Time for a long overdue fan swap write-up. I’m going to be referencing information from previous posts by myself and
@tby throughout so read through this thread if you missed anything.
The Dell J23 comes standard with 4 60x60x38mm hi-speed fans. At top speed they move a shopping 67CFM of air. Unfortunately this is at 12,000 rpms and at 65dBA. This means that they move a LOT of air but the unit sounds like a 747 taking off. They are standard PWM fans meaning that they can be throttled by a fan controller. There are a couple of tricks you can do to silence the J23. You could put a resistor in line on one of the fan wires to make it run slower, or
@tby has shown how to make it run with only 2 fans at once. I have done the 2 fan mod myself but it was still just too loud for me. I started looking around for replacement fans, but knew that I needed high flow fans due to the nature of the unit. It turns out that high-flow and low noise don’t go together in a 60mm fan.
My solution: Sanyo Denki 9G0612P4H0011
9G0612P4H0011 Sanyo Denki | Mouser
This fan moves 43CFM at 49dBA max. These fans are 60x60x25mm but because of the way the J23 fan module is built, it will allow for shorter depth fans. Most importantly, they are PWM standard. The problem was that they don’t come with a connector, just bare wire. So, looking at the PWM standard, it actually calls out the molex connector part number for the connector and the pins.
47054-1000 Molex | Mouser
08-52-0105 Molex | Mouser
Make sure to order extras of both.
The next step was to attach the pins to the fans the stick them into the connector in the right order. Use either one of the reference documents or the original fans as a template to determine pinout. The original fans are black-red-yellow-blue. Unfortunately the new fans don’t have a blue wire, they have a brown wire instead, but because they were PWM compliant, I knew that the brown and blue were equivalent.
Here is the fan module with stock fans
New and old fans side by side. The top two are the new fans. Note that on the left it only appears that the new one is smaller, they are the same height and width. On the right, you see the difference in the depth of the two fans.
Here is the fan module with the new fans installed
I only installed 2 of the new fans using the mod that
@tby came up with. I figured that if it wasn’t enough, I’d know soon enough because they would be running at high speed most of the time. It has been running for a little over a week now and seems to be running fine with the 2 fans. It is significantly quieter than it was before. Unfortunately I can’t state conclusively anything on temperature since I didn’t think to take notes of HDD temp before the change…
If anyone has any further questions, feel free to ask me