BUILD Power and thermals: Node 304 + C2750D4I

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nickt

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Hi all,

Have been enjoying reading all the great posts here - nearly ready to get started on my first FreeNAS build. But first I have a question about power and thermals with a Fractal Design Node 304 and an ASRock C2750D4I.

I want to build with 6 HDDs, but I am concerned that the 304 is too small and the passively cooled C27540D4I may not get sufficient airflow with all 6 drives installed. I'm also interested in any comments on typical power consumption for this build.

I am building for a file / media server at home. My two key goals are that the file server can comfortably saturate a Gbps link and that energy use is as low as possible.

Besides general file serving duties, primary use is to store older Photoshop / RAW files from my Lightroom catalog. Most of my photo editing work is done on my MacBook Pro (i.e. from high speed SSD), but with only 500 GB on the MBP, I have to move off older photos, which will get edited over the LAN from time to time. Media server duties will be modest - only occasional transcoding, and [almost] never to more than one device at a time. Some very light duty MySQL / web serving duties also.

The parts list I have in mind is as follows:

* ASRock C2750D4I
* Fractal Design Node 304
* 16 GB Crucial ECC unbuffered (CT2KIT102472BD160B)
* Seasonic SSR-360GP 360W
* 6x 3TB WD Red (as RAIDZ2). Maybe green.

Has anyone used the passively cooled C2750D4I with 6 drives in a Node 304? Thermals OK or a bit marginal? What about power consumption - is a 360W supply too much for this setup?

I love the case - I really want this combo to work!

Any other comments would be very welcome.

Many thanks! Nick
 

Ericloewe

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You will definitely needs fans because of the hard drives.
 

marbus90

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Which the Node 304 features. two 92mm in the front and one 120 or 140mm in the rear. they're standard.

the problem is to direct the airflow down to the CPU heatsink. it would sit in a dead zone. however, convection cooling might be enough. and don't forget to not use the right-hand side marvell sata ports.
 

charlie89

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I've used the Node 304 a year ago and i must say that temperatures are NOT an issue.
With an Intel i3 (around 54W max. TDP) and an COOLER MASTER Hyper TX 3 with the fan removed the CPU gets 70°C at maximum when running some programs which make full use of the CPU.
On standard usage with freenas the CPU has <50°C which is just fine.
If you plan to use a CPU with much higher TDP you should use a fan for the CPU.

I think the case has a good cooling because the 2 fans in the front blow directly on the HDDs and the big fan on the back silently pushes out all heat from the case.

One thing to note is that the case has a little switch on the back side to choose between 3 fan speeds. All my testings were made with the middle fan speed, which is very silent. The temperatures would be even less with the maximum fan speed.
 

nickt

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Hi all,

Thanks for the replies - some helpful tips there. A couple of further questions:

  • charlie89 - I hadn't realised the case itself has a fan controller. Can the fans be controlled by way of mobo headers (i.e. variable speed), or only by the fan speed switch in the case (fixed speed)?
  • any thoughts on power supply selection for 6 HDDs and C2750D4I - is 360 W too much? Would i get a more energy efficient solution with a smaller PSU?

Thanks,

Nick
 

charlie89

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The fans have 2-pin connectors - they can only be used with the fan controller because mainboards have 3- or 4-pin connectors.
For me this was really ok because with the middle fan speed they cooled enough while beeing very quiet.
If this is a issue for you then you could still replace the fans.

The CPU on the ASRock C2750D4I has a TDP of 20W and with 6 energy-efficient disks like WD Red's (6 x around 5W) you are definitely under 100W maximum.
So a 300W PSU is definitely enough, you could go even less but afaik the 300W's are the smallest you can get everywhere.
 

marbus90

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Maximum during spinup with 6x6TB Reds is 126W for HDDs only. On top of that I would allocate another 40W* for the board/cpu itself on 12V. Combining that we'd be at circa 14A @ 12V which the PSU has to cough out at a minimum. To be safe I'd grab at least 18-20A on 12V.

*Supermicro states their Avoton C2750 nodes with a consumption of 30W before AC/DC, the ASRock has more stuff onboard, but 40W should be okay.
 

nickt

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That's excellent. Thankyou both.
 

GrumpyBear

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The fans have 2-pin connectors - they can only be used with the fan controller because mainboards have 3- or 4-pin connectors.
For me this was really ok because with the middle fan speed they cooled enough while beeing very quiet.
If this is a issue for you then you could still replace the fans.
The Fractal 92 and 140mm fans included with this case are 3-pin not 2-pin fans so they are just voltage controlled but they do have a tachometer output so they could be connected to the motherboard instead. The motherboard does have 6 4-pin fan headers so you would have to see if any of them are capable of operating in voltage mode to vary the fan speeds. The manual is unclear on whether voltage mode is supported so likely it is not.

You could replace the case fans with 4-pin fans so the motherboard could control them. This is what I did on my Define R4.

The Fractal Fan controllers are just simple passive devices with a 3-speed switch. On my Define R4 the three positions are labelled 5V, 7V and 12V

Note that the folks that state that temperature is not an issue only report the temperature of the CPU and those reported have active (fan) cooling. So you may want to get some input from someone using this board and confirm that the Hard Drives also remain under 40 deg. C when under heavy load (say 30 minutes into a scrub as seen from the SMART data). This is a very popular case and motherboard combination so doing some digging into people's build questions in this forum and looking at peoples builds in their signatures may enable you to start a Conversation (PM) to ask how their experiences are.
 

nickt

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Having now built my server as planned, and nearing completion of burn in tests, I thought I'd report back on thermals.

Final build was Node 304, ASRock C2750D4I, 6x 3TB WD Green and Seasonic 360GP. So far, I'm using the Node 304's built in fans set to "medium". The C2750D4I motherboard is passively cooled; I haven't added a CPU fan. The fully built server is sitting on a bench in a ~21 C room. I've found that:
  • Drive temperatures sit around 32 - 34 C when under full load (running badblocks on all 6 drives at once).
  • Mobo / CPU temperatures sit at around 50 C with no CPU load (but drives at full load).
  • If I fully load all 8 cores and fully load the drives, temperatures stabilise at about 55 C for Mobo and 75 C for CPU. Drive temps don't change
I'm very impressed! I'd definitely recommend this config to anyone considering it.

Haven't done any power consumptions measurements yet; will report back when I do.

By the way, I used the following in bash to load the CPU:

Code:
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8; do while : ; do : ; done & done


Oh - and it is exceptionally quiet!
 
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