Silent server

BlueScreenTT

Explorer
Joined
Mar 26, 2018
Messages
69
Hi

i decided to rebuild my Supermicro build so i can actually have in the house.

the way forward is silent but also cool
these 2 things do not go hand in hand though :-(

I have 2 main questions

1: CPU cooler vertical or horizontal

2: push in air from the top or suck it out ?

i am going to install fans in the lid to either push in or suck our air or both.

i am thinking about cutting 2 holes center above the CPU coolers and then use a duct to get cool air to the CPU and then have maybe 4-6 fans spred out over the lid to such out the air

i want the air to go from the front via the HDD bays in to the main compartment of the chassis
i will scose off all extra vent holes with tape

i have one fan installed right above the LSI's blowing air in to cool them, or should i suck out and then have a duch under the fan to maximize the flow over the cards?

i have already installed 3X120 fans behind the Backplane but it is not enough

before i did anything to my chassis i had 42 C MAX and now i have 76 after 2 min of idle so i have to do something to cool my CPU's :-(

any thoughts ?
 

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SweetAndLow

Sweet'NASty
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Nov 6, 2013
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Those fans you have are not going to work. They are high air flow fans not static pressure. Any time you have to draw air through thing you need static pressure. To pull air through those hdd bays and backplane will require static pressure. If you want your cpu temps to go down you need to get the plastic shroud for that server or get a cpu cooler with a fan.

The loudest thing in that server even with the stock fans is the power supply. Unless you fat the quiet certain if the power supply.
 

Chris Moore

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May 2, 2015
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10,080
Wow. You really should not replace the factory fans in the Supermicro chassis. The engineers that design those things know what they are doing when it comes to keeping the drives cool, which is an important factor of why the fans are the way they are.
As for the CPUs, you will need to change from passive coolers to active (with fans) coolers

Take a look at this forum post :
ghetto acoustic by @jgreco
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...-mb-cpu-hds-recommendations.24453/post-255614

Most of the sound generated by the server is high pitched and easily muffled with sound deadening panels.
 

BlueScreenTT

Explorer
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Mar 26, 2018
Messages
69
yes but i am it sound is to high my other half dont accept me having it in the house so i have no choise

i am planing to get coolers with fans but i need to get the airflow through the disks
so i will get some static fans then
thanks
 

Chris Moore

Hall of Famer
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yes but i am it sound is to high my other half don't accept me having it in the house so i have no choise
Time to kick her out then. Tell her to find some place else to live.
i am planing to get coolers with fans but i need to get the airflow through the disks
so i will get some static fans then
thanks
getting enough airflow through the disk bay is the hard part. Do that and it is almost enough airflow to keep everything else cool. No need for all the cutting. I only use the mid chassis fan wall to move air front to back through the chassis and an active cooler on the CPU. Everything else handles itself from the airflow over the disks. The factory fans are great for static pressure, you just need to spin them a little slower to make them quiet.
 

Sjöhaga

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Apr 17, 2016
Messages
41
I have the SC846 chassie and while it is not yet completely filled with spinning disks the drives are making more noise than the backplane fans when working. The characteristics of the noise is different though and I would like to reduce some of the annoying frequencies a bit more. My chassie is unfortunately missing the fan duct over the motherboard that I think would make it possible to reduce the sound another db or 3 as it would make the cpu cooling more effective.

All the fans are controlled with the fan controller script found somewhere here on the forum and at the moment I am not able to get the fans to go lower than 2000 rpm even though I would like to lower them a little bit more to reduce the cooling.

In the beginning I also did consider to exchange the fans but I soon realized that during the summer I was very likely going to need the full power of the standard fans :).

The total noise level is quite acceptable (by my standards), but not something I would want to have close to my bedroom or the living room.
 

BlueScreenTT

Explorer
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Mar 26, 2018
Messages
69
yea i have the server in the "krypvind"/attic and at night it can be heard all over the house :-( 2 of the kids have their beds right up against the wall where the server is
and there is no way i can move it out to the garage there is to much moisture and condensation there (-25 in the winter) so i have to fix this some how.

maybe build a dry serverrack/room in the garrage ?
but then again what is cheapest :smile:
 

Sjöhaga

Dabbler
Joined
Apr 17, 2016
Messages
41
Not sure how many disks you have, but if it is 12 or less I would actually suggest to use another chassis where the drives are not stacked so tight. That reduces the need for the high pressure fans.
I have a cooler master stacker (the first version), and with the front 140 mm fans replaced with noctuas, a semi passive PSU and a fan controller that box is so silent that from two meters away it is not possible to hear if it is on or not, and that is with ten spinning drives inside.
 

BlueScreenTT

Explorer
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Mar 26, 2018
Messages
69
at the moment i have 16 disks i plan to install
and i am going to fill it up in the future

how ever it might take some time because i dont want any more craches so i am testing the RAM, CPU and mobo at the moment to find the problem i had earlier

yes it is a nice fan but then i am at that crappy sound level again :-(
and the static pressure on that one is les than 1/3 of the smal original fans so that is no good :-(
 

SweetAndLow

Sweet'NASty
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Nov 6, 2013
Messages
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I own those fans and they are just as lound as the supermicro fans. When you want higher static pressure you always end up with more noise.

yea i have the server in the "krypvind"/attic and at night it can be heard all over the house :-( 2 of the kids have their beds right up against the wall where the server is
and there is no way i can move it out to the garage there is to much moisture and condensation there (-25 in the winter) so i have to fix this some how.

maybe build a dry serverrack/room in the garrage ?
but then again what is cheapest :)
How much moisture? Moisture isn't really a big problem for computers unless it's like dripping wet. Having the server in an attic during the summer will melt the drives so be careful of that. I kept my server in the unconditioned crawl space under the house for 2 years. it's just dirt under there and it was perfectly happy and I would actually do it again if I got the chance. Temps stayed nice and low, sometimes too low. HDD's got down to 19c which is to cold for them.
 

