Please recommend me a NAS with minimum 6x2.5" bays and no FAN

[DC1MC]

So I have an old Netgear for rotating rust and I want to get rid of it. Please recommend me a nice home NAS with minimum 6 (8 better) 2,5" bays and totally and absolutely silent. I don't need more than 1Gbit network interface, 2 will be nice to have and eventually some USB and eSATA connectors, but this is not a must have.

What I wold like to have is a sane interface for management and standard RAID configurations.

 Thanks and cheers,
 DC1MC

[ataradov]

I was looking for a new NAS some time ago, and it looks like fanless for more than two drives just does not exist.

If you can accept fans (and I think you will have to), then I can fully recommend Synology. They all have fans, but they are relatively quiet. The spinning drives create more noise than the fans.

[KE5FX]

The Synology model that I use allows you to specify the tradeoff between fan noise and hard-drive longevity.  It's never going to be something you'd put on your nightstand, though.  The only way to get complete silence is to spend a small fortune on an array of SSDs and turn off the fans entirely, or spend a bigger one delegating the problem to Amazon or another cloud provider at the other end of a fast pipe.

[rdl]

That seems like a lot of drives for a NAS. How much storage space are you after?

[DC1MC]

That seems like a lot of drives for a NAS. How much storage space are you after?

4-6TB in RAID3 (minimum) depending on prices of drives, the 1TB Samsungs went to an acceptable price now with different coupons and sales and the 2TB are also going down, I'm really not interested in a NAS where you can put 3'5" or bigger disks or mechanicals (large inter-disk space, forced ventilation and so on).
Also I don't care to have some kind of oversized RAM/CPU to do 4K Video streaming and crypto mining and TOTALLY don't want to put a byte in any kind of cloud storage.
There is a Synology with 6 bays bur really elusive to find in EU.

 Cheers,
 DC1MC


 

[mk_]

I have 3 HP-Microserver at different locations, each running Openmediavault in the actual version. They all include 1 SSD for the System and 4pcs WD-Red 3TB  and one with 4TB, each with all disks as Raid 5. Hearable but nothing to complain.

After getting used to OMV I like it and it`s doing well for my purposes...

[DC1MC]

Nothing against 3,5" HDDs per se, also totally nothing against having a good ventilation, the problem is that this thing will be in a room where me and SWMBO are sleeping most of the time and any kind of fan is not allowed , so it has to be solid state, no moving parts, and small.

[Jeroen3]

There is a Synology with 6 bays bur really elusive to find in EU.

Here is a list of places where you can buy the 6 bay synology.
https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1178927/synology-diskstation-ds1618+.html

Nothing against 3,5" HDDs per se, also totally nothing against having a good ventilation, the problem is that this thing will be in a room where me and SWMBO are sleeping most of the time and any kind of fan is not allowed , so it has to be solid state, no moving parts, and small.

Pick one: cheap, silent or small.
Or keep looking to that thing you germans have a word for:eierlegende wollmilchsau.

[DC1MC]

There is a Synology with 6 bays bur really elusive to find in EU.

Here is a list of places where you can buy the 6 bay synology.
https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1178927/synology-diskstation-ds1618+.html

Nothing against 3,5" HDDs per se, also totally nothing against having a good ventilation, the problem is that this thing will be in a room where me and SWMBO are sleeping most of the time and any kind of fan is not allowed , so it has to be solid state, no moving parts, and small.

Pick one: cheap, silent or small.
Or keep looking to that thing you germans have a word for:eierlegende wollmilchsau.

For 800 eurons I can buy a high end Shuttle and make a NAS out of it, instead of this TWO HUGE FANS Brontosaurus  , actually I was looking the Slim version:
https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS416slim

 Cheers,
 DC1MC

[DC1MC]

Well, as the new Synology will be released later this year, I may need to improvise a bit and spare some cash for better SSDs:

First think will be this box to put the disks in a 5,25" bay:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/6-Bay-2-5inch-SATA-SSD-HDD-Hot-Swap-Mobile-Rack-Enclosure-Hard-Disk-Enclosure-Rack/32921898033.html

Then I want to see what king of Shuttle-like barebone I can find with a low-power CPU.

