Silent/Quiet 6 drive NAS setup?

  • I may be moving into a different arrangement soon where having a loud SuperMicro rackmount will get me eviscerated. I'm currently trying to figure out the best way to turn this into a silent server that will fulfill my needs. The current box has 6 hot swap HDDs, 42gb of RAM, and 4 quad core Xeons in a giant SuperMicro board. What are my options of turning this into a quiet system? Are there Mini ITX or ITX cases out there that are designed to be quiet with corresponding motherboards that support that huge amount of RAM (it's mostly the RAM that I'm interested in)?


    What about building it into a more standard case but moving the disks into some kind of ESATA enclosure? Does anyone have experience building large, quiet NASes?

  • yeah they always call out loud oh for what you are using it but they don't think and know that you need allot of ram with some raids and file systems. frankly even if you have hundreds of connections you need alot of ram.


    Now back to you ikogan: Well if you have enough space you can use silent mats but I think best would be to change the fans. They make the most noise and there it will be difficult. Or you buy a new rack server
    which is silent already. Then you just have to move the mainboard and rest. And with fans i also mean the one which is in the power supplies.


    My openmediavault server is at my home as i have a 1gb/1gb (fiber connection) so i used a Nanoxia Deep Silence 2 (Midi Tower), supermicro mainboard, 16GB RAM, 6HDs and another one for system. The system hd is
    connected to the onboard usb slot on the mainboard. The server runs fine since month. If you like to know more you can just ask. I wanted to use ZSF as well but I think i will first buy a good raid controller. at the moment
    its the onboard. with the new raidcontroller i want to buy 6x 2GB or 3GB harddisks.

  • I might look into the deep silences. The problem isn't so much the case fans but the PSUs. The box has dual 1000W redundant hot swap PSUs with tiny fans. Those are the loud ones. They're even on (though slower) when the machine is powered off! The SuperMicro motherboard is pretty huge, so I'm worried about other cases and I would really like to have hot swapping support. I'm assuming the Deep Silence doesn't come with any kind of hostswap backplane?


    Edit: Do not use ZFS with a hardware raid controller, it won't provide any benefit and will usually cause problems. You want ZFS to have native, direct access to the disks as that's what it's designed for. http://serverfault.com/questio…ctices-with-hardware-raid

  • I have an ASRock µATX motherboard with an AMD A8-7600 processor; the board supports up to 32GB RAM, and although the manual says "non-ECC" it seems quite happy with the unbuffered ECC I put in it -- I'm guessing this is due to the memory controller being on the APU rather than on the board (the "non-ECC" is probably just CYA by ASRock because some lower end AMD APUs don't support ECC).


    I picked the A8-7600 because it's got 65W TDP vs 95W for most other high end AMDs; I think they recently released or will soon release a next-gen A-series APU that's faster but still maintains the 65W TDP. On top of it I put a Corsair H60 liquid cooling kit whose radiator I just tacked on to one of the case fans, so there's no additional noise for the processor cooling. The motherboard also has a setting to lower the target TDP to 45W if you really need cool and quiet (I'm assuming this comes at the expense of processing power). Crank down the shared memory to 32MB (onboard video doesn't need any more than the minimum to run a Debian shell :P)


    Assuming your drives are SATA and not something more enterprise-grade, the board also sports 8 on-board SATA ports, minimizing your need for addon cards. The one caveat is that you'll need a PCIe card that OMV recognizes, because I couldn't convince it to recognize the onboard Atheros AR8171 during install... an Intel X520-DA2 did the trick though.


    For the case I used a Fractal Design Node 804; it's a nice cube-shaped case that, while a bit on the bulky side, could blend in nicely to a home entertainment center. It also sports room for 10 3.5" HDDs and 2 2.5" SSDs; eight of the HDDs fit in the racks behind the mobo, and two more can be mounted in the bottom of the case (or you can mount two additional 2.5" SSDs here instead). The two SSDs actually slip into special slots inside the front panel of the case.


    When I have a bit of time today I will post the complete specs and some pictures of my build... but I was targeting quiet and I think I met that target nicely -- when the CPU and all eight drives I installed were cranking away during the RAID build, I could barely hear the box over the air purifier a few feet away and even then it was only the soft noise of the disks (it took me a minute to identify the sound and verify that it was indeed coming from the box).

  • Maybe im to late but still :)


    I bought the Nanoxia Deep Silence 5 Rev.B (Big Tower, Schwarz, 55cm hight), which has space for about 11 HDs (prebuild you dont have to buy anything additional). An Intel Core i3 4360 BOX (LGA 1150, 3.70GHz), with Super Micro X10SLM-F (LGA 1150, Intel C224, mATX) and fitting 16GB ECC RAM. The PC is almost silent and constant temp between 35-45° Celsius (2 or 3x120mm fans and the fan of the cpu).


    Why do you have to give up the hot swap? You only need a controller which is able to do hot swap and the right case for it.

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