Possible to replace PSU in a 2U or 3U SuperMicro Chassis?

[Aristotle]

Hi all,

I have a SuperMicro 4U 24bay chassis, and to reduce the fan noise, i have swapped out the PSU and replaced it with a Seasonic Gold.

Has anyone tried replacing the PSU for a 2U or a 3U Chassis?
Can it be done, and be replaced with a more silent psu?

 

[melloa]

I think is more like what your PSU needs to power --- wattage ---, connectors (24, 8, 6, 4, sata, molex) , etc. Yesterday I got a Intel dual Xeon server on an old Supermicro 2u ...

 

[tvsjr]

Anything can be done... you could even put the power supplies external if you wanted. however, you should consider:
Power supply sizing - the supplies in rack mount servers, especially 4U models, produce Big Chunky Watts. The sort of wattage necessary to power 36 15K SAS drives at spin-up along with four processors, multiple PCIe cards, etc. If you pull the supplies out and replace it with something undersized, you're not going to be happy with the results.

Airflow - rack mount servers are focused around sucking lots of air in the front and pushing it out the back, while providing lots of cooling to all the parts that need it. The chassis are carefully balanced to make sure this works, and the power supplies play into this. If you start changing things around, you may find yourself with insufficient cooling, or with "hot spots" where one part of the chassis doesn't cool as effectively as another. Make sure you're watching the temperature of all CPU cores, chipset, add-on cards, and each drive individually.

 

[Ericloewe]

Good news is that newer Supermicro PSUs are much quieter during normal operation. Bad news is that they can be rather expensive.

 

[melloa]

Good news is that newer Supermicro PSUs are much quieter during normal operation. Bad news is that they can be rather expensive.

Talking about 2U PSUs, what are you guys using? I got as a gift a 2U SM case with 6 hot swap bays that I'm playing around for future build (the one on the attached pic with a floppy :) )

The case fans are loud as a jet taking off, the PSU fan is almost there. Replaced the PSU fan with a quieter one I had around and the noise level went down 80% and the air flow seems fine. Have anyone done that before? Any 2U PSU that someone would recommend that can be quiet enough to be running in your .... let say ... bedroom?

Now for the case fans I'm thinking on Fractal Design R3s 80mm. Are those a good option? I read they run at 18.1 db, so should be quiet (I hope).