I recently became fascinated with the idea of putting an HBA in a Lenovo Tiny. My plan is a use a LSI 9200-8e as shown
here and attach a 4010 fan using this
adapter. I wrongfully assumed the HBA would have a built in temp senser that I could get data from and pipe it into Home Assistant for temp alerts.
My main questions are
- Do I even need to monitor the temp or is it safe to assume the 4010 fan is good enough?
- Can I attach a temp probe to the case of the Lenovo Tiny and just monitor that for excessive heat
- If the 4010 fan fails and the HBA overheats will this cause damage to connected disks or will I just need to replace the HBA?
- Is putting an HBA in a Lenovo Tiny cool in theory and horrible in practice?
Well, for starters, you chose the right HBA for this application. The 9200-8e is pretty low power so you only need to move 6~7W of heat which is not too bad. It probably isn't that critical to monitor the temps, or at least to rig a temp probe and all that might not be worth the effort. But no one can fault you if you want to do so either.
If the HBA fails from overheating, the usual behavior I see is that the IOC will reset itself and the driver will attempt to restart the controller. During this "reset", I/O will cease and you'll probably get I/O errors from the driver level. This will often repeat, and if the overheating is severe enough, it will repeat more frequently until the controller does not start up anymore. I don't believe it will cause damage to your drives. And if you have a good resilient file system, no data should be lost, but you may encounter I/O errors so some transactions will not complete.
I don't see a problem putting a fan in there as long as you're not causing turbulence that counteracts the intended airflow patterns. If you're just helping move more air through the chassis, that's probably a good thing.
