Another Cool Box
Finally got around to installing the hard drive coolers that Fred was kind enough to get me and Cat5 was kind enough to drop off last week. After a little scare the other day when this server suddenly shut itself down and wouldn’t boot up without some coaxing (it seemed to freeze when doing stuff with the hard drives), and the hot weather we’ve been having already I decided it’s time to keep things a little cooler.
The devices are pretty cool themselves, a little fan unit that sits in the front of the case which attaches to two tongues which stick out from the provided hard drive side brackets. A bit of a pain to put in because I thought you just snapped the fan fronts into the case and then plugged them in, but oh well, the box needed to be brought off the floor to get rid of the dust anyway. I even manged to get it all flush! After all that there isn’t any (noticable) increase in fan noice and there is even the nifty bonus of green LEDs (see pic above, duh) to make your computer closet just a little brighter.
One of these days I really have to consolidated the 6 hard drives I have running in this system down to something a bit more reasonable 🙁
I think when I get a house I’m also going to set up a proper rack for myself. Even if it’s just a rack in name and I just use it to put computers and hubs on I think it’d make things so much better…
Looks to me like you need two more of those…
As for racks…They are cool, nifty and NOISY. Not something I’d recommend for a room you spend a lot of time in. From what I can see in the pictures you have as many exit fans as you can use…
Well, one front and one back only. I figured that with two fans interspacing them would help out, but probably eventually another two will be needed. Thanks for the info about racks though, I have never really used one that wasn’t in it’s own room. Are they noisy even just used as a holder for computers? Right now I have four around me and I don’t see it being any noisier when they are all stacked up on a rack in the corner…
Some racks have a fan on top to help get air in/out of the rack, but otherwise are quiet in themselves. Having a stack of rack-mounted servers, switches, UPSs, etc forcing air around can be real noisy. But just as a place to set computers and being able to cleanup cabling would be fine – you’d get used to the noise I think 🙂
Having doors & sides on the rack might dampen the noise somewhat…
I think the theory is that if you have your own house and more room, you could put it in a seperate closest/room, in a cool hidden corner of the basement, or some such?
I’ve setup some of those 2-4U systems (compaq, Intel, antec, etc and I can tell you when those fans fire up they are LOUD. Switches and such are normally ok, but I would recommend putting it into a closet if you can. If I ever built a house, I would have a central wire closet. Here I would have a rack and mount a firewall, switch, webserver and leave that all isolated there. Heck, even a file server. Then I would just patch (or use wireless) to the other computers through the house.
Traditionally there hasn’t been much of a concern for fan noise, especially on servers, but that may be changing.
Rack mount servers need lots of cooling though… a customer we installed a bunch of rack mount servers for had a bunch of them die because they procastinated on installing a proper A/C for the server 😛
I hadn’t really realized until you say it that way, but I guess that’s one reason I like using a laptop as my workstation. Much quieter then a noisy desktop case, quieter hard drives then noisy SCSI, and doesn’t generate as much heat overall. The firewall, switch, SCSI/SATA/RAID server, etc is upstairs in a storage/junk room. I SSH/VNC/RDP into other systems for most things anyways.