Adjust fan speed on non-Supermicro board?

[hjarnek]

Hello,

I have just installed a couple of Noctua PWM fans in my TrueNAS machine, but they both run at full speed. I read that there are scripts to adjust fan speed for Supermicro motherboards. My question is whether this is possible for other boards as well. I have a Dell workstation motherboard running TrueNAS Core 13.0-U3.1. It's worth noting that during POST the fans run at low speed, but as soon as TrueNAS is loaded the speed goes up to max. In other words, the motherboard does support low fan speed (which is something that has been problematic with some Supermicro boards, as I understand it).

Cheers

 

[ChrisRJ]

I never got the script to work like I wanted/needed it on my Supermicro X9 board. So opted for the "analogue" version, which is manual speed control from Noctua (https://noctua.at/en/na-fc1).

 

[hjarnek]

I never got the script to work like I wanted/needed it on my Supermicro X9 board. So opted for the "analogue" version, which is manual speed control from Noctua (https://noctua.at/en/na-fc1).

Hm, I doubt I'll manage to get it to work then. But one never knows, maybe the hardware will cooperate. When you refer to "the script", which one are you talking about specifically? I've seen a few different ones here in the forums, but I'm not sure which one is the most current/best one.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Sorry, I was imprecise. What I meant to say is that the general approach to use the ipmitool command did not work for me. There is a good chance that it could have worked eventually, but I did not want to spend more than a certain amount of time.

 

[Glorious1]

Hello,

I have just installed a couple of Noctua PWM fans in my TrueNAS machine, but they both run at full speed. I read that there are scripts to adjust fan speed for Supermicro motherboards. My question is whether this is possible for other boards as well. I have a Dell workstation motherboard running TrueNAS Core 13.0-U3.1. It's worth noting that during POST the fans run at low speed, but as soon as TrueNAS is loaded the speed goes up to max. In other words, the motherboard does support low fan speed (which is something that has been problematic with some Supermicro boards, as I understand it).

Cheers

It would be difficult or impossible to change fan control scripts set up for SuperMicro boards to get them to work on Dell. I doubt you'll find any scripts on this forum for Dell boards because so few people use them for TrueNAS. ipmitool is not a script; it is a built-in command for lots of things, including reading sensor settings and thresholds. If you don't have IPMI it might not do anything?

Is that Dell board a server class with IPMI? You may then have a fan mode setting there. Otherwise, maybe there is a fan mode setting in your BIOS.

 

[hjarnek]

It would be difficult or impossible to change fan control scripts set up for SuperMicro boards to get them to work on Dell. I doubt you'll find any scripts on this forum for Dell boards because so few people use them for TrueNAS. ipmitool is not a script; it is a built-in command for lots of things, including reading sensor settings and thresholds. If you don't have IPMI it might not do anything?

Is that Dell board a server class with IPMI? You may then have a fan mode setting there. Otherwise, maybe there is a fan mode setting in your BIOS.

Ah blast. No IPMI on this board. And no setting in the BIOS. It's not a server class board, so I guess for its intended use case in a desktop workstation the mobo handles fan speeds so well that no one has ever wished for a setting to change it. Until TrueNAS entered the system...

Is there really no way of fixing this without buying additional hardware like @ChrisRJ suggested? Because even in that case, it wouldn't be possible to control the fan speeds by the CPU or disk temps, so long as the mobo is supplying full PWM signal all the time. Feels kinda strange that we have managed to go over three decades with home computers and even longer with servers without fan speed management being a legacy function in all systems...