BUILD Supermicro 825TQ Noise

[RemyZ]

I ordered the case from Ebay and it comes with 3 "San Ace 80" case fans. What is the best alternatives for better case fans for noise reduction???

 

[RemyZ]

The fans used in the case are 80mm 6300 RPM PWM fans
Looks like the dimensions I should be looking for are 80X38 MM.
Let me know if anyone has a good brand in mind.

 

[Ericloewe]

You don't want "quieter" fans unless you feel like cooking your drives.

Sanyo Denki is pretty much as good as it gets. PWM should keep things mostly bearable.

 

[RemyZ]

I am thinking of going with these fans
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA4TZ2TA1043

 

[RemyZ]

You don't want "quieter" fans unless you feel like cooking your drives.

Sanyo Denki is pretty much as good as it gets. PWM should keep things mostly bearable.

Ok i was monitoring it on inital bootup so your saying it should go down with PWM once its built and on idle. Good to Know

 

[TheKiwi]

They won't work well. These racked cases need extremely powerful fans to cool well, that's just how rack cases work. Any quieter desktop fan won't have the airflow or the pressure to cool that case properly.

If you wanted a quiet case, you picked wrong.

 

[RemyZ]

Alright I guess not a biggie for now. Will continue to move on since the noise was on bootup and didn't monitor it being on idle.

 

[Dice]

I am thinking of going with these fans
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA4TZ2TA1043

That is a big no-no to any case design where there is a lot of flow obstruction.
The reason is that the fan's flow (amount of moved air) dramatically decreases when there are flow restrictions are introduced. For example, the tiny spaces between drives in the front of a 24 bah hotswap case. In other words, very little air gets moved once counter pressure is built up.
Cheers /

 

[jgreco]

I ordered the case from Ebay and it comes with 3 "San Ace 80" case fans. What is the best alternatives for better case fans for noise reduction???

San Ace 80's. Because the sound of your screams of horror when some inappropriate fans bodged in there cause your drives to cook and lose your data are much louder than the San Ace fans.

For noise reduction consider other alternatives, such as an appropriate place for the gear

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...-hds-recommendations.24453/page-4#post-255614

or a different chassis that does not require high static pressure for airflow. The 24-drive-in-4U-chassis thing effectively means that you're trying to draw lots of air in through the little millimeter-high gaps above and below the hard drives.

But the 825TQ is a horrible chassis, because it was designed for situations where the airflow wouldn't be sufficient (dual CPU and GPU systems, I believe). So they omit a row of drives, which reduces the static pressure, which then means that the chassis probably isn't doing a real good job of drawing air across the drives, especially the bottom row of drives, anyways. I'd suggest blocking at least some of the top row venting if your drives appear to be running hot.

 

[anodos]

But the 825TQ is a horrible chassis, because it was designed for situations where the airflow wouldn't be sufficient (dual CPU and GPU systems, I believe). So they omit a row of drives, which reduces the static pressure, which then means that the chassis probably isn't doing a real good job of drawing air across the drives, especially the bottom row of drives, anyways. I'd suggest blocking at least some of the top row venting if your drives appear to be running hot.

I can confirm this. It is a horrible chassis. The main problems are with bays 7-8 (right side of the case) which get almost no airflow due to the positioning of fans in the chassis. Blocking the top row venting is sufficient for cooling 1-6, but 7-8 requires setting fans to 'full speed'. (At 'standard' and 'optimum' settings drive temps in those bays were still getting up to 45C). This means swapping out fans for 'quieter' ones in this chassis is not an option. Note that I'm rocking 7200RPM drives, you may be able to reduce heat problems by using lower RPM drives in this chassis. You can populate the left 6 bays in the chassis (leaving 7-8 with blanks in them) and set fans to 'optimal', which I think adequately cools 1-6 (but you'll have to verify for yourself). Eight 7200 RPM drives requires you to set it to banshee mode. On the bright side, ear plugs are cheap.

 

[RemyZ]

I can confirm this. It is a horrible chassis. The main problems are with bays 7-8 (right side of the case) which get almost no airflow due to the positioning of fans in the chassis. Blocking the top row venting is sufficient for cooling 1-6, but 7-8 requires setting fans to 'full speed'. (At 'standard' and 'optimum' settings drive temps in those bays were still getting up to 45C). This means swapping out fans for 'quieter' ones in this chassis is not an option. Note that I'm rocking 7200RPM drives, you may be able to reduce heat problems by using lower RPM drives in this chassis. You can populate the left 6 bays in the chassis (leaving 7-8 with blanks in them) and set fans to 'optimal', which I think adequately cools 1-6 (but you'll have to verify for yourself). Eight 7200 RPM drives requires you to set it to banshee mode. On the bright side, ear plugs are cheap.