 DC1MC

[Jeroen3]

The DS4xx is 4-bay one...

However, completely silent is still on the table. But not with a synology, since the price would be outrageous.
The Samsung 860 QVO 1TB is, right now, the cheapest disk with
€0,105/GB for the 1 TB.
€0,114/GB for the 2 TB one.
€0,157/GB for the 4 TB one.

That means you can DIY a system with a cheap motherboard, large heatsink. Almost passive system. Some open source firmware. (€200~ I guess)
6x1TB (€660~) for 5 TB storage RAID5.
4x2TB (€940~) for 6 TB.
3x4TB (€1500~)for 8 TB.
Compared to a similar load with WD RED 4x2TB (€320) or 4x4TB (€480) for 6 and 12 TB of storage, you're a whole lot cheaper.

Note the 4TB WD RED are noisier than the 2 TB. You could also spend some money at the hardware store and build a decent cabinet to sound isolate the box, and place it on turntable damper feet to prevent conducted rattle on the shelf it's on.

_{Don't try hardware raid with ssd's, check the support list before purchase}

[ogden]

Nothing against 3,5" HDDs per se, also totally nothing against having a good ventilation, the problem is that this thing will be in a room where me and SWMBO are sleeping most of the time and any kind of fan is not allowed , so it has to be solid state, no moving parts, and small.

If you cannot find small fanless 6-bay 2.5" disk NAS - most likely it does not exist. I would just disregard "small" requirement, use 3.5" NAS and disconnect fans. DS1618+ Synology seems like very good candidate. SSDs will no dissipate as much heat as HDDs, you may get away w/o fans, especially if you put NAS oriented with exhausts facing up. If better airflow needed - craft chimney using plastics/paper pipe.

[DC1MC]

Yeah, it seems that I have to build it, the Chinese box will do for nice hot-plug enclosure, I need to find a little Shuttle-like barebone  with a Atom/Celeron or something similar ( still 187 times  better than whatever ARM is in the 4bay Synology thing)  and that it, the funds will be directed to SSDs, never ever I will use some rotating rust, I have also a  cat.

The brand name NAS manufacturers of course they recommend the most enterprisey disks ever, (google and others proved it to be BS) and their estimated usage pattern is some kind of Oracle monstrosity or busy webserver with 10000 writes per second, not a file archive, so I'm pretty sure that whatever disk I'll put there will not have some special wear.

I'll see if I'll be able to do some creative heat management .
 

[Jeroen3]

I own a DS214, and it's a nice ARM box. Would not have DIY-ed it. Remember, it's just a NAS. Not a server.
If you want a server, you'd have to build a server.

Also, Synology still uses SATA, not SAS. Those are the real enterprise disks.

[David Hess]

Build one into an ATX case with your favorite low power and inexpensive motherboard.  (1) With the proper vents covered to direct airflow, a "silent" power supply can be used for all of the ventilation and the 2.5" drives will be the noisiest thing.

(1) You can get an ECC supporting low power motherboard and Ryzen processor for $120 total not including the RAM.

[todd_fuller]

What about GnuBee? https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-1

it only 5 2.5" drives, but that's pretty close.

[Jeroen3]

2.5 inch drives are significantly more silent than3.5 inch. And a bit less expeexpensive than SSD. I have a raid array of 2.5” in my desktop only for the silence.

