Newbie: are rack-mounted or Mini ITX cases quieter?

[jgreco]

In case you think most rackmount cases are quiet. My SM 846 sounds like 7 jet fighters going to war. 5 80mm screamers and 2 40mm banshees. It is crazy loud at full afterburners. Mine will get a regular psu and quiet fans soon.

Do you not have them all hooked up to the PMbus and motherboard fan connectors? Properly set up, the fans should power up in Harrier Jump Jet mode but then ratchet down pretty far by the time POST completes.

I imagine if you're lacking PMbus support on your motherboard that'd be a real loud noise.

 

[jgreco]

I remember reading it in your guide and thinking "written like a true systems engineer" :p

Stop it, you're making me blush.

 

[R.G.]

Yeah. In a day where spreadsheet programs are free, It sometimes surprises me that people don't immediately jump to the answer by entering a list of materials by type in rows, actual part chosen in columns (or vice versa, depending on your preference for ortho-regularity) and then making sums of system cost, and various metrics calculated from the actual parts prices and so on.

And, with zfs, you also get to trade off the size of arrays and type of mirror/striping for a different delivered cost of usable storage per TB. That goes in a spreadsheet, too. :)

 

[mjws00]

Do you not have them all hooked up to the PMbus and motherboard fan connectors? Properly set up, the fans should power up in Harrier Jump Jet mode but then ratchet down pretty far by the time POST completes.

I imagine if you're lacking PMbus support on your motherboard that'd be a real loud noise.

It has a better brains on the way. So it just got a quick once over and then stuck in a corner. Full on Harrier Jump Jet as purchased. Made me smirk a little. I need 24 ssd's or something to provide proper motivation. ;)

 

[mjws00]

Yeah. In a day where spreadsheet programs are free, It sometimes surprises me that people don't immediately jump to the answer by entering a list of materials by type in rows, actual part chosen in columns (or vice versa, depending on your preference for ortho-regularity) and then making sums of system cost, and various metrics calculated from the actual parts prices and so on.

And, with zfs, you also get to trade off the size of arrays and type of mirror/striping for a different delivered cost of usable storage per TB. That goes in a spreadsheet, too. :)

You know we do this? Thought it was a trade secret.

 

[R.G.]

Oooops... now the NSA knows I know, and they also know that you know! ACK!! :)

 

[c32767a]

These statements don't seem to agree (or maybe they do, and the "tiny computers" are just really underpowered). I imagine the excess noise in rack-mounted cases comes from niceties like big, redundant power supplies and the large number of fans required to cool lots of hot-swappable drives, but I'm just guessing. Does anyone have advice on which case I should start with? Thanks!

Take this for what it's worth..

One of the applications where $dayjob uses freenas requires quiet hardware. In smaller 6 drive deployments, we use dell T410 and T420 machines with rack mount kits. They burn a lot of space (5U), but you can't tell they are on, even at full load. In our larger sites, we tried a bunch of different noisy options and ended up just biting the bullet and using the 45drives cases. With 120mm fans and decent room air temps, it's nearly silent. (e.g., it can run on the bench in my office, under load and my CD burner is still louder than the chassis. )

We pair the storage with a R310 or R320 to run ESX. They are also remarkably quiet, though the active fan controllers will spool things up to "noisy" if the machine gets heavily loaded.

If you search the Dell outlet, you can find bargains on those systems. Or you could buy a new one and still only be 1-200 $ off the price of the roll your own.

 

[sremick]

I was going to go rackmount for cleanliness in the basement. I've got sysadmin experience so I like to build racks.

In the end, though, I couldn't find what I wanted and noise was a factor. I gave up, went with a Node 304, saved a lot, got a sweet solution and all I had to give up was having it rack-mounted. Ultimately it'll just be on a shelf by my patch panel. In the end you spend more time using your server than staring at how it's physically set up, and cost matters.

 

[RXWatcher]

I think it depends on what you're using it for. I'm working on a 16 bay supermicro rack build with a X10SRH-CLN4F with an E5 CPU but will end up running esxi on it and passing through the LSI controller to a VM running freenas.
I will then have another VM for other 'services' I need to run. I decided I wanted to be able to snapshot the freenas and the other services VMs if needed for upgrades, etc.

I went with the E5 so I can up the memory beyond the 32GB limits if needed.

It all depends on your needs and wants. I am building for future growth.

 

[mjws00]

As a side note. Did a quick and dirty hack on the 846 yesterday. Installed a seasonic, and x10sl7. With some creative baffling one 80mm stock fan running at low keeps it cool with all drives sub 30C. It's quieter than a std desktop. I'll stuff a noctua in it this aft for silence.

 

[R.G.]

