Post pictures of your storagenode rig(s)

What about that sound damper material? it’s worth to try?

If you like the look, or like tinkering, then sure, give it a try.

It’s not around my disks, and at this point, they are the most noisy part of the machine. I consider that a great success, but my life would have been ruined without it :slight_smile:

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My case have space for some kind of material like this and unfortunately the rack will live in the living room, i’m looking for the quietest posible

It all boils down to budget. This is the order I’d look to upgrade in

  • SSDs > HDDs
  • Fans
  • Fan RPM curves
  • Larger heatsinks
  • Additional sound dampening.

Putting your rack in another room will be infinitely more better at removing noise from your living room, than foam will :slight_smile:

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The rack use will be mostly storj, SSDs it’s a waste and not viable, i’m playing fan curves with a fun hub and thinking to replace with better and quietter fans. I’m considering the redux version of noctua, it’s like a medium tier of their top notch fans. The cpu heatsink is stock ryzen one and the cpu is underclocked and undervolted, the fan is mostly idle and barely audible

I know the definitive solution is putting the rack in their own room but is not posible for now

Synology locks down the NAS 2025 lineup to only support their drives. So take note if you planning a new node on these machines with any other drive brands.

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Isn’t that just for their 25 Plus series and higher? (and not on SSDs?). It’s not a great decision either way :frowning:

Let me tell you something about Synology.

It used to be a technology company. They would innovate left and right, for example, plumbing the bit-rot recovery though madam and Lvm was one of such innovations they did back in DMS6.1. The whole system design was quite innovative – to accomplish so munch in a tiny form factor and low power.

If you had an issue – engineering support from Taiwan would jump on and debug it to shit, it was a pleasure to deal with them. You felt they genuinely wanted to help and fix issues. I know, I reported vast number of reproducible bugs, and even received a personal thank you note from a higher up at Synology “for helping make our product better”. Not bragging lol, just to illustrate sheer amount of issues and frustration I had dealing with those retched machines.

However since then synology began transformation into marketing company. Of course, there was always marketing component to it , handled by the separate team, that kept promising that you can replace Dropbox, MS Office, Plex, AWS and what not with just one box – by the time people realize the wickedness of that promise they would have already bough the box, and they were getting all that software crap for free so can’t really complain. They would just not use the value add software trash and use nas as a well, nas. But it did its job to sway prospective customers towards synology.

Today nothing of that original core design team is left, synology is entirely marketing company. Few examples (I posted some of it on Reddit years ago, reusing some of the content here to save typing)

Harwdare enshittification

Let’s take ds916+ or 218+, does not matter; the one in the series that started using intel SoC for a first time. A new product. Synology wants people to start buying it so it adds good features, sets reasonable price and of course gets happy customers. These devices sell for 2 years like hot cakes.

But this is a storage device. Hard drive technology does not and will not make a leap anytime soon and likely ever. Hard drives don’t become faster. Gigabit lan in 1900 also performs exactly the same as in 2010. Its very hard to innovate in this space – how do you improve on already impressive device that just works to release a new one in two years?

Two things happen. Synology spent that two years optimizing their design to deliver the same performance at lower cost. Aka cutting corners. Removing dust door. That’s a lot of plastic. Device is noisier now, but hey, they saved $1. Using worse, slower, but newer (new is good, right?) CPU that only on paper sounds better - but hey, you can do 4k transcode in real time now (who cares?) but UI performance and everything else will tank a bit because it has way smaller L2 cache (never mind that, most people blinded by shiny apps would not notice). And look, we have spare PCIE lanes — let’s solder on m2 connector and give people SSD cache: a killer feature. Never mind that it hangs and resets diskstation and causes data loss; It sounds cool and helpful. More on that later.

In the meantime intel does the same with their consumer grade SOC — cutting costs and adding gimmicks.

And the next two years pass. People are still buying this crap, how about we refresh the model — folks like new fresh products and they think storage device spoil in two years so they excitedly wait for a new model and postpone purchase in anticipation.

So, they take fresher and crappier intel SoC, and make another marginally different, slightly faster in some, and slower in other tasks, design. But wait — why do we have this memory connector here that cost us $.50 on the pcb? Most people don’t upgrade ram. Gone. Just saved .50 on a on connector. Another $2.00 saved on the preinstalled memory stick they source from neighbor next door ADATA. Instead, they can slap Synology sticker and sell at 4x markup. Win-win. (but that memory is specifically designed for synology devices! Sticker says so! It’s specifically designed for the off-the-shelf CPU synology put there, yes, indeed, as it is for all the other processors on the planet that require this range of timings)

SSD cache, memory, and marketing.

The issue I mentioned above I was hitting was about the SSD cache timing out and resetting this device. That was reliably reproducing with the SSD sticks from their compatibility device list. So engineering jumped on it to debug. They spent about four weeks remotely messing with my nas, because they could not reproduce the issue in-house. They even sent me a new nas at some point – but the issue persisted. The outcome – PCIE transaction stall caused by NVME timeout, when the disk runs out of space and needs to do maintenance mid-write. So the problem was two fold – allocating full disk for cache by default, and using shitty drives that exhibit this PCIE stall behavior. Synology bought me new sticks of a different brand and model, I ship mine to Taiwan to their lab, and that was that. (they did not bother to remove the original ones from the list of approved devices on the web site though, but I did the job of good samaritan telling people on reddit what is the culprit of their devices rebooting for apparently no reason)

Some time passes they release Synology branded SSD sticks specifically designed for caching! Oh wow how nice. Looking closely, you realize those are even shittier sticks, but heavily over provisioned, and write rate-limited – thus avoiding the issue they were seeing on my device. Is not that ingenious? They could have solved it in software (don’t allocate full disk and write limit transactions) but no, instead they took an opportunity to sell you more overpriced garbage.

And everything went downhill from there.

So, sell that garbage if you have it, dont’ buy it if you don’t, get old-ish enterprise hardware and use something like TrueNAS.

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I made video on fan noise in Synology Rack Mount.

You can hear StorJ HDD click happily throughout.

Rack Mount Synology Fan Sound comparison [Stock vs Noctua vs Arctic]

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they really want to lose customers right… well… i hated them anyway.