Where to get 80mm fan plate for Norco chassis?

[titan_rw]

Hi All.

I know the Norco 4U stuff has been discussed before.

Unfortunately mine came with the 120mm fan plate.

As mentioned before, creating static pressure with 120mm fans is quite a bit harder than 80mm fans. Also, finding high quality 120mm fans with decent static pressure seems problematic.

Being that 80mm fans create pressure more easily, I think it would take less energy if I changed to 80mm fans. And 80mm fans of decent quality are far more easily found.

That being said, I can't seem to find a source for the 80mm fan bracket. I can find the 120mm one everywhere of course, which doesn't help.

Anybody have a source for one?


Thanks.

 

[ChriZ]

What about Noctua 120mm industrial fans?
Should be easier than replacing the whole fan plate

 

[Ericloewe]

What about Noctua 120mm industrial fans?
Should be easier than replacing the whole fan plate

Not nearly enough for most cases. 38mmx120mm would be the bare minimum even worth considering. Even then, static pressure on those is very inferior to 38mmx80mm fans.

 

[jgreco]

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/846/SC846BE16-R920.cfm



No but seriously, there's more than one way to tackle this. You can use an 80-to-120mm adapter.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002C7IQ1O/?tag=ozlp-20

 

[titan_rw]

What about Noctua 120mm industrial fans?
Should be easier than replacing the whole fan plate

As mentioned in other threads here, cooling drives in this kind of case require pressure. Air flow doesn't matter much if the pressures not there. Even with my 120x38 fans at 3000 rpm, I barely have enough cooling. And these fans don't seem to like the load I'm putting them under. I had a couple of them running in regular desktop cases before for years and didn't have any trouble. Now that I've put them into a 4U chassis, I've had two fail in a year.

If I continued with the 120mm fan plate, I was looking at 3x Delta TFC1212DE. These are 120x38 at ~5500 rpm, pwm controllable. I'd solder up a power harness and power them via molex connectors, but connect their pwm signal to the MB fan headers and run them only as fast as I need.

I'm sure going that way will work, but I know that 80mm fans are much much more efficient for this task. I could get away with burning less power, and probably have less noise with 80mm fans.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/846/SC846BE16-R920.cfm

:p

No but seriously, there's more than one way to tackle this. You can use an 80-to-120mm adapter.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002C7IQ1O/?tag=ozlp-20

This is the problem of living in Canada. I would have absolutely went with a used Supermicro instead of Norco, but the shipping was a show stopper. The ebay price plus the shipping was more than they're worth new. And I think they were $1,200 or something new here. I decided to go with the $399 Norco and deal with the cooling issues. I thought they came with the 80mm fan plate. Unfortunately it came with the 120mm one.

That fan converter thing doesn't ship to Canada, and I can't find it on amazon.ca. That would also only let me mount 3 fans instead of 4. The other advantage of the 80mm fan plate is the sas cables go neatly through the cable hole in the middle instead of there being a fan in the way. I've mounted that fan on the other side of the fanplate to give enough room for the sas cables, and they only barely fit as it is.

I'm thinking my only option to mount 4 80mm fans is to fabricate my own plate. Which is more work than I really wanted to put into this. I may just end up getting the 120mm delta fans and deal with it.

 

[jgreco]

... idly wonders if there's a market for smuggling Supermicro into Canada ... heh

 

[titan_rw]

Sorry, new they're even more. The 846BE16 is $2,000. Even the TQ is $1,500.

It looks like things have gotten better on ebay. Including shipping I'd be looking at $500, which if I was making the decision now, I'd probably opt for over the $400 Norco. At the time though, used supermicro from ebay was over $1,000.

Yea, I'm only 2.5 hours from the border. I wonder if it's worth it to bring it over the border myself..

 

[titan_rw]

I got 3 of the Scythe Ultra Kaze 3000 rpm fans working and put back inside.

These seem to work well as far as airflow, but the fans seem to fail fairly quickly.

Here's the quick 'does the paper get sucked against the front' test: