Quiet cube fileserver

Show off your quiet rig.

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snq
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Quiet cube fileserver

Post by snq » Thu Jun 12, 2008 6:17 pm

I figured I'd show my relatively quiet fileserver build :) Relatively as in it's not really silent mainly because of the drives but it sounds a lot less than the average PC.

My old fileserver was running out of space and had some memory problem, it would run for max 10 mins at a time and then it would either crash or reboot, not very useful for a server. I had an AM2 X2 3800+ and lots of DDR2 memory on the shelf, disks come from the old server, so basically all I needed was a mainboard with a lot of SATA ports and a new casing.

The choice for the case was pretty clear from the beginning, I really like the YY-0221 cube server case. According to my calculations it will fit no less than 20 drives, which really should be plenty ;) 8 in the back, 2 in front on top, and the 5.25'' slots fit 2 5-in-3 units.

Now for the mainboard.. I really didn't want to spend too much cash, so the mainboard became the Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H with 6 SATA ports, IDE, onboard gfx, GbLan, basically all I needed.

So the setup looks like this:
Case: YY-0221
PSU: CoolerMaster Extreme Power 430W
Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H
CPU: X2 3800+
CPU Cooler: Zalman CNPS7500-ALCU LED
Memory: 4 x 1 GB PC6400
Case fans: 1 x Nexus 120mm, 2 x Nexus PWM 92mm
Disks: 400 GB IDE (20 GB sys, the rest storage), 3 x 500 GB SATA, 1 x 750 G SATA, all Samsung. And an IDE DVD unit.
No RAID or anything enabled, I'm old fashioned when it comes to that ;)

Anyway, lets get to the pics already.
I didn't take much pics while putting it together, but it's not like I did any modifications (other than having to drill out som spot welds in order to straighten out the case so the mainboard would fit...)

So here it is then!
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All vents are in place
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This is what the front looks like.. I added some noise dampening stuff, it actually made a pretty big difference. The disk you see hanging there is suspended with elastic cords, and it's there because it had to be close to the DVD ;) All other front holes are closed, so the disk gets cooling from the air that gets sucked in.
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Added some dampening in the front cover as well
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On to the drive side now, I added dampening there as well :roll:
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But this is what it looks like with that stuff removed. I'll neaten it up a bit once I figure out a way to silence the drives.
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The drives are not really packed, but could've been a bit further away from each other. There's about a quarter inch of space between them now. Behind the disks you see the Nexus fans.
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View from the back
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Then the other side!
This is actually the quiet side. One 120mm fan in the front, and a CPU fan, that's it. And the temps are fine :) Unfortunately I couldn't use my Ninja, it doesn't fit in the case.
Obviously some dampening material here as well..
Image
Image
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The results:
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The front fan is at a fixed speed of ~700 RPM.
The disk temps are fine too as you can see. I can still hear the rear HD fans and judging from the HD temps I should be able to lower the speed a bit, but if I do that they stop spinning, it seems the minimum RPM is around 850 :(

Any comments and tips on how to make it really silent are welcome :) It's mainly the HDDs and the rear fans that are audible now, I'm not sure about the PSU but the disks are louder for sure.

Nick Geraedts
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Post by Nick Geraedts » Thu Jun 12, 2008 6:28 pm

Very nice setup!

Sadly - once you get down to hard drive noise, the only ways of reducing that are suspension or enclosure boxes. As for the fans - you should swap those out for something quieter to begin with. Yate Loon's and the Scythe Slipstream are popular favorites here. :)

snq
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Post by snq » Thu Jun 12, 2008 6:42 pm

Thanks :)

Unfortunately Yate Loons are not available anywhere here. The Slipstream fans are only available as 120mm, and I need 92mm for the rear fans. I think the 120mm Nexus fans are fine actually, altho I might be a bit biased because I bought 20 of those when I got a good price when I built my current workstation PC ;)

I saw the Nexus Real Silent fans are in the recommended section on the site, and I think these are the PWM versions of those fans, or are they completely different? I had no option when I ordered because the regular non-PWM wasn't in stock so I decided to give these a try. They're not as silent as I'd hoped though.

