Drives really warm/hot while idling (+45°C)

[joscho42]

Hello,

first of all, here is my setup:
Setup:
Backplane: BPN SAS2 846E1
Motherboard: X10SRL-F
CPU: INTEL XEON E5-2620 V4 (2.1 GHZ / 3.0 GHZ)
Ram: 64GB
Storage: 250gb SSD for OS
Storage: 2TB SSD for cache
Storage: 10* Toshiba MG07SCA 12TB (end goal would be 24 *12tb drives)
HBA: IBM 45W9122 LSI SAS9201-8i (Flashed with the P20 9211-i8 Firmware)
all conveniently housed in a Supermicro U4 chassis
Maybe interesting for this question:
The fans I use are 5 Be Quiet! BL044 Pure Wings 2 (3 close to the Backplane and 2 at the back) all hooked up to the fan headers of my MB.

I'm setting up my first Truenas server.
I was checking out the different settings in the Web Interface (the server ran for about 30mins) and than shut the server down.
I realized that the drive got quite warm in that time even thought they are not doing much work yet (no pool has been created yet).
I'm a bit worried because I read that optimal temp for a drive should be close to 35° and when I measured the temperature I got 45° even though the drives are just idling.

I wanted to ask if it's normal for my kind of drives to run that hot.
I also can't see the temperature in the Web Interface and I think this has to do with not yet having a pool.
Could it be that the fans will take HDD temp into consideration only after creating a Pool?
Can I manually ramp up fan speed to reduce temperatures?


Thanks for any help/advice/hint.

Have a nice day
Joscho

 

[jgreco]

The fans I use are 5 Be Quiet! BL044 Pure Wings 2 (3 close to the Backplane and 2 at the back) all hooked up to the fan headers of my MB.

Well there's your problem.

You have sabotaged the carefully engineered cooling design of your chassis by replacing them with gamer-grade crapfans.

The fundamental problem with 4-drive-wide rackmount gear is that there is a need to cool the drives. This happens by sucking, hard, to force air through the tiny gaps that exist around the drives in the drive bays. Causing this static pressure differential is a process that consumes a lot of energy and that translates to noise. The fans that are used are beefy, industrial grade fans that are tolerant of such abuse and will still last a decade or more given such abuse.

A lot of people buy these and then try to toss Noctua/BeQuiet/OtherIdiotic fans in with 24 drives to keep the noise down and maximize the storage. Don't do this, it's dangerous and stupid. You will end up with a nice little oven up front, especially as the fans fail, because the Noctuas are not designed to generate a high pressure differential. Stacking two drives on top of each other creates a hot spot between them, and if you do not have the "oomph" to forcibly move some air through the gap, it gets hot. Two dozen of them is a recipe for disaster. The drives in the middle especially have nowhere for their heat to go, despite the irony of having some fans directly behind them. If the fans cannot move significant air, the drives just warm up and bake at far too high a temperature.

But what you *can* do is to remove every other drive in a checkerboard pattern. This gives you capacity for twelve drives in a 24-drive chassis, no two drives adjacent, and twelve slots for air to easily flow through, so then you can use silent "gamer" fans in place of the industrial fans on the bulkhead. The drives will run a slight bit warmer, but because there is a way for heat to bleed off, it's generally possible to get this working fairly quietly.

(this is sort of a generic form letter message and doesn't take your exact circumstances into account)

 

[joscho42]

Thank you for the quick answer,

I put them in a checkerboard pattern, just as you said, and will look for server grade fans when I add new drives.
I'll test temperatures on Monday.

 

[sretalla]

A great example of this is:

Build Report: Norco RPC-4224, SuperMicro X10-SRi-F, Xeon E5-1650v4

I first started planning my build in this thread The hardware is complete, the server is beginning to take on duties as we go through a commissioning phase. So, since there has been a fair bit of interest in my build whenever I've mentioned it, and specifically, my impressions of the Norco...

www.truenas.com

If you have the available time to read through it, you'll see the part where he found that the consumer Noctua fans weren't getting it done and he swapped to the more industrial ones (I followed this design and the associated change in fan type with results that I'm still happy with 3 years later).