In the end, though, I couldn't find what I wanted and noise was a factor. I gave up, went with a Node 304, saved a lot, got a sweet solution and all I had to give up was having it rack-mounted. Ultimately it'll just be on a shelf by my patch panel. In the end you spend more time using your server than staring at how it's physically set up, and cost matters.

I completely agree.

It's all a matter of objectives. If what you're doing is building a massively expandable storage installation, something like racks and modularity matter a lot. If you have a defined storage goal, and other factors include quiet, unobtrusive, etc., and you're not tied to the idea of racks, then the Fractal cubes may just fit the bill fine.

I personally don't plan on expanding beyond the storage I have available to me in the Node 804 for at least the few years' lifetime of the Node, so it meets my limited goals, and was easy, cheap, and quiet.

 

[mjws00]

Heh. Big Iron is FUN. I have no need for 50 bays... doesn't mean I can't watch em light up ;).

 

[R.G.]

Heh. Big Iron is FUN. I have no need for 50 bays... doesn't mean I can't watch em light up ;).

Yep!

I was introduced to computers in an era when "computer" meant a specially air-conditioned locked glass room with raised floors and many volkswagen sized boxes (usually blue!) to make one computer; in this time, memory was $10M per megabyte. Panels were filled with blinky lights and the row of 10" diameter tape drives on one wall periodically spooled themselves back and forth a bit.

I've sometimes had the fantasy of hunting down an old tape drive just to refurb it so it could spool back and forth in the background. :D

 

[danb35]

If you have a defined storage goal, and other factors include quiet, unobtrusive, etc., and you're not tied to the idea of racks, then the Fractal cubes may just fit the bill fine.

Well, if you have a defined storage goal, and you're quite certain that goal won't change... Just 9 months ago, my pool consisted of 3 x 2 TB disks in RAIDZ1, though it was getting full. I added 3 x 3 TB disks (another RAIDZ1) about the time I discovered SickBeard and CouchPotato. Now that's full. I just ordered 6 x 4 TB disks, and I'm glad I have a 12-bay chassis to install them in.

 

[R.G.]

Well, if you have a defined storage goal, and you're quite certain that goal won't change... Just 9 months ago, my pool consisted of 3 x 2 TB disks in RAIDZ1, though it was getting full. I added 3 x 3 TB disks (another RAIDZ1) about the time I discovered SickBeard and CouchPotato. Now that's full. I just ordered 6 x 4 TB disks, and I'm glad I have a 12-bay chassis to install them in.

Part of "defined goal" as I use it implies that this isn't your first rodeo :) and you have taken into account the forseeable but not exactly countable-right-now needs (the "known unknowns").

The unknown unknowns are a different story. I consider data to be the most expensive thing to both get and keep. The hardware that keeps it is to a degree trivial.

And I do still have this goliath Norco that was too big for my needs, and a couple of Antec P-series chassis to expand into if need be. :) Moving a motherboard, power supply and disks into a bigger chassis takes about an afternoon.

On the other hand, I also know the rate at which jmy data storage needs have grown in the last ten years, and I'm not much into storing video or wrestling other gigantic files around. I put in about four times the storage that I will reasonably need for the near future. The scheme (it's a scheme, not a plan, if you don't know *exactly* how it will get done) is to let the continued increases in drive density let me upgrade as I go. My first NAS was Solaris based, about the time that Oracle ra... er, bought Sun and took all of its stuff internal. I got on to FreeNAS looking for an alternate ZFS vehicle. That NAS had 12 disk drives at a lofty 750GB each for about 10 TB in RAIDZ2.

The most recent has let me have 12TB in seven 3TB drives. I've not come close to 80% with either of these or the intermediates.

So I get away with having piddly little data storage, and some OK-so-far guesses about what I'll need.

 

[areis]

It's only 4 bays, but the SuperMicro SuperChassis 813MTQ-441CB is nice and quiet. I had a SuperChassis SC813MTQ-520CB before this one and it was very loud. The fans were at full speed all the time. The PMbus makes all the difference.

 

[depasseg]

I did some filming to compare the amount of sound the various servers make in my rack. It's not really clear in the videos, but the newer (R710, R620, SM 5028R) servers are much, much quieter than the older generations. Clearly the ReadyNas enclosures are the quietest, but for a rack server in the basement, I can't hear the combination of the 2 Dells and the SM from upstairs. The HP's are just vintage I use as ballast and not for production/testing.

The first is an old HP ML570G3 which sounds like a jet fighter:

Then there is an DL380G4

Then a Dell R710

Then a Dell R620

Then a SuperMicro 5028R

[End of Part 1]

 

[depasseg]

[Part 2]


Then a ReadyNas Pro 6

Then a ReadyNas 516 (This was so quiet I didn't realize it was running the whole time).

Then an EqualLogic PS4000