Nick Geraedts
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Post by Nick Geraedts » Thu Jun 12, 2008 6:59 pm

Be careful when buying PWM fans. Most motherboards today still only have one or two PWM controllable fan headers (there are four pins on the header). Otherwise, the fan will always run at full speed.

Get yourself a set of plain-jane 92mm Nexus fans if they're available. You should be able to slow them down using your motherboard's BIOS or SpeedFan, or a few FanMates. :)

snq
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Post by snq » Thu Jun 12, 2008 7:05 pm

Yea, this mainboard has 2 PWM controllable headers, one for the CPU fan and another one for the system fan. Obviously I needed one more so I did a bit of rewiring and connected 2 fans to the one available PWM header. The RPM signal (green wire) from one fan is disconnected, but using one PWM signal (blue wire) to control 2 fans works fine!
Other than 2 PWM there's also 2 regular fan headers, but they don't seem to be controllable by anything, neither the BIOS nor speedfan can change the fan speed of a regular fan on one of those.

At full speed they sound like a vacuum cleaner ;) But at 35% they're just a tiny bit too loud, or maybe I'm just a bit spoilt after getting used to a system with only a couple 120mm fans and a Reserator. Also my office-to-be is completely empty atm because I'm waiting for my new desks, so I'm sure it will be a bit more quiet once I get some stuff in there and the sound doesn't bounce from all walls.

snq
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Post by snq » Fri Jun 13, 2008 10:02 am

I decided to start cleaning up a bit :)

So I removed the molex thingies from the fan wires, soldered the resistor onto the red wire, and sleeved the whole thing.
I also sleeved the front panel wires, which was a bit of a PITA, but it was worth the effort!

Before:
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After:
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Next up are the IDE and SATA cables, but I'm not allowed to shut down the machine at the moment as my girlfriend is copying some files to her new PC. Her old PC (which I stole the 3800+ from) only had a 100 mbit nic so it took her half a day to backup all of her stuff. She's really impressed with the speed now ;) <3 a girlfriend that appreciates technology :mrgreen:

I did some bandwidth tests and the network is definitely not a bottleneck, I get over 90MB/sec when doing a bandwidth test, I'm really quite satisfied with that number, especially because there's 2 cheap switches and about 30 meters/100 ft of cable between me and the server. Copying files goes at around 75MB/s for large files.

Anyway, girlfriend is done now, I'll be back later with more pics ;)

snq
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Post by snq » Fri Jun 13, 2008 11:33 am

Ok, so here we go :)

Before:
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After:
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And the other side...
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This will have to do for now. I'm still thinking of a good way to either silence the 92mms, or mount 120mm fans behind the disks. And I want to somehow suspend the disks without losing too much space. I'm thinking of some kind of bar all the way from the floppy bay to the rear, so it can be fastened in both ends. That should make it easily take the weight of the disks if I were to suspend them from that bar.

I did lower the fan speed to about 750 RPM, which seems to work, they keep running. And most of the noise is gone now, I can now only hear it when I'm really listening for noise. The easiest way to tell it's on is by looking at the power led, not by being deafened by the noise like with the old server :)

thejamppa
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Post by thejamppa » Fri Jun 13, 2008 2:35 pm

Case looks awesome and you've done excellent job with cables. Your choice of case fans is good too. Nexus is still one of the best one.

That's good looking board. I like the NB more than its S2H little brothers, which seems to go hot. Only beef with me in that case: USB 2.0 headers nearly middle of the board?! C'mon Gigabyte... Now that's not ridicioules... its plain wrong.

I am now making my next board choice: Gigabyte GA-MA78G-S3H ( same board than in you ) or its little brother: Gigabyte GA-MA78G-S2H, which seems to have eSata but has pretty lousy NB cooler.

Its tough between those two. In S3H I love the all solid caps and bigger NB heatsink but I hate the USB headers placement. It also has good expansion for future.

