Arctic P8 or other consumer fan for 2U Supermicro chassis?

[AveryFreeman]

Unless there's stuff out there that I've never heard of, I don't think you can set or change RPM on a mechanical drive. Even Western Digital admitted after the fact that Green drives were fixed RPM.

Most of the "savings" was from agressive headparking and the like, which in the early models would wear them out in a matter of months. During the period when Green and Red were mostly the same mechanically, those tools were great to set the Greens to mirror Red behavior and no wear out too fast. WD put a stop to that though in later models.

Yep, I did this with wdidle.exe on a USB with a copy of freedos. Then, wdtler.exe apparently enabled TLER functionality. My Greens were as new as 2010, out of 8 I had since 2009, four died after being my main file storage for basically a decade, two holdovers are currently recording 6 cameras on Blue Iris 24/7 because I set it up as a backup to milestone and the milestone VM took a shit during an upgrade. Seeking with them is crap though, I'm replacing them with 4TB HGST 7200 SAS drives any day now (or replacing the whole thing with milestone again). Never heard anything about them changing rpm dynamically AFAICR.

Just checking, but you're aware that IPMITOOL settings aren't persistent? (or at least they never were for me!) You either need to run the command(s) after boot each time, or have a script that runs. As noted elsewhere though, the best practice is to set the fan duty cycle at Full/100% in the Sensors menu of the BMC, and use IPMI tool to adjust from there. This means that your boots will always be at full speed till the scipt runs (or you hand jam the command).

Yeah, I didn't think they were persistent as I've seen people discussing startup scripts, chalk it up to wishful thinking. I was hoping you'd surprise me

My 920SQs are the quietest server power supplies I've ever heard (not that I'm an expert). That said, there's other, non SQ supplies that are darn quiet, while others are super loud. If you're curious just how loud your PSU fans are, you can always unplug the other fans (MOMENTARIALLY!), so that only the PSU fan is running under power, and boot the system to a prompt. It won't all fry in a minute, and a minute is often all it takes for you to say "OK, that's not just grating on my ears, its really grating!".

I actually unplugged a power supply the other day while the machine was running and found out the alarm goes off if the PSU is unplugged, but not if the PSU is removed from the machine. That seemed kind of self-defeating, hopefully if a PSU is actually non-operational the alarm will still go off to alert me of the problem.

I have 500w PSUs in my 836, presumably because I did a power consumption analysis and found the system probably never goes over 275w, so anything over 550w is dropping in efficiency exponentially (the most efficient pairing is a PSU that is 2x what you need for the system).

This makes pairing SM PSUs kind of hard for home users because their offerings are all so damn beefy, but barely anyone even knows about the efficiency curve so I guess the perception that "bigger is better" is a good marketing excuse to entice people out of more money.

I also have some 720w PSUs that were in my 825, and I swapped them out. They sound like garbage, just like you said - grating. The 500w ones are fine though, I'll find out the model # and edit later, don't want to bounce around on my phone and find all I've written has been lost.

Unraid is neat for lots of reasons and seems to bring a lot of functionality to people who are less technically inclined. I see their folks struggling with vfio every now and then when I'm looking up kernel flags. Not meant to be a dig, those are complicated things to be doing with an os targeted at the more general market, it's neat that it's possible for them, as well (but they do struggle).

I was able to spin down disks intermittently using camcontrol in freebsd back when I used it with a passthrough lsi 2008, I found it to be negligibly useful and never re-enabled it when I migrated to OmniOS (ages ago), but I might do it again. Def not a bad idea for my dedicated backup system. Video recording, not so much. It's all about the application/use case, amirite?

Just upgraded laterally to the new Truenas Scale and haven't even looked under the hood yet. Went from FreeBSD 13 to Debian and operates just the same, was completely transparent from a user interface perspective. Super impressed! Want to see what this whole "scale out v. scale up" storage thing is about first-hand. I have a feeling I'm going to like it, though.