[mariush]

You could just make your own NAS.
Buy a passive power supply or a psu that doesn't turn fan on below some threshold
Buy a B350/B450 motherboard and a 60$ Athlon 200ge and 8-16 GB of memory (for caching and other stuff)
Use a 32-64 GB SSD in m.2 as boot drive.
Install Freenas or some equivalent.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Athlon 200GE 3.2 GHz Dual-Core Processor  (€52.90 @ Caseking) - has cooler in box, but added fully passive heatsink as an option
CPU Cooler: ARCTIC - Alpine Passive Fanless CPU Cooler  (€11.90 @ Caseking)
Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-AX370M-Gaming 3 Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard  (€68.99 @ Amazon Deutschland) - has 6 sata ports, but 2 are disabled IF you use m2 pci-e x4 ssd , all 6 work if you use m.2 pci-e x2 ssd like the one in this list.
Memory: Crucial - Ballistix Sport LT 8 GB (1 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory  (€44.99 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: ADATA - XPG SX6000 128 GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive  (€39.45 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: BitFenix - Formula Gold 450 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply  (€64.90 @ Caseking)
Total: €283.13
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-03-23 11:35 CET+0100

Pick a case with 6 or more locations for 2.5" SSDs or 3.5" SSDs or one with a bunch of optical drive slots and use adapters that convert 5.25" into 2.5" or 3.5"

Example:
1 https://www.ebay.com/itm/2-5-3-5-HDD-SSD-Tray-to-5-25-Floppy-Drive-Bay-PC-Case-Adapter-Mounting-Bracket/122904885265?hash=item1c9db3b811:g:Y0cAAOSw5UFcJcq9
2 https://www.ebay.com/itm/4x2-5-SATA-SSD-to-5-25-Drive-Bay-Mobile-Rack-HDD-Docking-Station-Hot-Swap-F5J5/323575329612?epid=942813991&hash=item4b5697b34c:g:zI8AAOSwkvtb~qgc

[DC1MC]

@Mariush - this is almost exactly what I plan to do, except that I'll use another SSDs holder, the one that I've posted earlier, and a Shuttle system, some go on *bay for 40-50euros with all that is needed and have a nice 5,25" bay to host the JBOD .
There is totally no need to use a gaming mobo, lots of memory and powerful CPU, altogether eating 55W when idle, they are all nice and dandy if you want to play something on this system, not to export 2 iSCSI targets and some folders that have to be on 24/7/365.25.
I will definitely and under no circumstances use a full size PS and case, this is just disgusting  , the beige/black/black with blue blinking leds/full/half/midi/mini tower size boxes belong in the recycle bin.
The open source little piece of aluminium with 5 disks and a small ARM board was a nice idea, but for 200EUR I can do better.

 Thanks for the research in any case.

 Cheers,
 DC1MC
 

[mariush]

I suggested that motherboard because it was the cheapest on pcpartpicker germany which had 6 functional sata ports even with a m.2 nvme drive installed (as long as it's pci-e x2 max)
Boards with b350 or b450 often have only 4 sata ports

This particular board is cheap because it uses the x370 chipset instead of the current x470. As for the "gaming" tag in the title, I don't see any actual feature that would make the board more suitable for gaming - i guess it's just marketing.
Another reason why you may want to go with a board like this is ECC support - I'm not sure but there's a high change the board will accept DDR4 ECC just fine and actually use the ECC part. I think Athlon 200GE does NOT support ECC (it ignores it if it exists) but the others (Ryzen 3 1200 for example) should support it.

I chose that power supply because it's very efficient and has a very silent fan profile - while it's not completely passive power supply, that may be a good thing if you decide to go with passive cpu heatsink (that alpine for example) - the slow spin of the psu fan will move enough air to not have hotspots in the case.
That particular board is mATX, so you could have some minitower or slim design case quite easily.


You may also want to check out boards like this one: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157731&ignorebbr=1
CPU is soldered and passively cooled. Has 4 SATA ports on the board and you can use an extra sata controller card (maybe with a pci-e x1 riser cable) to get your 6-8 sata ports 
DDR3L so-dimms are also cheaper than DDR4 but the performance of those CPU is kinda small (should be enough for some basic NAS though)

[David Hess]

There is totally no need to use a gaming mobo, lots of memory and powerful CPU, altogether eating 55W when idle, they are all nice and dandy if you want to play something on this system, not to export 2 iSCSI targets and some folders that have to be on 24/7/365.25.

