Noise level on Dell R / T x20 series

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Roelf Zomerman

Active Member
Jan 10, 2019
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blog.azureinfra.com
Hi everyone,

The Dell x10 series (410/610/710) series are known for their noise levels due to the fans... while I've been able to replace the fans in my T710.. I was wondering if someone had some info on the 620 series in Rack/Tower format..

The servers will be running in a warm/hot room (30-33C) , and I still want to have the noise down..

Would it be better to go for R series (1u) or Tower series in that case
 
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brinox

Member
May 7, 2013
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I had a Dell R720 in my home server room and was bothered by the minimum 20% fans speed duty when all 8 LFF bays were populated. on top of that, it moderated the fan speed 2-5% on a regular basis that was rather annoying in nearby rooms. Eventually, I picked up a T430 from eBay which has a single high powered 120x38 PWM fan. In the same configuration (1 proc, 8 disks populated), I could hardly hear that the thing was on. Even when running a full transcode on 6 of the 8 cores, it still hardly spun up past its idle fan speed.

I will eventually be moving my Proxmox installation over to this hardware and will keep it in use for a long time I imagine. The T620 has two 92mm fans which are closer to the 80mm fans in the R720 and will inevitably sound louder due to that. Go for the T330/T430 chassis if you can find a good deal on one IMO!
 

vanfawx

Active Member
Jan 4, 2015
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Vancouver, Canada
I can confirm, we have a bunch of R620's and they are NOT quiet. If you fully populate all DIMMs too, the fans will ratchet up quite high. @brinox has the right idea, go for the T series, as they were built for office environments.

Also, intake of 35C air is pretty high for a rack server. I'm not sure I'd expect any 1U to be quiet in that setup.
 

Spartacus

Well-Known Member
May 27, 2019
788
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Austin, TX
I have a pair of R420, the noise with the newest fw sucks, the original fw its alot more reasonable but far from silent. Even in a half rack enclosure with egg crate foam padded for noise reduction. They also combo together poorly, same fans and speed build on each other being the same noise frequency range.