Fan Control

[David Dyer-Bennet]

We've got a great chassis that cools too well :) (Chenbro RM23212 rev. E). I mean, it's keeping the drives down below the optimum temp the big Google drive study suggests, and it's also noisy as a tornado rushing by, so even in a closed rack in the laundry room it can be heard all over the house at quiet moments. Machine room case, living in not entirely a machine room environment.

The 3 big mid-ships fans are controlled / powered from connectors on the back of the drive backplane. Apparently, it doesn't monitor for heat, it simply provides power, since they're roaring at the same rate all the time, including through startup.

So, we're looking to maybe hack the hardware a bit. If we switch to powering the fans off a motherboard connector designated for "chassis fan", is that under software control anywhere, or is it all in the chipset and not visible to the OS?

More specifically, what software in FreeNAS / FreeBSD is involved in chassis fan control and CPU cooler fan control?

The other approach is to swap them to a hardware / turn the knob fan controller, but having it automated based on monitoring drive temperatures or at least airstream temperatures would have fewer nasty failure modes.

 

[Dice]

So, we're looking to maybe hack the hardware a bit. If we switch to powering the fans off a motherboard connector designated for "chassis fan", is that under software control anywhere, or is it all in the chipset and not visible to the OS?

Yes. Depends on what motherboard you run?

More specifically, what software in FreeNAS / FreeBSD is involved in chassis fan control and CPU cooler fan control?

There is a script for fan control on X9 X10 X11 boards

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...in-response-to-hard-drive-temperatures.41294/

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

This is Rebma, which has an Asus M5A78L-M/USB3 in it. Don't know what "X9 X10 and X11" motherboards refer to even.

 

[anodos]

This is Rebma, which has an Asus M5A78L-M/USB3 in it. Don't know what "X9 X10 and X11" motherboards refer to even.

They're supermicro motherboards. I believe there are some fan controllers that have built-in temperature sensors (or temp probes you can attach to them). For instance -
https://www.amazon.com/NZXT-Sentry-...37&sr=1-3&keywords=temperature+fan+controller

I'm sure there are models that are less clunky.

 

[Dice]

This is Rebma, which has an Asus M5A78L-M/USB3 in it.

Then the linked script wont work.
That motherboard is a terrible foundation for a FreeNAS system.

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Ah, okay. I see ipmitool is standard at least, haven't tried to see if it can do anything with this MB yet, but that's a very useful pointer, thanks! Also the script examples will I'm sure be useful.

 

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Yep, no IPMI on that MB.

That MB and a close associate are running wonderfully for us for many years now. They support more than enough RAM easily, have a good controller count (6) for their vintage, and support ECC ram (which we have installed).

 

[Dice]

and support ECC ram (which we have installed).

Cool. The first 2 sites I found did not specifiy ECC memory.
Then you are better off.