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.
I repeat myself but check out Odroid H4+.
4 SATA ports and if you split one m2 port you can also put 3 pcie3 nvme (you could split one port up to 4 but just one lane per drive is bit sad).
Same idea as the rotating miniPCs on Ali except you actually have a shot at BIOS upgrades and not as dodgy supply chain.
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h4-plus/
If you put BIOS in power efficiency mode it can run fanless as long as the ambient temperature isn’t balming.
If it’s really just for NAS this is still more than you really need. You could get away a lot cheaper and leaner with something like the ARM-based HC4.
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc4/
Or check out Jeff Geerlings PiNAS shenanigans.
The Beelink looks all right. Personally I prefer the flexibility of non-soldered RAM but I guess it’s mainly a question of how much of an out-of-box experience you are looking for.
Seeed Studio reServer is also nice, though that’s on the beefier and pricier side.
https://www.seeedstudio.com/reServer-Compact-Edge-Server-powered-by-11th-Gen-Intelr-Coretm-i3-1115G4-p-5087.html
The H4 plus honnestly looks great. I do have a 3d printer so an custom NAS enclosure would be easy to manufacture. And 4 SATA ports for ssd should be more than enough. Thank you!