Cooling Dell H310+SM AOC-SLG3-2M2

[winstontj]

I have a mATX X11SSH-F board (3x pcie slots). A Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 card is in the middle pcie slot (only pcie slot with bifurcation) and right above it is a Dell H310 card. Problem is the H310 card gets HOT. I have 100gb P4801x drives (as slog) in the AOC-SLG3-2M2. I'm seeing hot temps in both the Optane drives and the dell H310. The case is a Fractal 804. I've seen a few 3D printable fan shrouds/ducts but nothing specific for that combination. I'm worried that at idle I'm seeing very high temps --and that's before I even have pools created or a system actually running/functioning.

I've seen @jgreco cringe at the thought of single-point-of-failure cooling failures --and I agree. If these things are HOT now and I don't even have pools created, very bad things could happen if I don't have some reliable redundancy. Two Noctua NF-A4-10 fans fit perfectly in a small rectangle mesh section next to the pcie slots. I'm thinking about a fan duct/shroud situation that pulls air from the inside of the case, flows over both the Dell H310 and the AOC-SLG3-2M2, and then exhausts out the rear of the case. Is two little noctua fans enough to consider it redundant? Should I do something different with a different brand/model fans, or more fans?

I am basically trying to solve for not having a hot/cold isle as well as not having proper air flow (using server hardware in a desktop chassis). Is there anything out there I can 3D print for either of those individual cards... or the combination of those two cards sitting in adjacent pcie slots?

I have messed around with some of the fan scripts (zones for PWM fan speed for cpu temp vs. hdd temp). Is there anything available in non-enterprise edition that would monitor other temps such as the HBA and nvme drives? Is there an APC community/non-enterprise plugin for bbu (usb or network)?

Last thought/comment. I don't really like the idea of this but there is plenty of room inside the chassis: Are there individual cooling shrouds anywhere available to 3d print for either of those cards? I could use pcie ribbon cables to relocate the cards within the chassis so there is enough distance to give them each their own cooling. (this seems like over-complicating and adding in more points of failure)

Thanks.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Looking at that case, fitting 2x40mm exhaust fans in the rectangle above the mesh is probably the opposite of what you want as it would guide the airflow up there. You want active airflow over the heatsink on the HBA, as well as over the P4801X M.2 cards.

Have you fully populated the front panel with 4x120mm fans? The stock layout pictured above doesn't really push any airflow directly into the PCIe area.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

If you use the builtin reporting feature of TrueNAS which is essentially a (enhanced by iX) collectd, you can pipe that data into InfluxDB and Grafana running in a jail. Including CPU and disk temperatures. Sadly this feature is missing from the stock FreeBSD port, iX did not upstream their changes, and the port maintainer does not answer emails ... But in the TrueNAS context, it's the way to go, IMHO.


In my case this is a mini tower enclosure (see my signature for details). ada0-3 are the spinning disks for the "storage" pool, ada4-5 the 32 G boot devices (2.5" SATA SSDs). nvd0 is the Optane on the mainboard (M.2) serving as an SLOG for VMware --> NFS. And nvd1/2 are two Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus on the same PCIe card you are using, serving as my VM and jail pool.

Temperatures are a bit higher than I would like them in my data centre, but this system is literally sitting in a cupboard at home, so that's good enough. No way to get it cooler without introducing a noise level I am not going to tolerate.