I need to put my NAS in my living room. So it must be as silent as possible.Thus I don't want a RAID configuration where all disks are spinning, but a JBOD configuration where unused disks spin down after 5 minutes.Looking on the comparison PDF, only the DuoV2 (too small) and the NV+V2 support JBOD.However, I saw in the FAQ that it would be possible to configure single disks as RAID-0 and thus simulate JBOD on other ReadyNAS devices (e.g. Ultra4 or Ultra6). Right?Which 4-6 bay NAS is the most silent one (regarding hardware, isolation, foam, fan noise, case vibrations...)?Are the Ultras more sturdy than a NV+V2 and thus more silent (when equipped with same drives)?I want one disk in my NAS dedicated to TimeMachine-backups from two Mac laptops. Two disks dedicated for movies. And a fourth disk for music and general files.So if I were to play music and otherwise not use the file server, I want the two movies disks to be asleep, and the backup disk to wake up every hour when my Mac does its Timemachine backup, then spin down again for 55 minutes.And, of course, the whole NAS should go to sleep after 5 minutes idle. So if nobody watches movies or plays music, then the whole NAS should only be awake for 5 minutes each hour (for the Timemachine backup). While I don't really like to unmount the music or movies disks for the NAS to find out that it should consider itself idle, I could probably live with that. But the Timemachine volume must be kept mounted so that backups happen automatically each hour.

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. 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. 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.

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?

It is possible to set drive spin down. As I have always had mine in an X-Raid/X-Raid2 structure, I don't know if it will spin down unused drives in a flex-raid mode. While I do not have any way to measure volume, none of the three ReadyNAS units (one NV+ v1, two NVX) I have would I consider noisy, in fact when I am on the desktop, they are only about 4 feet from my ear, sitting on top of the table. I do on occasion hear the drives, but not all the time. In my opinion, a 6 bay would have a higher noise level than a 4 bay (three fans and more drives). Since the difference in the Ultra 4 and Ultra 4 Plus is a single core processor against a dual core in the Plus, and the Pro 4 has the same hardware as the Ultra 4 Plus, I would say that the noise level would be the same, and I would expect them to be as quiet as my NVX. I will leave it to others if it is possible to configure four Raid0 volumes on a 4 bay unit. I simply do not know.

Mostly 2-bay and 6-bay units from a series of ReadyNAS units (e.g. Ultra) will be quietest. However with the NV+ v2 having an external PSU that will help reduce the cooling that is needed and help keep the noise down.You can configure up to four Flex-RAID volumes and these can be RAID-0 volumes. On the Duo v2 and NV+ v2 you can select the JBOD option.On other models you can select Flex-RAID and delete the existing volume that is created and create the ones you want. On x86, when you choose Flex-RAID, I think you can choose to create no volume which will help save some time.The OS is stored on the disks so I would think that the drives would still tend to spin down and up together even using Flex-RAID.You really can't put the NAS anywhere else? You can't find a place (e.g. the garage - of course you'd need a power point if there isn't one already) to put it and get a cabler in to run an ethernet cable or two to the living room (or wherever you want it run to)?

mdgm wrote:Mostly 2-bay and 6-bay units from a series of ReadyNAS units (e.g. Ultra) will be quietest.2-bay because of fewer noise sources and 6-bay because of larger cooling fan, right?However with the NV+ v2 having an external PSU that will help reduce the cooling that is needed and help keep the noise down.Thanks, didn't thought of that. So the NV+ series should be more silent than an Ultra4.You can configure up to four Flex-RAID volumes and these can be RAID-0 volumes. On the Duo v2 and NV+ v2 you can select the JBOD option.So on an Ultra6, I would still have to deal with RAID.The OS is stored on the disks so I would think that the drives would still tend to spin down and up together even using Flex-RAID.Huh?How can you start a barebone NAS with brand new drives when the OS is on the disks? That should be in flash ROM...You really can't put the NAS anywhere else? You can't find a place (e.g. the garage - of course you'd need a power point if there isn't one already) to put it and get a cabler in to run an ethernet cable or two to the living room (or wherever you want it run to)?I am living in a small flat on 3rd floor of a large city house - there's no garage and I cannot run a cable to the cellar.My first harddrive (Mac II, 1988) was a 5.25" full height monster that sounded like a jet engine - today I barely hear the WD 2TB external USB drive sitting right behind my MacBook on the table. I would expect to not hear it at all if it were in a decent case with some noise isolation and not just in a cheap plastic box.Of course I would choose the drives for my NAS regarding their noise level, I don't care about speed as long as an HD movie plays seamlessly.

Silent NAS wanted | NETGEAR Communities

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fesh

Aspirant

Jan 30, 2012

PapaBear wrote:
OK, my question is what connection will there be between the NAS and the device playing the movie (AppleTV or whatever)?

PapaBear wrote:
OK, my question is what connection will there be between the NAS and the device playing the movie (AppleTV or whatever)?

I drilled a hole in the wall and ran some cables thru.

If you are planning wireless, I'm not sure that even Wireless N will have enough bandwidth to do it.

Right, not for HD. I used to use WLAN for streaming SD videos to my Macbook, but for HD you definitely need Cat5 or better.

In the same vein, you will have to have some device between the NAS and the receiver to play the music.

I was hoping the NAS could do that, with a simple Behringer U-Control UCA202 USB sound box attached to the USB2 port.
Or probably I just use my retired PowerBook G4 Titanium for that - just need to replace its (noisy) internal PATA disk with an IDE->CF adapter and install MacOS 10.5 with iTunes on a 8GB CF card (noiseless), hook it up to the NAS and just mount the music disk... At least then I can control it with my iPhone remotely.

I am also in the mind that either all the disks will be spun down or spun up together, not individually. I don't know of any box that will do that.

I've just got confirmation (usenet) that some Synology boxes do that. The poster only owned a 2-bay box (DS-211), so I don't know whether the 4-bay boxes will do it...

Also, the drives spinning up is NOT Wake On Lan, that term applies to a box that is physically turned off but then turns on and boots when accessed.

Hopefully it should NOT be turned off but only sleeping (fan off, processor off, RAM powered), and not boot (30-60 seconds) but only wake-up (2-3 seconds).
I would only allow booting if it takes less than 5 or at max. 10 seconds, otherwise I'll buy another box!

In Spin Down, the box is on and the fan is on. Only the drives are stopped. When you access the unit, even going into Frontview and accessing any section beyond the home page will do it, the drives spin up. The LCD panel will come on and say spinning up. My backup unit is set for spin down after 90 minutes so it is only up during the time it resyncs to my primary NAS during the wee hours of the morning.

Problem is that most bigger NAS boxes are only thought of for (small) business, where performance is important and saving power is not, while the home user is thought to use a 1-bay or at most a 2-bay NAS. But with some hundred movies in the collection plus movies plus TM backup, I definitely need at least 4 drives - but still want the NAS to be optimized for saving power and being silent and absolutely don't care about speed as long as it's fast enough for streaming 1 HD movie plus 1 Timemachine backup concurrently.

Spinning all 4 drives or only 1 should make quite some difference on the electricity bill. And be more quiet.

Netgear should wake up. I think every home user would want to save energy, and have less noise.

TeknoJnky
Hero
Jan 30, 2012
fesh wrote:
I think every home user would want to save energy, and have less noise.

Not me, I want FAST, CHEAP and Dependable!

Energy and noise are at the bottom of my list.

The only truely silent nas, is the one you build your self, with SSD drives and fanless cpu/motherboard.

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Silent NAS wanted

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