Thanks, I know, I'm not new to the game. I just had prioritize absolute silence over cost/performance, since I live in 30 m2 and I can't stand the otherwise sweet buzzing of HDDs. I need absolute silence to be able to sleep, so I bought four 4TB Samsung 870 EVOs.

I am however planning to build an HDD rack with a RPi, which I then intend to keep in one of my closets in order to isolate the sound. For now, I have cages for eight. :)

[–] TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Nice! I totally get it. Just some advice: if you build something for in your closet, make sure it stands on thick rubber feet / mat. Or make a cage suspend from elastic binders. Anything to avoid the vibrations to go into the wood/metal of the closet.

It's how I have my NAS, also in a closet (next to Tom Cruise)

Some sound isolation pads (soft foam with pointy bits) around it are also an option. Just make sure it gets enough air for cooling. If you need more fresh air from outside, use the silent Noctua fans, they have less air displacement but really are very silent.

[–] emotional_soup_88@programming.dev 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Wow! Thanks for all the great advice! :D

Now I just need to figure out:

shall I drill a hole in the bottom of the closet for the Ethernet and power cables?
can I power the HDDs with a "detached" PSU that was originally meant to have inside a chassi? But then, the Pi doesn't have SATA connectors... But maybe I can find some extension card than goes on top of the GPIO pins? 🤔

[–] TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

There's a raspi nas card so you can make a raspi a NAS with a lot of sata ports, like 8 or something! It's called pinas or something. I found a tutorial for creating your own raspi nas but it's not with the sata card I saw before... Here's a link :) When you search for "convert raspberry pi into nas" you will find a lot of tutorials and tips.

I'm at a Christmas party with friends so I'm not going to search dive to find the thing I saw right now, but know there's a sata expansion card for a raspi, I hope you can find what you are looking for!

Making a hole in your closet is something I can recommend, I'm autistic, I love cable management. But if it's an antiques cabinet I wouldn't do it. Also, if it's Ikea or something similar (laminated pressed wood fibers), when you make a hole you break the seal in the top layer so moisture can get in. This can lead to mold in the pressed wood fibers. When your house isn't cold during the winter and moisture free, it's not a big issue. Just add small planks on top and the bottom with clamps when making the hole and drill through that, otherwise it will splinter and get ugly. If it's solid wood, I would definitely make a hole to make the cables invisible.

[–] emotional_soup_88@programming.dev 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you sir and I wish you a very Merry Christmas! :)

[–] TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 hours ago

You too! Good luck with your project!

[–] sefra1@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Just suspend overnight, it's what I do when drives or fans annoy me.

[–] emotional_soup_88@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago

That's also a good idea, but I want to seed 24/7 🙃

[–] curious_dolphin@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's pretty dope. Would you mind posting a photo or two of your 4xSSD setup? Also, what are they hooked up to, a mini PC?

[–] emotional_soup_88@programming.dev 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

Nope, they are hooked up to my retired gaming rig xD retired because my physical health makes it hard to sit in front of the PC and game 😭 poor RTX 3080 just sitting there...

Anyway, here you go! There is room for five more 2.5 inch SSDs in the back. I've even seen somebody mod this chassi to hold 22 HDDs he he.

Oh, and the software part: 4 x 4TB drives made into one 16TB logical volume with LVM, on top off which there is a LUKS container for whenever my home is raided (not that encryption helps legally speaking, unless you have plausible deniability...). I figured I don't need redundancy with SSDs and none of the data is really anything that I couldn't just torrent again. Maybe I'll do an offline backup of them down the road.

[–] curious_dolphin@slrpnk.net 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Regarding encryption, I'm no lawyer, but I always figure if I were ever wanted by the authorities, it would at least give me a choice whether or not to comply. On the other hand, anything that's not encrypted may as well already be compromised. The other thing encryption buys you is peace of mind if and when you ever sell those drives on the secondary market.

[–] emotional_soup_88@programming.dev 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the valuable input! :)

I always encrypt all my drives - external or internal - because at the very least, I have nothing to loose with today's computing power. The overhead isn't noticeable for me once the drives are decrypted, which takes two seconds with my Ryzen 5800 x3d.

Regarding what you said specifically about the peace of mind that it gives me if and when I were to sell the drives: YES. encryption can even be used as a method of securely ~~wiping~~ scrambling content.

[–] curious_dolphin@slrpnk.net 2 points 7 hours ago

Yup, and for SSDs specifically, I've read online that once you've stored info on the device unencrypted, then down the road you use a software tool like shred, there's no way to guarantee nothing is left in the clear because of wear leveling, so it's best to always encrypt them before we start storing anything on them.