5 ms·

I know the article is just using the noise thing as an excuse to deep dive into zfs and proxmox, which is cool, but if what you really care about is reducing no

by paol 2y ago

I know the article is just using the noise thing as an excuse to deep dive into zfs and proxmox, which is cool, but if what you really care about is reducing noise I thought I'd leave some practical advice here: 1. Most hard drive noise is caused by mechanical vibrations being transmitted to the chassis the drive is mounted on. 2. Consequently the most effective way to reduce noise is to reduce the mechanical coupling in the drive mounting mechanism. Having the drives in a noise-isolating case is helpful too, but only as a secondary improvement. Optimizing the drive mounting should really be the first priority. 3. If space isn't a concern the optimal thing is to have a large case (like an ATX or larger) with a large number of HDD bays. The mounting should use soft rubber or silicon grommets. Some mounting systems can work with just the grommets, but systems that use screws are ok too as long as the screw couples to the grommet not the chassis. In a good case like this any number of hard drives can be made essentially inaudible. 4. If space is a concern, a special purpose "NAS like" case (example: the Jonsbo N line of cases) can approach the size of consumer NAS boxes. The lack of space makes optimal accoustics difficult, but it will still be a 10x improvement over typical consumers NASes. 5. Lastly what you shouldn't ever do is get one of those consumers NAS boxes. They are made with no concern for noise at all, and manufacturing cheapness constraints tend to make them literally pessimal at it. I had a QNAP I got rid of that couldn't have been more effective at amplifying drive noise if it had been designed for that on purpose.

