ReadyNAS NV Loudness?

[earthbased]

Can anyone speculate how loud a ReadyNAS with 4x500GB drives in it would be? Does it have to be in an isolated room from the listening room?

TIA,
EB

[Heuer]

Yes it does need to be in a separate room, or preferably a separate building!

Three sources of noise - main fan, PSU fan (high pitched) and disks. You can enable disk spin down when not in use and the fans are temp controlled but the unit is more noisy than a fast Dell PC or an air-con unit. Best bet is to put it in an attic, basement our outbuilding. If you want quiet then go for the Qnap which is almost totally silent. I have both and the Qnap is sitting next to me on my desk, the 2Tb NV is in a utility room where it competes with a large fridge freezer and washing machine.

[egd]

I agree with Heuer, the NV is rather noisy. I definitely wouldn't put it in the listening room. A simple solution is to put the NV in another room where noise is not an issue and to use Ethernet over Power adapters to get the NV to integrate into your network, thereby accessible from a PC or directly via an SBx - beats the hell out of wireless.

[glen]

While the ReadyNas isn't quiet, I think the statements about its noise are overblown. I expected mine to be louder. It's not bad. I wouldn't have a problem sitting it next to my PC, but probably not in a listening room.

I located mine in a shelf in my basement utility closet along with my cable modem, switch, wireless router. Then I ran ethernet up through the floor to my listening room. The wireless router even extends to the whole house. I understand it's not an option for apt. dwellers, but there's no need for the NAS to be anywhere near the squeezebox.

[Heuer]

Actually you only realise how noisy the NV is when you switch it off. Did some sound level readings using a digital SLM.

Dell PC - 40db
Self contained Air-con unit on Full - 52db
Maytag Fridge/Freezer - 53db
ReadyNAS NV running - 58db

Not strictly empirical as the NV is in a different room but should give you some idea of scale.

'A' weighting, measured at 1 metre from source, max hold.

[earthbased]

Yes it does need to be in a separate room, or preferably a separate building!

Three sources of noise - main fan, PSU fan (high pitched) and disks. You can enable disk spin down when not in use and the fans are temp controlled but the unit is more noisy than a fast Dell PC or an air-con unit. Best bet is to put it in an attic, basement our outbuilding. If you want quiet then go for the Qnap which is almost totally silent. I have both and the Qnap is sitting next to me on my desk, the 2Tb NV is in a utility room where it competes with a large fridge freezer and washing machine.

Are you talking about the QNAP TS101 or the 401?

[Heuer]

TS-101. The TS-401 has fans and multiple disks whereas the TS-101 has a single disk and uses its cast alloy case as a heat sink - hence no noise.

[funkstar]

I wouldn't agree with no noise from the TS-101. I can hear the disk in mine spinning and accessing when it gets to a new track or i hit the menus. I have a 500gig Maxtor drive in there, some of the others drives they use might be better.

[Heuer]

Agree with you but it is relatively quiet, not much noisier than a TiVo, CD or DVD player. If it was in the same room as the music I doubt you would notice it and once it goes to 'sleep' it is almost totally silent.

One of the things to check is the HD has been set to run in quiet mode - you can do this with HD manufacture's HD Utility programme downloadable from their web site. Copy this to a bootable MS-DOS floppy, stick the HD in a PC and run the utility, select quiet and re-install in the Qnap.

I have done this using UtilDisk with Samsung disks in my TiVo's and Paul said he was using Powermax to set up the TS-101's but he may have overlooked some.