Hello ! I have a custom build NAS currently using 4x6TB hard drives in RAID10. I am looking for a capacity upgrade. My main focus are low power consumption and low noise (the NAS is in my living room / home office).

I can’t seem to find any 5400RPM HDD over 8TB in capacity anywhere. Is there any model with 10, 12 or more TB in existence ? If not, what could be the reasons ?

  • Björn TantauEnglish
    2•8 months ago

    Can’t you just slow them down? I remember doing that with a home theatre PC. I configured it with hdparm to go to sleep very quickly and not run very fast because the movies I watched didn’t need much throughput.

    • SynapseOPEnglish
      2•8 months ago

      I already have spin-down setup, I can definitely tell when they are spinning up, especially the 7200rpm one. I don’t think it is possible to slow-down the rotation speed of the hard disks, I believe they are just designed to operate at a given speed.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•8 months ago

        Are you running these in a NAS or PC case? I have a Fractal Design R6 case and it is nearly silent even with 9 HDDs running inside of it because they added a bunch of soundproofing inside.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•8 months ago

      Putting hard drives to sleep when not in use can akso drastically decrease power consumption. But for that to work, the OS cannot be on there and things that potentially get accessed rather often neither.

      Want to improve my system by doing exactly that and spinning the hard drives only up, if one watches a movie from plex. Nextcloud is on a ssd and should not make any problems anymore :)

      • Björn TantauEnglish
        1•8 months ago

        If I recall correctly I only had to put /var/log and maybe /var/run into a ram disc. And I think I did automatic updates at night.

      • Björn TantauEnglish
        2•8 months ago

        It wasn’t so bad that it would sleep while watching a movie. But it didn’t take long to power down after we were done. It was totally noiseless while not in use. And while watching a movie or recording one it was still very quiet.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•8 months ago

        My old Dell Optiplex would spin the drives up and then shut them off in a constant cycle and it drove me bonkers. I agree a consistent noise is better than no noise some of the time.