Damn wish i would have known this earlier. Ehh you live and you learn.It has the capability of 8 drives but i would prolly end up with maybe 6.Will definitely look into having 5900 rpm drives for the last 2 and continue trucking.Ill keep the case fans and move this chassis somewhere where it doesnt bother me or drown out silent scenes in movies. Since you bring up the temp thing is there any other mods i can make to the case to allow for better cooling?

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[anodos]

Damn wish i would have known this earlier. Ehh you live and you learn.It has the capability of 8 drives but i would prolly end up with maybe 6.Will definitely look into having 5900 rpm drives for the last 2 and continue trucking.Ill keep the case fans and move this chassis somewhere where it doesnt bother me or drown out silent scenes in movies. Since you bring up the temp thing is there any other mods i can make to the case to allow for better cooling?

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Unless you have a particular need for 7200RPM drives, you might want to consider 5900 RPM (like the WD Red) for all of them. As you test your system you may get different results than me. "smartctl -x" (i.e. smartctl - x /dev/da7) is your friend. It will show temperature logs for your drives, which you can use to gauge whether your drives are baking.

 

[joeschmuck]

You could pop in SSDs and then change out the fans :D

 

[anodos]

Unless you have a particular need for 7200RPM drives, you might want to consider 5900 RPM (like the WD Red) for all of them. As you test your system you may get different results than me. "smartctl -x" (i.e. smartctl - x /dev/da7) is your friend. It will show temperature logs for your drives, which you can use to gauge whether your drives are baking.

If you don't mind losing hotswap capabilities, I contacted supermicro support once and they told me that you can actually install a couple hard drives along the top row of the chassis. You just need to use a molex y-splitter for the power (be warned though there are some fantastically low-quality molex splitters out there. I've had some fall apart while handling them.).

 

[RemyZ]

If you don't mind losing hotswap capabilities, I contacted supermicro support once and they told me that you can actually install a couple hard drives along the top row of the chassis. You just need to use a molex y-splitter for the power (be warned though there are some fantastically low-quality molex splitters out there. I've had some fall apart while handling them.).

Does the top of the case get better cooling?

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[RemyZ]

You could pop in SSDs and then change out the fans :D

Haha 6TB SSDs prolly in 5-7 years if it comes down drastically in price which i doubt

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[RemyZ]

Unless you have a particular need for 7200RPM drives, you might want to consider 5900 RPM (like the WD Red) for all of them. As you test your system you may get different results than me. "smartctl -x" (i.e. smartctl - x /dev/da7) is your friend. It will show temperature logs for your drives, which you can use to gauge whether your drives are baking.

Oh this sux lol. I remember researching between the two but i forgot why i went with HGST drives.So for a vdev its a good idea to keep the same size and brand etc.I can prolly look into getting wd reds for another vdev instead of mixing and matching on the same vdev

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[anodos]

Does the top of the case get better cooling?

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That's my guess. I haven't used those bays personally. They are positioned directly in front of the 80mm fans and so I'd assume they get better airflow.

One thing I didn't try was blocking airflow in the bays where the power buttons and front panel USB / serial are located on my chassis. Entirely blocking airflow across the top row might force enough air through bays 7-8 to adequately cool the drives under quieter fan settings. You'll have to experiment and see. Switching from 'standard' to 'full' speed on fans dropped temps in bays 7-8 from 45C to 30C.

 

[jgreco]

I can confirm this. It is a horrible chassis. The main problems are with bays 7-8 (right side of the case) which get almost no airflow due to the positioning of fans in the chassis.

Positioning of the fans having a significant impact is merely a sign that there isn't a sufficient pressure differential. It's a sign of "stupid" (for FreeNAS-style-purposes) design.

Assuming my recollection of that catastro-fsck is accurate, this really comes down to an issue of making it once again think it's an SC826. You go and block all the top row airflow. You make sure that there's a tray blank in any empty trays, and ideally I think what you probably want is to occupy all four middle row drive bays and the two center bays in the bottom.

The cooling isn't supposed to be direct air cooling. The space behind the drives, and in front of the fans, is supposed to be a low pressure region, equally drawing air in through all available openings in the front of the chassis. There will be a tendency for that to work better directly in front of the fans, because any HVAC technician will tell you that every obstruction or turn tends to reduce airflow, but it does work. Large fans are needed to build that pressure differential, which is why any attempt to "fix" these chassis with "quieter" fans is doomed to fail, unless there's some other mitigation. This is also why you cannot leave open bays or forget to use drive blanks in these chassis.

There ARE other possibilities. For example, in an SC846, you can populate it with 12 drives, every other row, and you COULD use smaller quieter fans, I suppose. Or in the SC825 here, you could just put four drives in the middle row and some quieter fans, relying on pure CFM above and below the drives to keep them cool. But this is relying on the operator of the system not to go and fill those bays at some future point.

 

[jgreco]

Does the top of the case get better cooling?

No, it's just where there's empty space. Supermicro designed this chassis for compute nodes needing more airflow to cool the back end components. The air had to come from somewhere, so they removed a row of drives.