gymbeaux 2y ago
I find NASes to be a waste of money except for the “no one ever got fired for….” aspect in an enterprise environment. $600 for a NAS with a Celeron and 8GB of RAM is absurd.
- devilbunny 2y ago
  Value of your time and effort maintaining it is not zero. I used to play with stuff like this. It was fun when I was single and had lots of free time. I don't play with it anymore. If I pay someone $500 over nominal value to provide me with 8-9 years of support for security updates, etc., and I just install their packages... that's worth it to me. My first Syno was a DS412+ and my second was a DS1621+. Nine years between introduction of the two. The 412+ is still running just fine at a friend's house. I gave it to him with ~12 TB total drive space, said just help me next time I need something done with car audio (he's a DJ and knows cars) and we're square. He's happy, I'm happy. I go set up his network, he installs my head unit. We both win by doing what we're good at and letting someone else use their expertise instead of learning a lot of stuff we will almost never use again.
naming_the_user 2y ago
Yeah, the article title seemed kind of weird to me. I have a ZFS NAS, it's just a bunch of drives in an ATX case with (what I'd considered to nowadays be) the standard rubber grommets. I mean, you can hear it, but it's mostly just the fans and drives spinning, it's not loud at all. The recommendations seem reasonable but for noise? If it's noisy probably something is wrong I think.
- nicolaslem 2y ago
  I totally understand the article title, I have a ZFS NAS that makes the same kind of noise as described there. Roughly every five seconds the drives make sound that is different from the background hum of a running computer. In a calm environment this is very distracting. I even had a guest sleeping in an adjacent room complain about it once.
  - ndiddy 2y ago
    This is likely a different problem than the article describes. Most newer hard drives will move the actuator arm back and forth every few seconds when the drive is inactive. It has to do with evenly distributing the lubrication on the arm to increase the life of the drive.
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    That's a tunable in ZFS. vfs.zfs.txg.timeout defaults to 5 seconds, but it can be set (much) higher if you wish. I don't care if I lose up to a minute or two of work instead of <=5 seconds in the face of an unplanned failure, so I set it to a couple of minutes on my desktop rig years ago and never looked back. AFAIK there's also no harm in setting it both dynamically and randomly. I haven't tried it, but periodically setting vfs.zfs.txg.timeout to a random value between [say] 60 and 240 seconds should go a long ways towards making it easier to ignore by breaking up the regularity. (Or: Quieter disks. Some of mine are very loud; some are very quiet. Same box, same pool, just different models. Or: Put the disks somewhere else, away from the user and the sleeping guests.)
cjs_ac 2y ago
To add to this, I mounted an HDD to a case using motherboard standoffs in a place that was obviously intended for SSDs. Not only was it very loud, the resonance between the disk and the case also broke the disk after six months.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  And you probably weren’t even listening to Rhythm Nation![0] 0 - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=106994 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=10...
magicalhippo 2y ago
I recently upgraded my home-NAS from a Fractal Define R4 to a Define 7 XL. The R4 had the rubber grommets, but hot-swappable trays that were just held in by spring force. As such they rattled a lot. The Define 7 has the same grommet system, but the trays can be fastened by screws to the support rails. The difference in noise was significant. Even though I went from 6 to 10 disks it's much more quiet now.
patrakov 2y ago
No. The most effective way to remove HDD noise is to remove HDDs and add SSDs. I don't have any HDDs since 2016. P.S. I also talked to a customer in the past who stored their backups in an SSD-only Ceph cluster. They were citing higher reliability of SSDs and higher density, which was important because they had very limited physical space in the datacenter. In other words, traditional 3.5" HDDs would not have allowed them to store that much data in that many rack units.
- toast0 2y ago
  SSDs are great. Quieter, can be denser, faster, available in small sizes for small money, more reliable, etc. But they're not great for low cost bulk storage. If you're putting together a home NAS, you probably want to do well on $/TB and don't care so much about transfer speeds. But if you've found 10TB+ ssds for under $200, let us know where to find them.
  - sobriquet9 2y ago
    They also lose data. Especially large files you rarely touch, like family videos. Bit rot on SSDs is real. I backup to HDDs now.
- Guvante 2y ago
  A 20 TB HDD is <$400 An 8 TB SSD is >$600 $80/TB vs $20/TB is a four fold increase. Also a 16 TB drive is $2,000 so more like a 5x increase in a data center setup.
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    The 4TB M.2 SSDs are getting to a price point where one might consider them. The problem is that it's not trivial to connect a whole bunch of them in a homebrew NAS without spending tons of money. Best I've found so far is cards like this[1] that allow for 8 U.2 drives, and then some M.2 to U.2 adapters like this[2] or this[3]. In a 2x RAID-Z1 or single RAID-Z2 setup that would give 24TB of redundant flash storage for a tad more than a single 16TB enterprise SSD. [1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005671021299.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005671021299.html [2]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005870506081.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005870506081.html [3]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006922860386.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006922860386.html
kaliszad 2y ago
You clearly haven't read the full article as Jim Salter writes about the mechanical stuff at the end of the article. Also, you want to reduce vibrations because of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 (Shouting in the datacenter)
Larrikin 2y ago
>Lastly what you shouldn't ever do is get one of those consumers NAS boxes. They are made with no concern for noise at all, and manufacturing cheapness constraints tend to make them literally pessimal at it. I had a QNAP I got rid of that couldn't have been more effective at amplifying drive noise if it had been designed for that on purpose. Is there any solution that lets me mix and match drive sizes as well as upgrade? I'm slowly getting more and more into self hosting as much of digital life as possible, so I don't want to be dependent on Synology, but they offered a product that let me go from a bunch of single drives with no redundancy to being able to repurpose them into a solution where I can swap out drives and most importantly grow. As far as I can tell theres no open source equivalent. As soon as I've set up a file system with the drives I already have the only solution is to buy the same amount of drives with more space once I run out.
- kiney 2y ago
  BTRFS
- mrighele 2y ago
  > As soon as I've set up a file system with the drives I already have the only solution is to buy the same amount of drives with more space once I run out. Recent versions of zfs support raidz expansion [1], which let you add extra disks to a raidz1/2/3 pool. It has a number of limitations, for example you cannot change the type of pool (mirror to raidz1, raidz1 to raidz2 etc.) but if you plan to expand your pool one disk at a time it can be useful. Just remember that 1) old data will not take advantage of the extra disk until you copy it around and 2) the size of the pool is limited by the size of the smallest disk in the pool. [1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15022 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15022
- kccqzy 2y ago
  I might be misunderstanding your needs but my home server uses just LVM. When I run out of disk space, I buy a new drive, use `pvcreate` followed by `vgextend` and `lvextend`.
  - tharkun__ 2y ago
Marsymars 2y ago
I went down this rabbit hole of sound reduction, but then I bought a house and put all my NAS and NAS-like things in my basement storage room where I can’t hear them from anywhere else in the house.
theodric 2y ago
I assembled a fanless all-flash NAS in a Jobsbo N1 last year, and it's still working pretty well https://github.com/theodric/NASty https://github.com/theodric/NASty
PeterStuer 2y ago
"The mounting should use soft rubber or silicon grommets" Suspension of the drives with elastic bands used to be popular in the silent PC community.

