Silent NAS wanted

onimod wrote:

I don't think you'll find anything that meets your expectations. In my experience the noise of the unit isn't determined by the discs, but the fan cooling the cpu - if the machine is up and running, so is the fan. There is very little difference in the fan speed of my Pro wither the discs are spinning or spun down. Find a stand alone air cooled drive if you're serious about sound. Maybe you nee a NAS for the volume of your collection, but maybe it can be shut down when you really need silence?

Yeah, I also read here in the forum about people putting a more silent fan into their NAS.

But I am also concerned about power consumption. This will be a true "home" server. Unused after midnight and almost the whole day until we come home again after work - so it probably is only used 4-6 hours in the evening. I want the whole NAS to sleep the other 18-20 hours. And wake-on-lan when I need it. Usually when I come home I will first listen to music (mt-daap from the NAS, music disk), surf the web, e-mail... and then after dinner maybe watch a movie (movie disk) before sleeping. So I first need only the music disk, then the backup disk (once every hour for 5 minutes), and once I arrive at the movies disk the music+backup disks can sleep... No, I don't want to manually switch disks on and off, I want a computer (NAS) to do that for me.

Of course, I could just buy two 2-bay NAS boxes, one with music+backup, one with 2 movie disks. But why pay for 2 "computers" if one is enough to do the job? All I ask for is to spin down unused disks...

PapaBear wrote:
if your NAS is going to be in the living room, and the TV (home cinema) is in another room, what connection will be between the TV box and the NAS?

I don't have a TV, but an Apple 23" Cinema Display hanging at the wall of my bedroom - actually also only 1m away from the place I intend to put the NAS, but with the wall in between. That Cinema Display is connected to a PowerBook G4 which plays the movie (at the moment from external USB disk, in the future from the NAS), and audio is sent via optical TOSlink to my AV Receiver which powers the 5.1 speaker system.
I plan to buy the next generation AppleTV box, if that can play full HD movies (1920*1080) - the current generation can only play 1280*720 "half HD" movies.