New build--want to control more fans

[pincorrect]

The parts are on the way for my new build, which will be based on the Supermicro X11SSH-F motherboard. This board has 4-pin connectors for 4 chassis fans and the CPU fan (FAN1-FAN4, FANA). My case, a CoolerMaster HAF32 has 4 stock fans. However, I will need to put some of my drives in the 5 1/4" slots, with adapters, and I would like to add at least one more fan to cool them.

Can the fan ports on the motherboard be made to drive more than one fan? (And if so, how would speed monitoring work?) Or is there a PCIe expansion card that gives you more fan ports? (And would it work with the built-in IPMI controller?) Or can you suggest any other approaches for managing more fans, preferably via IPMI?

 

[m0nkey_]

It's usually safe to run two fans per header, but you've got to be aware of the maximum voltage and amps you can pull, along with the max voltage and amps your fan can use at max.

Most PWM spliters have one fan pin reporting it's speed on one connection, while the other has the speed indicator pin removed. This is good if you have two fans covering the same area.

If you want more control over the fans, then you'll need to buy some fan controller and set-up a profile within that to adjust based on temperatures.

 

[Glorious1]

Those fan headers supply 2.5 amps, which would be enough for at least 5 of the fans I use, using a series of splitters.
Be careful about the stock fans, they may not be PWM (4 pin) fans that can be controlled.

The motherboard will have several fan modes that determine how the PWM fans react to changes in temperature on the board. These are modes like FULL, STANDARD, HEAVYI/O, OPTIMAL. Of course none of these respond to drive temperatures. I don't know if the commercial controllers that @m0nkey mentioned read drive temperatures, but you can use a free script that does. @Stux has a dual-zone script. I have a script that uses PID control logic for the drives and responds to CPU temperature too. I am working on a dual zone version of it, currently testing with several users.

 

[pincorrect]

Awesome. Thanks very much for the tips, guys!

 

[Spearfoot]

This board has 4-pin connectors for 4 chassis fans and the CPU fan (FAN1-FAN4, FANA).

It may vary from motherboard to motherboard, but I checked w/ Supermicro support and they told me that in the case of my X10SL7-F, FAN1 is the CPU fan and FANA is for 'auxillary' devices. Again, your mobo may differ; so it wouldn't hurt to ask Supermicro.

Or can you suggest any other approaches for managing more fans, preferably via IPMI?

You can tweak fan settings with Supermicro's IPMIUtil program, and probably other IPMI programs as well; there's a pretty good discussion about this in How To: change sensor thresholds with IPMI using ipmiutil by @Ericloewe.

 

[pincorrect]

It may vary from motherboard to motherboard, but I checked w/ Supermicro support and they told me that in the case of my X10SL7-F, FAN1 is the CPU fan and FANA is for 'auxillary' devices. Again, your mobo may differ; so it wouldn't hurt to ask Supermicro.

I checked with Supermicro tech support, and this appears to be the same on the X11 motherboards, or at least on my specific one, X11SSH-F. They said

Fan 1 header is for CPU and fan A for Add on card.
Fan 2-5 (sic, only goes up to Fan 4) are chassis dependent and mostly for memory and system components.
Fan header Current rating is up to 3 amps on Supermicro motherboards.

 

[Glorious1]

I checked with Supermicro tech support, and this appears to be the same on the X11 motherboards, or at least on my specific one, X11SSH-F. They said

The current is close, but your motherboard manual says 2.5 amps. I would assume that is correct.

The important thing to know about the fan headers is they are in 2 zones. Zone 0 is FAN1-4, zone 1 is FANA. The zones can be controlled independently. Within zone 0, the headers are equivalent and will all get the same control, so it doesn't make much sense to say FAN1 is for this and FAN2-4 are for that.

Notice they didn't say any of the headers are for HDD cooling, which is kind of funny, because most people have several HDD fans. Other places they describe FANA/zone1 as the peripheral zone, which sounds like HDD. Anyway, if you don't use a script to control fans you should probably connect things roughly as they say. I would certainly use spincheck.sh (which only reads, doesn't control anything) though to monitor what's going on with temperatures and fan speeds in various fan modes and loads.

 

[Ericloewe]

Notice they didn't say any of the headers are for HDD cooling, which is kind of funny, because most people have several HDD fans. Other places they describe FANA/zone1 as the peripheral zone, which sounds like HDD. Anyway, if you don't use a script to control fans you should probably connect things roughly as they say. I would certainly use spincheck.sh (which only reads, doesn't control anything) though to monitor what's going on with temperatures and fan speeds in various fan modes and loads.

That's because an ordinary system doesn't have the required access to HDD temperatures to control them - so the approach is a brute-force one.