by paol 2y ago

gymbeaux 2y ago

I find NASes to be a waste of money except for the “no one ever got fired for….” aspect in an enterprise environment. $600 for a NAS with a Celeron and 8GB of RAM is absurd.

devilbunny 2y ago
Value of your time and effort maintaining it is not zero. I used to play with stuff like this. It was fun when I was single and had lots of free time. I don't play with it anymore. If I pay someone $500 over nominal value to provide me with 8-9 years of support for security updates, etc., and I just install their packages... that's worth it to me. My first Syno was a DS412+ and my second was a DS1621+. Nine years between introduction of the two. The 412+ is still running just fine at a friend's house. I gave it to him with ~12 TB total drive space, said just help me next time I need something done with car audio (he's a DJ and knows cars) and we're square. He's happy, I'm happy. I go set up his network, he installs my head unit. We both win by doing what we're good at and letting someone else use their expertise instead of learning a lot of stuff we will almost never use again.

naming_the_user 2y ago

Yeah, the article title seemed kind of weird to me. I have a ZFS NAS, it's just a bunch of drives in an ATX case with (what I'd considered to nowadays be) the standard rubber grommets. I mean, you can hear it, but it's mostly just the fans and drives spinning, it's not loud at all. The recommendations seem reasonable but for noise? If it's noisy probably something is wrong I think.

nicolaslem 2y ago
I totally understand the article title, I have a ZFS NAS that makes the same kind of noise as described there. Roughly every five seconds the drives make sound that is different from the background hum of a running computer. In a calm environment this is very distracting. I even had a guest sleeping in an adjacent room complain about it once.
- ndiddy 2y ago
  This is likely a different problem than the article describes. Most newer hard drives will move the actuator arm back and forth every few seconds when the drive is inactive. It has to do with evenly distributing the lubrication on the arm to increase the life of the drive.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  That's a tunable in ZFS. vfs.zfs.txg.timeout defaults to 5 seconds, but it can be set (much) higher if you wish. I don't care if I lose up to a minute or two of work instead of <=5 seconds in the face of an unplanned failure, so I set it to a couple of minutes on my desktop rig years ago and never looked back. AFAIK there's also no harm in setting it both dynamically and randomly. I haven't tried it, but periodically setting vfs.zfs.txg.timeout to a random value between [say] 60 and 240 seconds should go a long ways towards making it easier to ignore by breaking up the regularity. (Or: Quieter disks. Some of mine are very loud; some are very quiet. Same box, same pool, just different models. Or: Put the disks somewhere else, away from the user and the sleeping guests.)

cjs_ac 2y ago

To add to this, I mounted an HDD to a case using motherboard standoffs in a place that was obviously intended for SSDs. Not only was it very loud, the resonance between the disk and the case also broke the disk after six months.

jonhohle 2y ago
And you probably weren’t even listening to Rhythm Nation![0] 0 - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=106994 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=10...

magicalhippo 2y ago

I recently upgraded my home-NAS from a Fractal Define R4 to a Define 7 XL. The R4 had the rubber grommets, but hot-swappable trays that were just held in by spring force. As such they rattled a lot. The Define 7 has the same grommet system, but the trays can be fastened by screws to the support rails. The difference in noise was significant. Even though I went from 6 to 10 disks it's much more quiet now.