BlueScreenTT

Explorer
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Mar 26, 2018
Messages
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so normaly we have between -10 to-40 C / -40 F during the winter (4-6 month) and +30-35 C / 86 F in the summer.

At the moment there is condensation collection on the surface of the freezer i have in my garage
and also i am not sure i can place my server in -25 during operation

i had the server in the attic this summer and it was super hot outside but it was stable at 45C so not a huge problem

Under the house could be a idea if it was not for the fact that there are mice and other rodents there and also -25C during the winter
but thanks for the input :smile:
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
so yea i am ****ed :-(
the airflow is no problem but the static i don't see how to do that and go silent at the same time

You don't. The process of consuming energy to create pressure with fans is just a noisy business.


The main problem with hobbyist grade fans is that they tend to die after a year or two of abuse. The industrial grade fans that Supermicro uses tend to last a really long time. Noctua can call their fans "industrial" but it doesn't really make it so. There are a number of good, high quality fan manufacturers out there with actual real-world runtimes that are crazy.

Placing fans in the top of your 4U chassis isn't going to be helpful because that isn't where the heat problems are. You need the forced air to move past the drives, which are the most heat-sensitive components in a NAS. So your options are to go with the as-designed/as-engineered solution, or find some way to increase airflow by the drives to remove heat. There's also a nonviable option of doing some random thing that allows your drives to bake.

So here are your realistic options. These options will work well.

1) Leave it alone and let it be noisy. Possibly try to muffle the noise by placing some remediation as @Chris Moore describes above.

2) For a 24 bay chassis, populate 12 drives, leaving every other row empty. You may then replace the bulkhead fans safely with high airflow low noise fans, with the caveat that you'll likely need to replace them sooner than would otherwise be normal. If you do this, make sure you make it impossible to add drives in the future to the bays being used for airflow, else you'll have a drive bake.

3) Skip the 4-drive-wide chassis and move to a tower where you can guarantee airflow past each drive.
 

garm

Wizard
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Aug 19, 2017
Messages
1,555
I get the quality issue with DIY gear in general, and the real world limitations on airflow and noise. Having said that, the engineers working on data center gear dosent care about noise at all. It’s not in the project specification and doing anything about it is expensive. Even if you do get the noise of the fan down, you still have the airflow in the case to consider.
 

Yorick

Wizard
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Nov 4, 2018
Messages
1,912
So here's a thought: Rethink the case entirely? Fractal Define R6 can hold 11, possibly even 12 drives, with extra drive brackets, and is built for silent running. Is 16 drives a "nice to have" or an absolute must for your application? That is, do you need the IOPS of a bunch of smaller vdevs, or could you go with bigger and fewer drives?

To put that in perspective, I decided to go with a tiny amount of drives: 5 in a raidz2, with a maximum of 8 that will fit in the chassis, a Node 804. This gives me 20.7 -ish TiB usable, expandable to roughly twice that with another 3 drives if/when raidz expansion hits. IOPS are that of a single (5400rpm) drive, so nothing to get excited about - and, all I am doing with it is backup storage and Plex, so I don't need IOPS. Drives are gloriously affordable at USD 150 per 8TB "HGST HE8 whitelabel 5400rpm".
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
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May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
I get the quality issue with DIY gear in general, and the real world limitations on airflow and noise. Having said that, the engineers working on data center gear dosent care about noise at all. It’s not in the project specification and doing anything about it is expensive. Even if you do get the noise of the fan down, you still have the airflow in the case to consider.

Not quite correct. This started to go off the rails in the mid-2000's when some manufacturers discovered that you could just barely squeeze four drives wide into a 19" rack form factor. This combined nicely with a desire to increase density in the data center, and both of these are tied to cooling capacity. Suddenly we started seeing lots of dual- or quad-CPU in 1U servers. This led to all sorts of weird, because data centers are built around power density. Both electrical supply and cooling are inexorably intertwined. In the '90's, we planned for a peak of about 500W/ft^2 or 1.92kW per rack, but we're now headed into an era where it looks like 20kW per rack may become a common thing.

In the '90's, lots of servers were really more like an ATX midtower chassis turned on side with rack ears added, and these were very pleasant and could be very quiet. Some of this still lives on to this day, take a look at the Supermicro SYS-7048A-T which is a convertible deskside/4U "whisper quiet" workstation unit.

The big trick here is that if you want quiet, you need to engineer for quiet. That means not creating a chassis where air is forced using significant pressure differential. Modern server equipment began diverging from "standard ATX in a sideways can" years ago, so most of the gear destined for data center has become ever more specialized and aimed squarely at the data center. In that sense, yes, engineers care less about noise than about density, but it's still perfectly possible to find, or make, rackmount gear that is noise-optimized.
 

Redcoat

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