bit more robust. It runs great in the VM on the NAS, but you know those disks… (I did wonder if the VM was doing the disk thrashing but I have tested that hypothesis)

Have you tried isolation of the NAS unit from what it’s sat on? Mine, with WD Reds in was noisy (2 bay Synology) but the noise is vastly reduced when using some self adhesive silicone isolation pads under the feet of the NAS unit.

I bought a selection of pads like this to see what worked: Amazon – Self Adhesive Pads

To add to the SMR / CMR issues WD had, this is also out there too: WD Red Age Flag Synology DSM

Have you tried isolation of the NAS unit from what it’s sat on

No but I will later. That’s a very cheap option if it works 🙂

One big point: Amazon Prime Day is coming up next month, so don’t buy anything big til then!

I went through this process (albeit with a much smaller NAS setup), and two main recommendations came up:
– SSDs as noted above. WD Reds are a recommended solution for NAS Drives, and the 2TB size has dropped steadily in price to about £140 each. When I looked they were >£200, so I got Crucial MX500s instead (SATA, 2TB £100, 4TB £200 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09FRRWVWX/ref=twister_B0BRJWB4LS?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1)
– a fanless NAS enclosure. For my purposes, the NAS wasn’t being used much of the time, and it’s the fans making a lot of the noise. It’s definitely a premium solution, but QNAP have a few fanless options (HS-453 being one).
You could also look to strip down the enclosure, clean the fans (may be a large part of it) and replace them with quieter fans.

Replacing the drives you should be able to replace one drive at a time and let RAID rebuild each time. Replacing the enclosure it’s a case of running them side by side for a few days and just transferring everything across.

It’s not the fans, it’s defo the drives! Putting them in a half height cab has helped but still very noisy.

Looking at what’s on the current NAS, I could move (in fact doing a hyper backup right now) all my old video files (work/bike) to the older NAS as just dead-drop storage really.  Then I could probably get away with 3x2TB SSDs…. tempting.

What’s the actual question? “How do I make this quieter?”

Can you fit a Wi-Fi adapter / run an Ethernet cable and shove it in the loft?

Did you mean “4gig” or was that a typo and you meant 4TB? Assuming the latter then what are you doing which requires 12TB of RAID5 storage, performance is a concern, yet you could readily wipe and restore from a backup?

[Edited for cross-posting]

The question is two part

1. Have I exhausted all options for making these specific drives stop spinning
2. If yes, then what are the best options for new drives

In terms of ‘can it go in the loft’, sadly not. There might be an option to put it somewhere else but it does need to be connected to one of the TP Decos. Wireless not supported.

In terms of do we need 12TB of RAID like storage. Yep, for mostly work reasons involving a lot of video and a useless internet connection. But a lot of that content is static. The old NAS ran out of space (disks and bays) and I basically copied everything to the new one, but thinking about it, I could get better use of the old NAS (which is still a mirror set up) by archiving older content onto it.

DS220+ here so only two drives in it, but Seagate in SHR, silent from a couple of metres away. I was tinkering with Observium and that was writing SNMP data to it almost every second and it was noisy to the point of noticable all the tine due to the disc writes. Deleted that VM and its back to almost silent again.

Running Pi-Hole, SMB shares, time machine, cloud sync and a couple of VM’s for some virtual firewalls as part of my network/test lab.

Looked at upgrading the storage a few times for SHR, general wisdom appears to be swap a drive, and then wait for the array to rebuild, then swap the next drive.

Stopping and starting the drives is a bit of a non-starter with a Synology. You can ask it to do it but it hits performance from ‘cold’. And IME asking them to stop spinning if possible achieves nothing.

I use Toshiba N300s in my main NAS they’re  as noisy as any other HDDs I’ve used in my other NAS

I keep mine in the cellar connected via cable to the LAN.
with the fan on ‘normal’ even I can hear the drives whirring and zipping/clicking as they endlessly do their thing when I’m closer than a couple of metres.

you could use SSDs. It seems an expensive solution compared with getting a long patch cable or running some cables and sockets to move the NAS somewhere you won’t hear it.

DS220+ here so only two drives in it

My original was the 218J. Pair of WD drives – silent and barely audible in use. Seagate Ironwolf Pro, well they just love to spin regardless any load! I have stopped time machine and cloud sync (which I only use for a couple of shares as our internet is pretty slow) and it may have made it a bit less thrashy. I do need to turn them back on tho regardless of what I end up doing.

I did a test with a drive, deactivated it, removed it, reinserted it, added it to the (single) storage pool. All worked but took 7 hours to re-integrate into SHR and then it decided the pool needed a scrub. That’s going to be tedious with four drives, but manageable.

I dug out my old Rasp Pi (that ran home assistant originally) and installed latest Pi OS on there and added pi-hole and tailscale (which I use for VPN). Disabled those on NAS so worse case I could shut it off at night now (but I’d lose HA as it’s running in the VM and I really don’t want to move it back to a PI).

topping and starting the drives is a bit of a non-starter with a Synology. You can ask it to do it but it hits performance from ‘cold’. And IME asking them to stop spinning if possible achieves nothing

This is the conclusion I’m coming to. If I do the long patch thing, I’ve got to find a route (old house not easy) but it does seem the preferred option.

My 216 (fairly old model) with 2x drives is pretty noisy, so you’re not alone. As above I couldn’t work out why it wasn’t sleeping the drives, but apparently it is better – and they are designed – to run 24/7.

Easier to say with 2 drives but I’ll just replace with SSDs when one dies (or they come down in price enough).

I didn’t notice on my 218 but I bet they were always spinning as well. Albeit quietly 😉

Anyway I have a non disk swap plan. I can run an ethernet cable through an existing conduit into the cupboard where 2 of our fuse boards are. There’s plenty of space and it’s pretty well vented. So going to build a couple of shelves and do a proper job of tidying power / cables etc. It’ll connect to one of our mesh devices near the end of the conduit so should be pretty well hidden.

Bit of a project as need to get some 13a plugs in there but lots of space on fuse board and I like the idea of all the NAS/PI etc being on it’s own fuse. I’ll be getting a proper electrician to do that of course!

If that is still too noisy (and it’s in a bit of the house we’re least likely to hear it other than loft which we can’t do) then I’ll go back to looking at new drives.

Thanks for all the help 🙂