 

[AveryFreeman]

Keep the original fans, go here and install this >> SUPERFANS on GITHUB.

Add it to /etc/crontab @reboot with the preferred setting and be happy. I have it in a 2U Dual-Socket production server at 12% with 20C ambient temps here and it's super silent. You can also intervene manually with superfans -u USER -p PASSWORD set 20 (IPMI user data).

Sounds nice. Could give me some great ideas for custom settings or my own script.

BTW you can set the fan speed on your phone if you don't want to tolerate the start-up noises, it'll just reset to 100% a few times during the process so be prepared to send the raw commands over and over (they persistent in the application, so it's just a matter of hitting the send button after you copy them in).

Then, once it's started up, presumably your ipmitool wrapper will be functional...

I'm paradoxically too lazy to hit a button, so I'm going to spend hours tearing apart my old SM 825 to try out this stack of P8s I blew $30 on.

I actually think reversing the fan direction is going to be super beneficial for my drive temperatures, the low RPMs just don't pull enough air, as evidenced by my time I had resistors on the fans previously and they cooked, so blowing straight on the drives is probably better for keeping them cool at low RPMs I'm guessing.

 

[nabsltd]

hopefully if a PSU is actually non-operational the alarm will still go off to alert me of the problem.

If the power supply is plugged into the distributor but not functional for any reason (not plugged in, died, etc.), then the alarm sounds. But, if there is no power supply installed, the alarm will not sound.

 

[Markess]

have 500w PSUs in my 836, presumably because I did a power consumption analysis and found the system probably never goes over 275w, so anything over 550w is dropping in efficiency exponentially (the most efficient pairing is a PSU that is 2x what you need for the system).

This makes pairing SM PSUs kind of hard for home users because their offerings are all so damn beefy, but barely anyone even knows about the efficiency curve so I guess the perception that "bigger is better" is a good marketing excuse to entice people out of more money.

I think a big part of it is a "one size fits all" mentality. They put those large capacity supplies in so that a chassis take on the majority of motherboards (and associated CPUs) in their product line, with no regard to efficiency. In an enterprise setting, where a couple watts each adds up in a bit server room, I can see how its super important to size the PSUs correctly though.

In a home lab, like mine (that's in the house with me) noise is a big factor though. Those 920s are really really quiet. And even though none of the boxes that have them need anywhere near half that much wattage, the efficiency difference is minor. I tried the 500w supplies, and they were Sooooo loud compared to the 920s, and only a half watt or so difference at idle.

At one point, I did convert one server (an ancient SC933 I picked up locally for $20) from redundant to fixed, because it was incredibly loud and there were no quieter redundant supplies that would fit. I took out the PDB and left two of the three redundant supplies in place to fill the holes. A PWS-605P-1H was almost an exact fit to replace the third and is very quiet and well behaved. The motherboard I originally used had poor fan control options and resisted IPMI tool, so I tried Arctic F9 & F8 "TC" fans, which have thermal sensors. I stuck the sensors for the fan wall in the path of the air coming back off the drives, and the sensors for the back fans went near the HBA. I set the motherboard's fan control to "100%" and left the fans alone to do their thing. Worked great. Not much later I changed the motherboard out for something that happened to have pretty good fan control. But, the TC fans were working so well, I left it alone.

If the power supply is plugged into the distributor but not functional for any reason (not plugged in, died, etc.), then the alarm sounds. But, if there is no power supply installed, the alarm will not sound.

I run pretty much everything at home on one PSU. A couple chassis each came with a pair of 920SQ PSUs, while the others were bare or had other, louder, options. I swapped PSUs around so that everything that can take one, hasd one 920SQ. The second slots have non-SQ supplies that are pulled out a half inch or so, just to plug the hole.

There was an article on the main site a while back about power savings running on one PSU, but I do it mostly for the noise factor and helped by the fact that my home lab data isn't "critical".

https://www.servethehome.com/single-or-redundant-psus-impact-on-power-consumption/