Can anyone help cool my drives in Fractal Node 804? All drives 40+ C

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jang430

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
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At Full speed, my fans rev to 2295 RPM, fans don't rev up and down. But I believe that will destroy my fans. Temperatures still at 41, 42-44, 1 or 2 in 47 degrees. Are you using the screen? Or have you removed the screen at intake?
 

Zathras

New Member
Sep 15, 2015
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Ottawa, Canada
Just to clarify my setup I have two fans cooling the 8 hard drives in the storage compartment of the case, both Fractal Design Silent Series R2 (intake is 120mm, 1200RPM in the upper position and exhaust is 140mm, 1000RPM at the back) connected to the motherboard fan headers of a Supermicro X10SLL-F and the fan control mode set to "Optimal". The front dust filter is installed, and the power supply underneath the drives is a Seasonic G550 with the fan intake at the bottom of the case.

Your drive temps are really odd if they are low power/green, unless your ambient temp is super high. What are you using to read the drive temps?
 

K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
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Looking at some of your screenshots, it looks like you have a SuperMicro board. Please confirm the motherboard and CPU. If so, try these steps
  1. Connect your CPU and fans on the motherboard side to FAN1 - FAN4 headers on the motherboard.
  2. Use a Fan splitter cable to connect all 3 fans marked in Post #4 by @marcoi to connect to FANA header on the motherboard.
  3. Reset your BMC to factory defaults. (Maintenance -> Factory Defaults -> Reset)
  4. Once the BMC comes back online define the fan thresholds manually with the commands 1 and 2 below.
    1. ipmitool sensor thresh FANA lower 200 250 300
    2. ipmitool sensor thresh FANA upper 1300 1400 1500
    3. This should set the thresholds for the 3 Noctuas
  5. Restart your BMC (Maintenance -> Unit Reset -> Reset)
  6. Set the fan speed to Full
 

jang430

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
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Just to clarify my setup I have two fans cooling the 8 hard drives in the storage compartment of the case, both Fractal Design Silent Series R2 (intake is 120mm, 1200RPM in the upper position and exhaust is 140mm, 1000RPM at the back) connected to the motherboard fan headers of a Supermicro X10SLL-F and the fan control mode set to "Optimal". The front dust filter is installed, and the power supply underneath the drives is a Seasonic G550 with the fan intake at the bottom of the case.

Your drive temps are really odd if they are low power/green, unless your ambient temp is super high. What are you using to read the drive temps?
I also have 8 HDDs. I checked my drives physically, and they are mostly Seagate LPs, something like low power. I have Seasonic PSU, with fan intake also at bottom of the case. Front dust filters are also installed. The pictures I'm showing are either from my Unraid Dashboard, or IPMI Plugin I installed. I am also running out of options as of now. I never thought adding new fans to cool down the drives will be such tedious. Please don't give up on me yet guys :DScreen Shot 2017-06-07 at 10.51.57 PM.png
 

jang430

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
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Looking at some of your screenshots, it looks like you have a SuperMicro board. Please confirm the motherboard and CPU. If so, try these steps
  1. Connect your CPU and fans on the motherboard side to FAN1 - FAN4 headers on the motherboard.
  2. Use a Fan splitter cable to connect all 3 fans marked in Post #4 by @marcoi to connect to FANA header on the motherboard.
  3. Reset your BMC to factory defaults. (Maintenance -> Factory Defaults -> Reset)
  4. Once the BMC comes back online define the fan thresholds manually with the commands 1 and 2 below.
    1. ipmitool sensor thresh FANA lower 200 250 300
    2. ipmitool sensor thresh FANA upper 1300 1400 1500
    3. This should set the thresholds for the 3 Noctuas
  5. Restart your BMC (Maintenance -> Unit Reset -> Reset)
  6. Set the fan speed to Full
K D, I'm using Supermicro X9SCM-F motherboard, and using Xeon E3-1240 V2. Sounds like a plan. I hope it works. Will do it another day since it's late. Thanks for keeping hope alive :D
 

jang430

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
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While I still cannot fix that yet, I have a burning question. Why is my fan spinning faster than it's designed to be? It's supposed to be a 1300 RPM fan, so why am I reading 2000+ RPM? Are the readings wrong? Can the motherboard make it spin more than it's designed to?
 

jang430

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
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K D, Zathras, up to this morning before leaving house, I can hear fans revving up and down. For unknown reason, without changing anything, checking tonight, fans are in 1700 RPM earlier (about 1 hour earlier), then it went down to 540, now, it's at 1080. But it's not revving up and down anymore. It stays there sometimes, a few minutes, before changing to another RPM.

That was true up to a few minutes ago. Now, it's revving up and down again. Since I observed it's behavior earlier in the night that it wasn't revving up and down, haven't tried your advice. I think it's not consistently fixed yet. So I will try your suggestion once I get time to do it, and report back.
 

marcoi

Well-Known Member
Apr 6, 2013
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Gotha Florida
side note are you running the latest bios and bmc firmware? I just updated my server since i decommissioned it from home prod use. (testing freenas solo on it in a different case now) (note when you do the bmc, it requires you uncheck two boxes- see readme for guidance.)
upload_2017-6-8_11-49-49.png

also under configure, did you change the fan mode?
upload_2017-6-8_11-50-19.png
 

jang430

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
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Hello Marcoi, I am using the latest firmware and bmc. I will check version once again. So far, I get to change fan mode in Bios, and only Full gives me seemingly low temperatures. But it is noisy as hell, since the fans seem to spin way more than it is designed for. I said seemingly because there was once I saw all my drives at 35+ degrees while at full speed. I didn't observe it long enough to check if it went up again.

