Meh, you got a spare kidney…

If the NAS is always making noise then it’s not parking the drives. Check the config - I’m not sure QNap does drive parking by defaut if at all. Fron what I’ve seen, they’re a Business Class solution first, consumer second (I have friends in the SMB space, QNAP has been a common solution for their clients), business doesn’t want drive parking.

I have an ancient Drobo that does parking and uses a large fan (so it can run at lower speeds, meaning quieter) - with 5 drives I don’t hear it over ambient room noise (the fridge is louder).

Give us some numbers on space. My NAS is 8TB that I keep 20% free (It complains with less free space and performance drops), my server has an 8TB data drive, with two 4TB externals attached. I replicate data from the server to each device on a rolling schedule for data redundancy, and also use a cloud backup for the important stuff (less than 1TB).

The point I’m trying to make is maybe you don’t need a RAID NAS right now if your critical data size is below available single-drive capacity, and may be better served by multiple drives and cloud backup. (Also, a NAS is still a single point of failure - RAID isn’t redundant data it’s redundant drives. Even with ZFS it’s still a single data store that can fail, which is why businesses still have backups of their RAID systems).

To paraphrase an old racing saying: quiet costs money son, how silent you want it to be? 🤪

Edit: Some links on QNAP drive spindown

https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/faq/article/why-cant-my-nas-drives-enter-standby-mode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7ItW76PyBw

Edit2: Even SSD is like 4-6x the cost of spinning disk per terabyte https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new%2Cused&capacity=8-8&disk_types=external_ssd%2Cinternal_ssd%2Cm2_ssd%2Cm2_nvme

I would definitely keep them warm, as in a running machine.

Drives on a shelf die more often than always-on drives.

I don’t even know what you’re saying at this point

Big time more expensive.

Who says college is better than no college?

What are your metrics?

Your questions are all binaries:simplistic, juvenile.

Like your question about dating and race: simplistic, bigoted and racist.

Careful, not all states have a castle doctrine, and really you don’t want the legal shitshow even in a Castle Doctrine state.

Better to deter than have to deal with that.

at an unrecoverable height

Ouch!

I’ve had way more USB C ports fail than micro, surprisingly, and that’s in perhaps a 5 year period vs 15 (and continuing) usage of micro.

I know C is supposed to be more robust, that just hasn’t been my experience.

My last phone was a 2017 model, I replaced it early 2025 with a Pixel 5. I have since bought 2 more Pixels (because they’re cheap) and keep one as a hot spare (boot it once a month to update) and one as a test bed.

I would involuntarily laugh at this.

“Clearly you don’t know my family, we’re like wolves. Yes, we’ll back you up, but we’ll also pounce on the weak so they either toughen up or die. Is that really what you want?”

I use a similar Dell Optiplex 7000 series.

It boots from the NVME, with an 8TB 3.5 disc for data, and a 500GB SD for my VMs. (Since spinning disks can idle much lower than SSD, getting my always-on VMs off the big drive lets it idle, with the SSD peak power being lower than the peak of spinning disk Adding the SSD increased net power slightly).

I use a splitter on the 12v power line for both of the drives. It’s fine.

This box only has an 80w power supply, and with both those drives hooked up it draws 20w at idle, and peaks at 70w when converting multiple videos simultaneously.

The manuall tells you what you can do without voiding the warranty.

Edit: Given it’s age, I’d pull the CPU cooler and replace the paste. It’s likely hardened by now. Mine was randomly rebooting because the cpu would overheat. Replaced the thermal paste and its been rock solid since.

I self host on a 5 year old Dell Optiplex Small Form Factor desktop.

I also have a Raspberry Pi, which has about 1/16 the performance of the desktop - Pi can be used for all sorts of stuff.

Get in line!

Yep.

My Pi is about 8 watts. Really hard to beat.

The SFF started at 12w, but swapping out the data drive for a much larger one pushed it up 5w. And now with 2 VMs always running (PiHole and a Windows VM), it hovers at 20w.

The ancient NAS (Drobo) sits at about 15w.

The LOVE of money.

The number one thing you can do, by orders of magnitude, is to start with power-friendly hardware.

For example, my previous server was an old gaming machine. It’s lowest idle power consumption was 80 watts. That was with running an OS that permitted heavy power reduction control, and enabling every power saving feature in the BIOS.

Compare that to my 2019 Dell Optiplex Small-Form-Factor desktop I’m running as a server. The power supply is rated for 80 watts, MAX. It idles at 20w, peaks at about 70w when converting multiple videos simultaneously. This with an 8 TB enterprise drive for data.

So 1/4 the power draw when idle, where it spends perhaps 90%+ of its time. Even things like Resilio Sync and Syncthing don’t significantly raise CPU time.

Streaming with Jellyfin or Mediamonkey have nearly no CPU impact.

There’s nothing in heavier hardware you could tune to get down to 20w.

Wheneth Someoneth addeth etheth to everyeth wordeth to speaketh medievaleth

That’s a GM car - both the color of the panel and design of the cranks are GM.

Yep.

Even if you aren’t religious (I’m not), I highly recommend reading the bible, and history since say the 1500’s.

Things were objectively MUCH worse prior to the 20th century.

Thief: Deadly Shadows