Shouldn't matter how DEEP the fans are, they just mount by normal fan screws anyways, I swapped my SC933 chassis 4 x 92mm fans with noctua ones.... And also the rear ones with generic fans and the beast is damn near silent now. Noisy fan is now the psu 40mm one.... But that's not an obtrusive noise. It has a triple psu, but I only insert one psu fully.... Other two are just to block the holes... It runs fine and cool with 7200rpm drivesSorry for reviving this relatively old thread, but I'm in somewhat of the same dilemma myself.
I'm curious, jcl333 what did you end up with?
I'm currently planning on building a SM storage server myself, and am trying to ascertain if I will be able to get noise down to an acceptable level, since this server will be located in an office at home. I am not aiming for silent or quiet, I am absolutely aware that this thing will not be that, but I'm hoping it can get to a level where it is tolerable.
This would be a SM 847 chassis (36-bay) with a SM Xeon E5v3 mainboard and 1280W SQ PSUs. The PSUs are insanely overpowered for my needs but that's what comes with the chassis/solution, also I believe that the combination of them being SQ supplies and typical load being well below 50 % should make the PSUs quite okay, noise-wise?
The chassis has 7x FAN-0126L4 standard, which are 7K RPM 53.5 dB monsters. As far as I can understand, using the "optimal" setting in the BIOS/IPMI should make the fans run about half-speed, which should help. I'd also imagine that I could remove several of these fans if necessary, since I will only be running a single E5v3 with a 85W TDP and no expansion cards, while the chassis has been thermally designed to support a DP setup with TDPs of up to 2x 135-145W I believe. There are several posts in this thread about swapping fans for less noisy versions. The 0126L4's are 80x80x38 and unfortunately the "quietest" alternatives at that size are 45 dB. Is anyone aware of quiet fans available in this size? (the ones I've been able to find are 25-30 mm deep).
Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions?
You can also use the noctua fan adapters too quieten it further if you liked ( blue and black) which drop the voltage down and as such the speed of the fans down.
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