Could you check your NB's temp's for me? It might be the crucial thing to help me decide my board betwen S2H and S3H. Thank you very much.

snq
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Post by snq » Fri Jun 13, 2008 3:04 pm

I chose the S3H mainly because of the number of SATA ports and the upgrading options, it supports all current AM2/AM2+ CPUs and up to 16 GB of memory. Onboard graphics is perfect for a server. Basically a lot of stuff for little cash.
I agree the placement of the USB headers could be better, but there are 4 regular USB ports on the back as well. The ports being in a weird place is not something I would discard a mainboard for :)
I didn't really look at the S2H tho, because the number of (internal) SATA ports was a pretty important factor for me.

As for the temperatures, there don't seem to be any sensors there but the NB and SB heatsinks are "slightly warm", as in I can feel that they're a bit warmer than ambient temp but far from hot.

The only issue I've had with it so far is that the stock bios had some memory issue, it wouldn't post with more than 1 stick installed. There's supposedly a problem with the first bios that will make it not boot with 4 GB installed, but for me anything >1 GB didn't work.
A bios upgrade fixed that, but it still won't take more than 2 of my Ballistix sticks. 2 Ballistix + 2 Corsair works fine tho, so the problem might just be with the sticks.

snq
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Post by snq » Sat Jun 14, 2008 8:47 pm

Well, I spent the past 4 hours trying to silence the system. I checked for noise sources by removing everything, and reconnecting stuff one part at a time.

It turned out the PSU wasn't exactly silent. It's far from noisy but with the harddrives disconnected, it was the loudest part in the system. So I fiddled around a bit and tried different fans. I had a Scythe 120mm fan that came with a Ninja, and it was absolutely silent! Unfortunately I couldn't use it, because it wouldn't spin up every time, the PSU only gives 4.4 Volts to the fan when cold. A Nexus fan didn't start either, and I ended up using a 3-speed chassis fan from a P180. They're not the quietest fans but at least it spins up every time and it was a lot more quiet than the original (Adda) fan in the PSU, I set it at medium speed and have the speed selector sticking out of the PSU so I can change the speed if I want to, it's silent as long as I dont put my ear directly to the PSU :)

The next noisy thing was the CPU fan. I had it running at 25% or around 720 RPM. At that speed it had a bit of a humming noise. I found that raising the RPM to 780 RPM made it disappear almost completely, without causing more "wind" noise, so that became a bit quieter as well. I'm still not entirely satisfied with it tho. Zalmans fans almost always disappoint me in terms of noise level, but I keep buying them :? Anyway, I'm probably going to replace it, I just need to find something that will fit in this relatively low profile chassis.

I also lowered the RPM of the front fan a bit, it's now spinning at 650 RPM. I might put the Scythe fan in its place tho, I was really impressed by how quiet it was, no bearing noise, nothing. That was at 4.4V tho so I don't know how effective it will be at that speed.

Anyway, now all fans were as quiet as they could be. I can hear a slight difference in noise level when I unplug all of them, but I have 5 major noise makers remaining: the harddrives!
They are now officially the loudest parts in the system, even tho I suspended all of them with rubber cords. And they're all Samsung drives, pretty quiet to begin with. The idle noise is what's bothering me and I'm actually not sure how I'm going to solve this one.
The dampening material I'm using isn't the best, but it helps. I'm wondering if using some real material like acoustipack would help better? The problem is also that I need to have them close to an opening in the case in order to get some airflow around them.
Right now I have the disks suspended in the front, and kept the fans running in the back. Cooling doesn't seem to be an issue, I've been defragmenting 2 drives for about an hour now and their temperature is stable at 31-32C.

Well, if anyone has any suggestions for lowering the HD noise, I'd love to hear them :) Most of the usual stuff doesn't really work for me as I need to silence all 5 of them, not just 1 or 2.

thejamppa
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Post by thejamppa » Sun Jun 15, 2008 12:21 am

Get 4x Scythe Quiet Drives and place them on Sorthobane on cubes floor?

snq
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Post by snq » Sun Jun 15, 2008 12:42 am

The problem with those is that they are quite expensive, and I'd need 5 of them. And with that many, that'd leave no space whatsoever for air to flow around so the disks will run hot.
I'm kind of obsessed with keeping my disks cool since I've had 2 disks die on me because of overheating a long time ago ;)

I'm trying to figure out some way to put all disks into one big enclosure, but there must be decent air flow around them. I looked at some 3-in-3 and 4-in-3 enclosures that use 3 5.25 places for 3 or 4 disks and have a 120mm fan in front, but I doubt any of them will help much for keeping the noise down.

thejamppa
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Post by thejamppa » Sun Jun 15, 2008 1:17 am

at least two bottom most HDD's you could turn them on side ways on piece of sorthobane and secure them with bunge cord or similar. You might get 3rd HDD down there too. But in upper HDD cage I doubt you can get them into sideways.

