At the moment i am using the beta to check if the harddrives are up to snuff. After a complete hardware burn in i will decide what version of FreeBSD will be installed, most likely it will be the beta though since i still need to relearn alot. By the time i am, once again, semi-fluent in *nix the beta most likely won't be beta anymore.
Anyways, if anyone cares about what to expect from this kind of hardware in terms of temperatures; while doing
smartctl -t long /dev/adaN on all six drives as well as molesting the CPU with
for i in 1 2 3 4; do while : ; do : ; done & done (no hyperthreading so "only" 4 cores available) my CPU temperature will max out at 75°C while the CPU fan (seriously haphazardly "mounted" by simply standing the fan's rubber mounts on top of the heat sink's screws) spins up to 2100RPM. When i kill the molesting processes the CPU temperature goes back to 50°C and the fan settles at 1400RPM.
The harddrives temperatures vary between 35°C and 39°C and this is with the case fans running at medium speed and the tests are ~80% done. I made a script that polls the temperature of the drives and displays an up to date reading that i plan to run while doing the long tests as well as the
badblocks -b 4096 -ws /dev/adaN test. If that test results in higher temperatures there is always the high speed setting on the case fans to use. If that fails there is always the option of placing the computer in a well ventilated area (i know, it should always be in a well ventilated area but the only spare network cables lack of length forced the issue).
Image of trends showing temperatures rising and falling when the CPU goes from ~0% to 100% to ~0% load:
A snapshot of temperature of the harddrives:
