The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Hamm3rhart on 2025-05-26 12:30:23.
Hello community,
I’m currently planning a DIY NAS. I have most of the parts lined up, but I’m still unsure which hard drives to pick. More space for less money is great, but I don’t want a helipad in my living room. And sadly i dont have a spare room or a basement i can place the server in, so only the kitchen, livingroom or bedroom. Not to mention the bathroom xD
Has anyone here had experience with how loud Seagate Exos drives get when they’re in a RAID set handling constant reads and writes? Is the noise unbearable, or would sound-proofing the case make sense? I would be sitting 2 m away from it on the couch. There are currently 7 external Seagate drives with 6TB each at the sameplace in a locker and the sound is hearable but not annoying or anything. For comparison if that helps.
Seagate IronWolf Pro 20 TB vs. Seagate Exos X24 24 TB
For context, the plan is to run Proxmox as the host with a TrueNAS VM on the following hardware:
- Case: Fractal Design Define 7 XL (Black Solid)
- PSU: Seasonic Prime TX-1600 (80 Plus Titanium, ATX 3.1, fully modular)
- Motherboard: ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE (LGA 1700, DDR5, PCIe 5.0/4.0, ECC-UDIMM support)
- CPU: Intel Core i5-14500 (14 cores / 20 threads, 65 W)
- CPU cooler: Noctua NH-U12S redux + NF-P12 redux-1700 PWM
- Memory: 2 × 32 GB DDR5-4800 ECC-UDIMM (64 GB total, 2 slots free for future expansion)
- Boot / VM drives: 2 × Kingston DC600ME 960 GB Enterprise SATA SSDs (PLP, 1 DWPD) – mirrored
- HBA: Broadcom / LSI 9305-16i (16-port SAS/SATA, PCIe 3.0 ×8, IT mode)
- HDDs:
- First batch (now): 8 × Seagate Exos X24 24 TB or Seagate IronWolf Pro 20 TB, RAIDz3
- Second batch (later): +8 matching drives to populate the remaining bays
- Network: Dual onboard 2.5 GbE (Intel I225-V) – 10 GbE NIC planned for a future upgrade
I’d love to hear about anyone’s real-world experience with these hard drives.