As always, I got the username wrong…
I don’t know, never tried anything like that, I just plug the fans to the 12v voltage rail and leave them full power all the time.
Maybe you can use the raspberry pi gpio to control the fan and get drive temperature via smart to control the fan speed.
I used to run my nas from a raspberry pi with an USB to Sata bridge, but I found that USB cables are as always super unreliable and keep disconnecting and eventually I get filesystem errors, had to format and restore from backup.
I ended up repurposing an old i3 computer as nas. Which worked well for few years until I was scrubbing the harddrives this summer and one of the harddrives died, when I took it off it was super hot. So I learned that having front fans blowing air directly to the hardrives is important so they don’t overheat. I’m not sure if external cases have enough air circulation.
So maybe you could consider the overall reliability of the system and temperature of the harddrive, electricity can be expensive but an 8TB harddrive surely is more. Also you say you want no fan, so that makes things harder, maybe you can use the raspberry pi just as a client and have a big noisy NAS made from some old computer somewhere else in the house? And maybe have it so it wakes up on LAN when it’s being used and powered down when it’s not to safe power?
OMG! I’ve been looking for something like this for quite some time!
I will try this as soon as I have time. Thank you!
Just tell them “I own my own private cloud” and then look smug.
Then I may tell them “this way the CIA (don’t say NSA, older people usually don’t know what NSA is, but they know CIA) or those capitalist companies can’t spy on me”
And I don’t find a need to go into more detail, at this point the conversation has either moved on or they say “but I have nothing to hide” and move on anyway.