Quietest "NAS HDD's" for home NAS

[ullbeking]

Hi all,

I currently have a U-NAS 800 that I am working on provisioning for our home NAS, to go in to the living room. Controller is Supermicro A1SRi-2758F mini-ITX board.

I am considering 8x WD Red SATA 8TB or higher. I already have four in storage but they make a clicky clicky noises that can, apparently, be reduced by setting firmware appropriately.

• I've heard that I can set various options in the HDDs' firmware to make them acoustically quieter. Is this true...?
• I heard rumors or confirmed stories about WD Red less than 8 TB being quieter. Apparently He-filled 8+ TB are unavoidably louder in some revisions. My WD Reds are EFZX.

Any help or suggestion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!

Andrew

 

[Spartacus]

If you have 4 drives already, it'd might be more cost efficient to just build a sound dampening box of some sort rather than replace those 4 drives.

 

[ullbeking]

Thank you @Spartacus . I wasn't looking to replace the WD Reds, just to tune them, if possible, to be less noisy. Is this feasible?

I have 4x WD Red 3 TB HDD's, about 12-16 WD Re and Gold 4 TB (SAS and SATA) HDD's too, and 4x HGST He 8 TB HDD's too (although these are marked to go to colo).

Basically, I was looking for reassurance as to whether the WD Reds are still a good option. If not, what is?

I have two HP Microserver Gen 8 machines and they are amazingly quiet. 4x 3.5" HDD each. But that's two servers. Perhaps I could make the second one an onsite backup server? What do you think? Perhaps the first backup NAS should be larger capacity than the primary NAS to archive time-based snapshots?

 

[Spartacus]

The only tuning I'm aware of is spinning the drives down when not in use.
Yes the firmware 'technically' dictates the noise level but pretty sure thats just by dynamic rpm and 5400rpm on the regular reds is about as low as it goes.

Are you using the same drives in the Gen8 machines or are they using more tuned enterprise level drives vs the WD red NAS entry level?
Is it possible the drives are louder because they're reverberating in the unas case more?
Similar to how low frequency sub-woofer noise is audible/felt in a house as it penetrates.

Up to you on secondary backups, backups are usually not that much larger due to compression and dedupe, but if its 1-1 back backup it might be a good idea.

My drive of preference is the WD white shucks, they can be had regularly from $130-140 for the 8TB and are WD red equivalents.
They are somewhat clicky but not unreasonably so for the cost IMO.