I helped a friend build a NAS couple months ago and he went with a $70 ASUS Prime A320M-K and $50 Athlon 200GE and that is still what I recommend although with only 4 SATA ports, it will require an SATA host bust adapter.

I will definitely and under no circumstances use a full size PS and case, this is just disgusting  , the beige/black/black with blue blinking leds/full/half/midi/mini tower size boxes belong in the recycle bin.

An ATX mini-tower would be large enough and has the advantage of using commodity parts like power supplies.  The size also makes silent operation easier.  There are some smaller sort of standardized power supplies which are almost as good though.  Flex ATX?  I forget the name.

[DC1MC]

There is totally no need to use a gaming mobo, lots of memory and powerful CPU, altogether eating 55W when idle, they are all nice and dandy if you want to play something on this system, not to export 2 iSCSI targets and some folders that have to be on 24/7/365.25.

I helped a friend build a NAS couple months ago and he went with a $70 ASUS Prime A320M-K and $50 Athlon 200GE and that is still what I recommend although with only 4 SATA ports, it will require an SATA host bust adapter.

I will definitely and under no circumstances use a full size PS and case, this is just disgusting  , the beige/black/black with blue blinking leds/full/half/midi/mini tower size boxes belong in the recycle bin.

An ATX mini-tower would be large enough and has the advantage of using commodity parts like power supplies.  The size also makes silent operation easier.  There are some smaller sort of standardized power supplies which are almost as good though.  Flex ATX?  I forget the name.

Mini tower large enough for what ? The 6 x 2.5" are fitting perfectly in the 5,25 holder, either mine or the one posted by Mariush, the rest is just waste of space and it's not like a Shuttle case will be crowded with them, what it needs is a half height PCI card with 6 ports and the SATA cable management done right.
Also I'll desperately try to underclock the CPU, really I just want to have a data storage and not some video streaming, bitcoin mining space heater machine. If one of this Chinese WhateverPi arm64 boards would have some proper SATA ports will be enough.

Well, I guess if I got a Shuttle for less then 50EUR with 4GB RAM and a Core2Duo, even if I will prove unsuitable it will still be a good to have around for experiments.


 Cheers,
 DC1MC

[David Hess]

The 6 x 2.5" are fitting perfectly in the 5,25 holder, either mine or the one posted by Mariush, the rest is just waste of space and it's not like a Shuttle case will be crowded with them

Cramming the drives together in the minimum space increases forced air cooling requirements.  I would actually prefer spacing them out among more 5.25 slots so less cooling is required.

what it needs is a half height PCI card with 6 ports

Good luck finding that.  If I knew of one, I would be using it.  Reasonably priced PCI and PCIe SATA adapters are rare enough that it is often much more economical to buy a "gamer" motherboard and disable most of it just for the extra SATA ports.  I wonder what Backblaze uses.  Here is my not terribly old reference on the subject:

http://blog.zorinaq.com/from-32-to-2-ports-ideal-satasas-controllers-for-zfs-linux-md-ra/

I have been leary of using SATA port multipliers.  Similar technologies in the past only brought tears.

[ogden]

what it needs is a half height PCI card with 6 ports

Good luck finding that.  If I knew of one, I would be using it.

Here you go (8-ports):

https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9207-8i

http://www.scsi4me.com/dell-hv52w-perc-h310-adapter-8-port-internal-6gb-s-sas-sata-raid-controller.html

[DC1MC]

This controller:
https://www.ebay.de/itm/LSI-SAS3081E-R-8-port-Internal-SATA-SAS-3Gb-s-PCI-E-RAID-Controller-Card/131983310976

And this cable:
https://www.ebay.de/itm/1-Stucke-Mini-SAS-SFF-8087-zu-4-Port-SATA-HDD-Festplatte-Adapter-Konverter/163048151379

Hopefully they fit