Hiya,
I have a bit of a dilemma with my DIY NAS rig. I thought I was being clever by getting the cheapest 8TB seagates in existence for a RAIDZ1 pool, but I have to conclude they're Fucking Noisy^TM^. I'm very sensitive to the noise, unable to relocate the rig further away from my sleeping space and I never need the spinning drives at night anyway.
I run Proxmox with the drives passed through to a TrueNAS VM. I'm willing to turn this setup upside down to get a super convenient way to put the drives to sleep and wake them up exactly when I want to. Heck, I'll write my own webapp to do it if I need to, but I rather ask around first because this has to be a reoccurring thing.
I know it's possible to put drives to sleep with Linux. I know it reduces their lifespan and I don't care, I need to sleep. :) I'm unsure how exactly it should be done when the drives are passed through to a VM.
Do you put your drives to sleep? What tricks have you used to achieve this conveniently? Let me know!
E: Should have clarified, but there are other, SSD-backed services on the same machine that need to stay online regardless of what is going on with the spinning drives.
E2: Thanks all! Ended up dismantling the VM disk passthrough setup and going with hd-idle for now. It does what it says on the tin and even works nicely together with smartmontools even though it warned against it. Still need to setup network shares via LXC and recreate all the snapshot tasks I had going on in TrueNAS. But that's non-urgent. I may well also look into better insulation soon, the case is indeed not ideal as it is right now.
Does your setup have any way to do noise insulation? I suspect the answer is no but figured I'd throw it out there, surprisingly noise insulation helps more than you'd think. I have a bunch of drives inside a desktop case with insulation panels built in and the drives themselves are in there with rubber anti vibration screws/mounts. Barely ever hear anything from the drives (granted my WD Reds are probably quieter than your current Seagates).
Just something to think on whether it's an option for your current NAS rig or a future configuration.
I saw some guys years ago doing this for a small generator. They took a sheet of insulation foam and made a box around the box. Just a single baffle in the front and a baffle in the back drop the noise by something like 6 dB.
I'll consider this!
I found with my QNAP NAS that even just sitting the case on a piece of styrofoam made it considerably quieter. A lot of vibration gets transmitted through the feet and whatever it sits on gets turned into a sounding board.
i have an old wood desk at the office. it just resonates and amplifies noise when i set a desktop form factor external hdd (with its attached rubber feet) on it. it now sits on a couple old-school foam rubber mouse mats.