Meh, you got a spare kidney…

If the NAS is always making noise then it’s not parking the drives. Check the config - I’m not sure QNap does drive parking by defaut if at all. Fron what I’ve seen, they’re a Business Class solution first, consumer second (I have friends in the SMB space, QNAP has been a common solution for their clients), business doesn’t want drive parking.

I have an ancient Drobo that does parking and uses a large fan (so it can run at lower speeds, meaning quieter) - with 5 drives I don’t hear it over ambient room noise (the fridge is louder).

Give us some numbers on space. My NAS is 8TB that I keep 20% free (It complains with less free space and performance drops), my server has an 8TB data drive, with two 4TB externals attached. I replicate data from the server to each device on a rolling schedule for data redundancy, and also use a cloud backup for the important stuff (less than 1TB).

The point I’m trying to make is maybe you don’t need a RAID NAS right now if your critical data size is below available single-drive capacity, and may be better served by multiple drives and cloud backup. (Also, a NAS is still a single point of failure - RAID isn’t redundant data it’s redundant drives. Even with ZFS it’s still a single data store that can fail, which is why businesses still have backups of their RAID systems).

To paraphrase an old racing saying: quiet costs money son, how silent you want it to be? 🤪

Edit: Some links on QNAP drive spindown

https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/faq/article/why-cant-my-nas-drives-enter-standby-mode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7ItW76PyBw

Edit2: Even SSD is like 4-6x the cost of spinning disk per terabyte https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new%2Cused&capacity=8-8&disk_types=external_ssd%2Cinternal_ssd%2Cm2_ssd%2Cm2_nvme

I would definitely keep them warm, as in a running machine.

Drives on a shelf die more often than always-on drives.

I use a similar Dell Optiplex 7000 series.

It boots from the NVME, with an 8TB 3.5 disc for data, and a 500GB SD for my VMs. (Since spinning disks can idle much lower than SSD, getting my always-on VMs off the big drive lets it idle, with the SSD peak power being lower than the peak of spinning disk Adding the SSD increased net power slightly).

I use a splitter on the 12v power line for both of the drives. It’s fine.

This box only has an 80w power supply, and with both those drives hooked up it draws 20w at idle, and peaks at 70w when converting multiple videos simultaneously.

The manuall tells you what you can do without voiding the warranty.

Edit: Given it’s age, I’d pull the CPU cooler and replace the paste. It’s likely hardened by now. Mine was randomly rebooting because the cpu would overheat. Replaced the thermal paste and its been rock solid since.

I self host on a 5 year old Dell Optiplex Small Form Factor desktop.

I also have a Raspberry Pi, which has about 1/16 the performance of the desktop - Pi can be used for all sorts of stuff.

Yep.

My Pi is about 8 watts. Really hard to beat.

The SFF started at 12w, but swapping out the data drive for a much larger one pushed it up 5w. And now with 2 VMs always running (PiHole and a Windows VM), it hovers at 20w.

The ancient NAS (Drobo) sits at about 15w.

The number one thing you can do, by orders of magnitude, is to start with power-friendly hardware.

For example, my previous server was an old gaming machine. It’s lowest idle power consumption was 80 watts. That was with running an OS that permitted heavy power reduction control, and enabling every power saving feature in the BIOS.

Compare that to my 2019 Dell Optiplex Small-Form-Factor desktop I’m running as a server. The power supply is rated for 80 watts, MAX. It idles at 20w, peaks at about 70w when converting multiple videos simultaneously. This with an 8 TB enterprise drive for data.

So 1/4 the power draw when idle, where it spends perhaps 90%+ of its time. Even things like Resilio Sync and Syncthing don’t significantly raise CPU time.

Streaming with Jellyfin or Mediamonkey have nearly no CPU impact.

There’s nothing in heavier hardware you could tune to get down to 20w.

That’s not data redundancy - there’s still only one copy of your data.

Those are mitigations against loss of data due to loss of parity.