Your best change is to buy some bungee cord, stretch magic or similar and remove HDD trays completely. Then use screws to screw HDD's and give them attachment point for the cord and hang them on elastic cord in place of your HDD racks. That yould need some tinkering but you would definately get 5 HDD's near those 92mm fan vicinity.

snq
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Post by snq » Sun Jun 15, 2008 1:29 am

I'm already suspending all of them seperately using bungee cords and I still think they're too loud ;) Like the system disk the pic, except I moved the other 4 to the front as well, and got rid of the DVD.
Haven't updated the pics yet as I'm still testing.

I need some kind of sound wall in front of the disks, but somehow without losing the airflow around them.

Image

amjedm
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Post by amjedm » Sun Jun 15, 2008 6:43 am

Very nice setup :)

I found the idle noise of a single Samsung P80 irritating so swapped it for a T166. Still no joy so ended up buying a Scythe Quiet Drive.

Didn't make much difference until MikeC suggested I put the Quiet Drive on foam. Can't hear it now (thank God).

Sooty
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Post by Sooty » Sun Jun 15, 2008 7:20 am

Nice setup. I've not time enough to read this all now, but I'll be back to read up more, but one interesting point: you've got the airflow in the mobo side, running opposite from what YY intended (IIRC).

Image

YY intended the front 120 to blow outwards, and you've covered up the side panel 92mm hole. Your temps look good though.

snq
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Post by snq » Sun Jun 15, 2008 10:49 am

amjedm wrote:I found the idle noise of a single Samsung P80 irritating so swapped it for a T166. Still no joy so ended up buying a Scythe Quiet Drive.

Didn't make much difference until MikeC suggested I put the Quiet Drive on foam. Can't hear it now (thank God).
The IDE disk is a T133, the 500 GB disks are T166 and the 750 is an F1 :) I don't see any practical way I can put all of them in their own enclosure, I need to be able to add disks as well. I might try some Acoustipack on the inside of the case and see if that helps anything :)
Sooty wrote:Nice setup. I've not time enough to read this all now, but I'll be back to read up more, but one interesting point: you've got the airflow in the mobo side, running opposite from what YY intended (IIRC).
YY intended the front 120 to blow outwards, and you've covered up the side panel 92mm hole. Your temps look good though.
Hmm, where did you get that info? It sounds a bit weird to have an exhaust fan in the lower front, the only way the air can go from there outward is down through a hole in the front cover.
The manual for the case is really worthless tho so I don't know, I just did what seemed most logical to me ;) There's some holes in the back of the case where the warm air can escape. Anyway, the temps are fine. I measured them using a regular in/out thermometer and the temperature inside the case is about 4 degrees warmer than ambient.

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Post by NyteOwl » Sun Jun 15, 2008 11:01 am

Hmm, where did you get that info? It sounds a bit weird to have an exhaust fan in the lower front, the only way the air can go from there outward is down through a hole in the front cover.
The YY website lists it as an exhaust fan. The air intake for the motherboard compartment would then be from the rear ventilation holes and the CPU intake fan on the side panel.

Nice case with some interesting possibilities. I'm not sure there would be sufficient airflow for a CPU heatsink like a Scythe though without an fan on it.

snq
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Post by snq » Sun Jun 15, 2008 11:15 am

NyteOwl wrote:The YY website lists it as an exhaust fan. The air intake for the motherboard compartment would then be from the rear ventilation holes and the CPU intake fan on the side panel.