patrakov 2y ago

No. The most effective way to remove HDD noise is to remove HDDs and add SSDs. I don't have any HDDs since 2016. P.S. I also talked to a customer in the past who stored their backups in an SSD-only Ceph cluster. They were citing higher reliability of SSDs and higher density, which was important because they had very limited physical space in the datacenter. In other words, traditional 3.5" HDDs would not have allowed them to store that much data in that many rack units.

toast0 2y ago
SSDs are great. Quieter, can be denser, faster, available in small sizes for small money, more reliable, etc. But they're not great for low cost bulk storage. If you're putting together a home NAS, you probably want to do well on $/TB and don't care so much about transfer speeds. But if you've found 10TB+ ssds for under $200, let us know where to find them.
- sobriquet9 2y ago
  They also lose data. Especially large files you rarely touch, like family videos. Bit rot on SSDs is real. I backup to HDDs now.
Guvante 2y ago
A 20 TB HDD is <$400 An 8 TB SSD is >$600 $80/TB vs $20/TB is a four fold increase. Also a 16 TB drive is $2,000 so more like a 5x increase in a data center setup.
- magicalhippo 2y ago
  The 4TB M.2 SSDs are getting to a price point where one might consider them. The problem is that it's not trivial to connect a whole bunch of them in a homebrew NAS without spending tons of money. Best I've found so far is cards like this[1] that allow for 8 U.2 drives, and then some M.2 to U.2 adapters like this[2] or this[3]. In a 2x RAID-Z1 or single RAID-Z2 setup that would give 24TB of redundant flash storage for a tad more than a single 16TB enterprise SSD. [1]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005671021299.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005671021299.html [2]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005870506081.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005870506081.html [3]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006922860386.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006922860386.html

kaliszad 2y ago

You clearly haven't read the full article as Jim Salter writes about the mechanical stuff at the end of the article. Also, you want to reduce vibrations because of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 (Shouting in the datacenter)

Larrikin 2y ago

>Lastly what you shouldn't ever do is get one of those consumers NAS boxes. They are made with no concern for noise at all, and manufacturing cheapness constraints tend to make them literally pessimal at it. I had a QNAP I got rid of that couldn't have been more effective at amplifying drive noise if it had been designed for that on purpose. Is there any solution that lets me mix and match drive sizes as well as upgrade? I'm slowly getting more and more into self hosting as much of digital life as possible, so I don't want to be dependent on Synology, but they offered a product that let me go from a bunch of single drives with no redundancy to being able to repurpose them into a solution where I can swap out drives and most importantly grow. As far as I can tell theres no open source equivalent. As soon as I've set up a file system with the drives I already have the only solution is to buy the same amount of drives with more space once I run out.

kiney 2y ago
BTRFS
mrighele 2y ago
> As soon as I've set up a file system with the drives I already have the only solution is to buy the same amount of drives with more space once I run out. Recent versions of zfs support raidz expansion [1], which let you add extra disks to a raidz1/2/3 pool. It has a number of limitations, for example you cannot change the type of pool (mirror to raidz1, raidz1 to raidz2 etc.) but if you plan to expand your pool one disk at a time it can be useful. Just remember that 1) old data will not take advantage of the extra disk until you copy it around and 2) the size of the pool is limited by the size of the smallest disk in the pool. [1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15022 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15022
kccqzy 2y ago
I might be misunderstanding your needs but my home server uses just LVM. When I run out of disk space, I buy a new drive, use `pvcreate` followed by `vgextend` and `lvextend`.
- tharkun__ 2y ago

Marsymars 2y ago

I went down this rabbit hole of sound reduction, but then I bought a house and put all my NAS and NAS-like things in my basement storage room where I can’t hear them from anywhere else in the house.

theodric 2y ago

I assembled a fanless all-flash NAS in a Jobsbo N1 last year, and it's still working pretty well https://github.com/theodric/NASty https://github.com/theodric/NASty

PeterStuer 2y ago

"The mounting should use soft rubber or silicon grommets" Suspension of the drives with elastic bands used to be popular in the silent PC community.