There’s still only ONE copy of your data.

Fine.

Pull 1 drive and see how redundant your data is while it’s resilvering.

RAID is NOT data redundancy. You still have a single copy of your data.

Tell me again how RAID is data redundancy?

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1987/CSD-87-391.html

RAID isn’t data redundancy, it’s an array of drives combined to form a single logical storage pool. It solves the problem of needing a single storage pool larger than the available drives. As such, it’s very sensitive to loss of a single drive.

At your storage size requirements (2 TB), RAID is unnecessary today.

Edit: Let me say it again for you downvoters-RAID is NOT data redundancy.

There is only ONE copy of your data in RAID (excepting mirroring). It’s why RAID now has double parity and hot spare drive capability.

RAID is for creating a single pool that’s larger than available drive size.

Go ahead and downvote in ignorance, and learn about data redundancy when your RAID fails.

RAID is NOT data redundancy - it’s DRIVE redundancy.

Take it from the source https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1987/CSD-87-391.html

Unless you need the super-compactness of a mini PC, the Small Form Factor is a significantly greater value.

You get more horsepower, more space, and better cooling.

And they tend to be very quiet. Mine only has some fan noise when converting video, and it’s always running 2-5 VM’s (mostly Windows).

I disagree with cold backup drives.

In my experience, cold drives fail more often than warm drives. This is why all my data replication is always warm.

All backup solutions should be regulator tested, otherwise you don’t know if you have a backup.

Others have mentioned backup, I’m going to reiterate that.

Backup, backup, backup.

I have an (old) NAS that frankly I don’t trust to not die. Then again, anything can die, so it’s just one component of my data duplication.

I also have my server which is authoritative for all data, which is then duplicated (on schedules) to the NAS and 2 external drives, so I have 4 local copies.

All mobile devices sync important data to my server.

Power

My NAS idles about 15w. It’s 5 drives, so honestly that’s quite low and tells us it spins down drives.

My server idles at 20w, using NVME as the boot drive, a large data drive, and an SSD for virtual machines. It’s power supply maxes at 80w (which it approaches when I’m converting videos with handbrake).

Before this my server was an old gaming desktop that idled around 100w.

So my server today is a 5 year old Small-Form-Factor Desktop that I picked up for $50. I paid more for the RAM I added. It has enough room internally for one 3.5" drive and the 2.5" SSD…

It’s also quiet - the CPU and power supply fans double as case fans.

Oh, agreed.

There’s some other stuff at play with the minis (shared family photos, backup to each other, etc) that I’m going to use as an enticement to get them to learn to use these tools.

Once they learn that, I can slip in some other things, piecemeal, depending on what each person clicks with.

To be fair, you’re talking about root - which is always tricky.

I run rooted Pixels, and so far updates haven’t been a problem.

So far…

OMV is an OS, and it’s a version of Ubuntu Debian.

Bold move, Cotton!

(Not really, Lineage updates are the most seamless I’ve ever seen).

Uggh, feel bad for them.

I’ve tried for years to get friends and family to have their data sit in a single point in the house and use backup services. That would be a massive improvement.

Family won’t listen, so I’m building minicomputers for them all that will handle it. Just have to configure their devices to store data there.

This started because one sibling asked about transferring photos from a phone, and I started documenting how to use Resilio and Syncthing.

I don’t do upgrades (well, not in the sense most people think of them).

My approach is that upgrades are too risky, things always break. It’s also why I don’t permit auto updates on anything. I’d rather do manual updates than dedicated time. Keeping things working is more important, and I have backups.

I run everything virtualized (as much as I can), so I can test upgrades by cloning a system and upgrading the clone. If that fails, I simply build a new system based on some templates I keep. Run in parallel, copy config and data as best I can, then migrate. Just migrated my Jellyfin setup this way.

This is a common methodology in enterprise, which virtualization makes a lot easier for us self hosters.

I haven’t had a disruption from updates/upgrades in 5 years.

Sync it to a cloud