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.
You must log in or register to comment.
Probably a fine buy, you can get m.2s for it and it should be silent at idle. With the level of silence you want, you’re gonna have to do some sort of low power mini PC & ssds.
A quick caution, don’t cheap out on your ssds! The cheap ones are low quality and have high premature failure rates (ask me how i know 😭)
As others said, spin down the drives when they’re not in use. Make sure power saving is enabled on the drives and tune them to spin down after some appropriate amount of time. (hdparm lets you customize it on Linux)
Consider also sleeping the NAS when not in use. You can try using Wake-on-LAN to remotely wake it up when you need to use it. Saves on electricity and heat! You could also sleep it on a schedule, in case you need to be online for backups to run at particular times.
I tried a fully fledged consumer NAS (QNAP with Seagate 12 TB NAS drives) but the noise of the platters was not acceptable.
If you have a NAS, then you can put it as far away as your network reaches. Just put it somewhere where you can’t hear the thing.
Yeah I would do that if I could but unfortunately we would hear the thing regardless of where I would set it up in the flat.
I realize you’re looking for new toys, but ‘anywhere in the flat’ includes ‘under a pile of pillows.’ Otherwise, for personal photo-sized storage, just put a couple 2.5mm format SSDs in the QNAP.
under a pile of pillows
maybe not literally though, hard drives do need some cooling…
Fine, I write an extensive bit of help with links to QNAP docs and a few other things, and you downvote.
Fine, how about I just delete it, and ya all go figure it out without my help.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters LVM (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping NAS Network-Attached Storage NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PSU Power Supply Unit Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native SSD Solid State Drive mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
[Thread #1000 for this comm, first seen 13th Jan 2026, 08:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Usually 2.5" hdd tends to be more silent. But they are definitely worse from a nas perspective and not so in the ratio €/gb.
The solution with non mechanical disks is by far the most silent, but prepare the wallet and probably a kidney too.
An M.2 PCIe card can make most old computers into a good SSD NAS.
https://www.startech.com/en-eu/hdd/quad-m2-pcie-card-b
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.
