Ideas to do a quieter Sonarr/Radarr setup

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ReturnedSword

Active Member
Jun 15, 2018
526
235
43
Santa Monica, CA
I purchased a Synology DS1821+ a year ago but only had the chance to set it up recently.

It is stuffed with 18 TB EXOS drives backed by 2 x 2 TB non-enterprise NVMe cache, with the RAM maxed out to 32 GB. Synology’s caching seems a bit janky tbh so I have mine set up as read only. Docker is running my Sonarr/Radarr, with qBitorrent and Usenet are set up on an ESXi box because Synology struggles with running VM on the NAS.

While the setup’s performance seems fine, the actively downloading torrents constantly hit the NAS, and the HDD noise is starting to get unbearable when I’m working in my lab.

I haven’t run download clients for a long time so I’m sure many things have changed. The last time around SSDs didn’t exist yet. Heavy downloading on HDDs would thrash the drives before.

How does everyone implement their media downloading? I was thinking of moving everything to a smaller box with its own storage, then move completed media to the NAS (after seeding). Obviously having everything on SSD would provide instant quiet, but wouldn’t constant active torrents wear down usable NAND health fairly quickly?
 

roen

New Member
Feb 17, 2022
2
0
1
First and foremost: a HDD shouldn't produce a noiselevel that can be labelled as unbearable. Unless you are overly sensitive, that is. If you aren't: you might want to take a look at the placement. For instance, if you place it on a wooden desk: wood conducts sound and vibrations. Different material has different characteristics. A sound dampening mat could fix this without the need to move your Synology box.

Naturally, you can run the applications on a different machine. STH's TinyMiniMicro series has some excellent boxes for this exact purpose. Regarding SSD wearing: write actions tend to wear SSDs more than read actions. Wearing it out in a couple of months shouldn't happen, unless you are mining Chia on the same SSDs. Solid state storage became really affordable; if you seek complete reliability you might use it in RAID and have a cold spare ready.