Silent NAS wanted

PapaBear wrote:
First - all of the 4 bay units except the NV+ v2 have virtually the same hardware. They all have the 92mm case fan and an internal fanless PSU. The NV+ v2 has an external power brick as do all the 2 bay units. All of the fans vary their speeds based on heat conditions.

OK, but which is more silent?

In the living room next to the TV is a poor location, for if after a bit, you will walk up to any flat screen TV you can feel the heat emanating from it. I have a 52" Plasma that is now 6 years old and the area around the TV is several degrees warmer than the rest of the room which is warmer than the rest of the house.

I have a separate room for my home cinema, but the NAS must go in the living room. There's no TV there, and the stereo system is ca. 1m away.

You would be better off to place the NAS in another room with an ethernet connection between the NAS and the living room if at all possible. Except for the Time Machine backing up your desktop/laptop, I don't see any provision for data protection. If you load up two separate disks with movies, and one of the disks goes down, then you have lost them unless you still have the original DVDs. Then a single disk for music and general files. If the general files are not on the desktop/laptop backed up by Time Machine, they should be.

Don't worry, I will backup all 4 disks of the NAS with external USB drives. The content of the 3 media disks doesn't change much, there's only a few movies or CDs added per month. But the TimeMachine disk in the NAS of course gets new content every day, so I will backup that frequently.

Thanks for your thoughts, but they are already being thought of. The NAS must go in the living room, so I just want to find the most silent solution.

Which 4-6 bay NAS is the most silent one (regarding hardware, isolation, foam, fan noise, case vibrations...)?

Is it possible to spin down unused drives?