Nice case with some interesting possibilities. I'm not sure there would be sufficient airflow for a CPU heatsink like a Scythe though without an fan on it.
Right, I saw that now. I think it would be pretty strange to use it as an exhaust tho so I'll keep things as they are :)

A fanless heatsink might work with the side hole opened, if you can find a heatsink with the right design, a tower-style heatsink might not work that well. But I'd rather have that hole closed and have a near silent fan on the heatsink.

IsaacKuo
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Post by IsaacKuo » Sun Jun 15, 2008 4:09 pm

snq wrote:It turned out the PSU wasn't exactly silent. It's far from noisy but with the harddrives disconnected, it was the loudest part in the system. So I fiddled around a bit and tried different fans. I had a Scythe 120mm fan that came with a Ninja, and it was absolutely silent! Unfortunately I couldn't use it, because it wouldn't spin up every time, the PSU only gives 4.4 Volts to the fan when cold.
You are not obligated to use the PSU's internal fan header to power the PSU fan. You can simply connect it directly to black/red molex lines for a constant 5v, or connect it to a fan controller. I usually power my PSU fans with a simple constant 5v.
snq wrote:Well, if anyone has any suggestions for lowering the HD noise, I'd love to hear them :) Most of the usual stuff doesn't really work for me as I need to silence all 5 of them, not just 1 or 2.
Over the years, I've come to ultimately accept only two methods of silencing 3.5" drives:

1) Put the file server in another room.

or

2) Spin down the 3.5" drive. Obviously, this is approach has...limitations. ;) But seriously, there are some good applications for mostly spun down drives. One is RAMboot, where you copy the OS into RAM and then spin down the hard drive. Another is to use smaller older hard drives as rsync backups. The drives are only spun up during a backup update.

So, for example, instead of putting a bunch of drives into a redundant RAID array, I'd use only one or two big hard drives for the file server. The remaining smaller drives can be used for backups, and are only spun up during backup updates (rsync is a nice tool for only copying over changed/moved files).

In your case, it seems that the hard drives aren't in any sort of RAID array, so I don't see any obvious reason why all the hard drives need to be spinning in the first place. Your solution might be as simple as figuring out how to set the drives to automatically spin down after several minutes of inactivity.

Stravos
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Post by Stravos » Sun Jun 15, 2008 4:17 pm

Seems like you have plenty of room on the motherboard side to rig up more HDD suspension (or some other form of damping) if there isn't enough room for all four on the other side.

snq
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Post by snq » Mon Jun 16, 2008 3:04 am

IsaacKuo wrote:You are not obligated to use the PSU's internal fan header to power the PSU fan. You can simply connect it directly to black/red molex lines for a constant 5v, or connect it to a fan controller. I usually power my PSU fans with a simple constant 5v.
I know ;) But I figured if I do it this way, it will spin faster automatically when/if the PSU is getting too warm.
IsaacKuo wrote:1) Put the file server in another room.
Hehe, I used to have the old server in another room, next to the fridge to be more precise. But that was mainly because it sounded a lot more, this new machine is silent in comparison. The disadvantage was that I had no screen or keyboard there, so no access other than over remote desktop/VNC.
IsaacKuo wrote:2) Spin down the 3.5" drive. Obviously, this is approach has...limitations. ;)

In your case, it seems that the hard drives aren't in any sort of RAID array, so I don't see any obvious reason why all the hard drives need to be spinning in the first place. Your solution might be as simple as figuring out how to set the drives to automatically spin down after several minutes of inactivity.
That's actually a very good idea :) One disadvantage is that there's about 10-15 secs delay when a drive needs to spin up, but it's not like I'm acessing them all day long. I don't think windows will let me spin down the system disk, but I'll replace it with a suitable 2.5'' :)
So you just cost me a lot of money, because now I'm going to have to order a new drive, cpu heatsink, and perhaps some fans ;)

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Post by IsaacKuo » Tue Jun 17, 2008 4:28 am

I can say definitively that Windows XP CAN spin down the OS drive. I'm currently doing some work on an old Windows XP machine with just one hard drive, and it certainly spins down that drive after some minutes of inactivity.

Naturally, this depends on if there's any software running that periodically accesses the hard drive. For example, a "My Pictures" screen saver would prevent the hard drive from spinning down.

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