There seems to be 2 issues I'm faced with, constant revving up of fans, hence noisy, and temperature of hard drives. Since the fans don't stay steady, it's hard to say whether the high temp of drives is due to fans spinning to so low at times, or whether it isn't enough.

I will check versions as well and post back.

Sent from my LG-D855 using Tapatalk
 

jang430

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
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Running BIOS 2.2, and BMC 3.38, both the latest already.

Found out that the fan that is too noisy is in fact another Supermicro provided fan from 1U rackmount case that I use as CPU Fan. The 3 of the other fans are the Noctua. I followed the steps detailed above. Connected CPU Fan (Supermicro) to Fan 1, and Noctua Fans to Fan A. Reset BMC, set threshold. Set fans to full.

At Fans set to full, CPU Fan runs at 3300 RPM, and Noctuas run at 1275 (within limit of 1300 RPM). But the Fractal Design Node 804 is poised for TAKE OFF! :)

Despite 1275 RPM at full speed for Noctuas, the HDD temps seem to be at 40 to 41, older models go up to 45. Is this enough?

Is there a way to just lower the speed for the CPU fan, and not affect Noctuas' maximum speed at 1275 RPM?
 

K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
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See resource by @PigLover at Supermicro X9/X10/X11 Fan Speed Control

You can use IPMITOOL RAW commands to set cpu zone and fan zone speed independently now that you have hooked them up correctly.

40c avg at idle is still high. I try to keep temps at low 30s during idle. It could be that the P12s are not enough. Alternatives that I'll recommend are Arctic F12, Noctua F12 or even better Noctua iPPC 3000.
 

marcoi

Well-Known Member
Apr 6, 2013
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You could also get a PWM Fan RPM Reduction Cable to reduce cpu fan speeds if the ipmitools option doesn't do it for you.
 

jang430

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
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Marcoi, K D, Zathras, and anyone here, what finally solved the issue is summarized below. Marcoi, you're last input is partially correct.

I'm happy to finally report that the suggestion of another member in another forum of getting fans set to Heavy IO, CPU fan stayed constant at close to 50% (therefore, quiet), and Fan A (Noctuas) stayed constant at about 750 RPM. I believe it stayed at 750 RPM due to fans set at Heavy IO mode, and low noise adapters connected to the fans. That combination gave me constant 750 RPM for the Noctuas.

Before following a suggestion to set fans to Heavy IO, had fans set to Standard mode, and was revving up and down. I wouldn't have guessed that heavy IO will make it stable at about 50%. The fans revving up and down not only affected the Noctuas, it also affected the CPU fan (Supermicro provided fan). At high speed, that Supermicro fan (CPU fan) is too noisy.

At 750 RPM though, Noctuas won't be enough to cool my hard drives. In the end, what cooled my hard drives are the original fans that came with the Fractal case, all 3 of them connected to the HDD side. All those fans have 3 pins, that I connected to the fan switch that came with the case, set to High. That took care of the fans blowing the HDDs. Since I have a dedicated CPU Fan, the motherboard side of the case, with Fan A (Noctuas) blowing at low speed, it doesn't really get hot.

What a journey! Thanks to all of you guys!
 

jang430

Active Member
Mar 16, 2017
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See resource by @PigLover at Supermicro X9/X10/X11 Fan Speed Control

You can use IPMITOOL RAW commands to set cpu zone and fan zone speed independently now that you have hooked them up correctly.

40c avg at idle is still high. I try to keep temps at low 30s during idle. It could be that the P12s are not enough. Alternatives that I'll recommend are Arctic F12, Noctua F12 or even better Noctua iPPC 3000.
K D, where do I execcute IPMITOOL RAW commands? Do I ssh into the BMC IP address?

In Unraid, I can't execute that command. If you are familar to Unraid, I installed IPMI tool plugin, and ssh'd to Unraid NAS, then went to /mnt folder to try executing the command you provided. IPMITOOL command isn't recognized.

Additional question: What do you mean by now that fans are connected corretly?
 
Last edited:

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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Additional question: What do you mean by now that fans are connected corretly?
He's talking about the cooling zones on supermicro mainboards:
Fan 1-5:* controlled by cpu temperature (usually in combination with an air shroud to improve airflow and reduce noise)
Fan a-d*: controlled by system temperature (for the add on cards and chipset/onboard sas controller)
*number of fan headers may vary

If you set "heavy io" in ipmi it's basically what @K D means with setting indepentend fan speeds:
fan 1-5 stay at optimal (or 30%), but fan a-d are set to standard (50%)
 

K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
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What @i386 said above.

At 750 RPM though, Noctuas won't be enough to cool my hard drives. In the end, what cooled my hard drives are the original fans that came with the Fractal case, all 3 of them connected to the HDD side. All those fans have 3 pins, that I connected to the fan switch that came with the case, set to High. That took care of the fans blowing the HDDs. Since I have a dedicated CPU Fan, the motherboard side of the case, with Fan A (Noctuas) blowing at low speed, it doesn't really get hot.
Additionally, The noctuas at full speed dont seem to be enough to cool your drives. So reducing their speeds is not going to help cool the drives. Looks like then fractal fans helped and you are set now.

I am not very familiar with unraid. I use ipmitool from my mac or from a freenas vm.