1U Servers are noisy, looking for some advice

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So here i am the owner of shiny “new” Dell R640 10-bay with NVMe but… I’m not happy about it, it’s all my fault as well.

I decided to pick this up as an upgrade for my R630 and cycle my R610 out of DEV duty. The new R640 is fine but the sound, it’s not crazy loud but with the fans seemingly locked at a minimum of 33% it’s just too loud to be powered on 24/7 in my server rack which unfortunately is in my lounge room :frowning:

I naively went into this knowing 1U servers are loud but after reading up about the “Sound Cap” profile and the acoustic documents, posts on Reddit which don’t describe the sound of these things any more than “they are loud like all 1U servers” i just figured well it can’t be much different to the R630.

This leaves me in a tricky place i can just try to deal with 50db of background noise in my living space, but i know I’ll go crazy if the rest of the family doesn’t start complaining first, or i could look at replacements but shopping for a 1U server I’m more or less going to find the same issues since that’s just par for the course for most 1U machines.

I can live with about 40db of noise which is my current baseline from the rest of the rack but i’m not confident i can find that in a 1U server, and currently i also don’t have space for a larger form factor machine.

What have you done in this situation?

I’m curious to know how people have transitioned from a 1U server to quieter consumer grade hardware and what challenges you encountered?

I’m open to ideas of mini PC clusters or anything i can squeeze into 1U that will be not silent but quiet enough.

Curious to in general what you are running for your virtualisation needs.

My R630 currently has a single CPU installed and 256GB of RAM which memory wise is about 50-60% utilised and two RAID-10s for VM storage, having moved from VMware to Proxmox i should have some more architectural flexibility than i did previously, VMware being one of the reasons i decided to stick with server hardware to this point, iDRAC being the next biggest one.

Here’s hoping i can find a path moving forward, pretty unfortunate purchase i made for myself though :frowning_with_open_mouth:

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2U Epyc Rome / Ryzen Build for Homelab
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I have seen noctua fan swaps on Reddit /r/homelab for 1u enterprise gear. They are more silent but beware that they also don’t move as much air / build up as much pressure as the stock fans. Depending on your hardware you might create hot spots.

For me the main question would be: Why not 2u? Even with noctua fans it’s going to be louder than a 2u with 80mm fans.

If you are able to return it / sell it, I would look for a 2u server especially if the server rack is in your living room and you have a family :joy:

40mm are always noise.

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Put the server rack in it’s own closet. Done :wink:

Depending on the size of the rack and closet, you may “sell” this to your SO as a clothing dryer when you have a 22U rack and the door of the closet can be persuaded to be in 2 parts (bottom: server rack, top: clothes line for drying) :wink: Jank, but you never know what the missus gonna say :stuck_out_tongue:

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All these thoughts are currently going through my head unfortunately i don’t really have room to move things around i could try it under the stairs in a pinch but it would probably get too hot.

2U is a consideration i could make it work if i shuffled some things around perhaps consolidation of the two VM servers i do have. But without an amount of assurance i won’t have the same noise issues it’s a hard sell right now. I have heard the R740s are not so quiet either.

It’s a real shame Dell locked out the fan control on their 14th gen with recent upgrades. They just need a “Home Lab” thermal / sound profile would help people get attached to them as a brand at home and then move that into their professional life.

The R640 acoustical performance at idle is between 46-48db according to Dell so loud now i look at it again (argh). The R440 would be more in line with what I’m after noise wise at 36db.

The R630 is 43db for a 10 bay chassis apparently.

The R740 is between 35-40db depend on loading so that doesn’t sound bad. I would be keen on hearing what anyone who has an R740 thinks.

Perhaps an R440 bare bones that i can swap some of the CPUs and memory into is an option otherwise the R740 on paper sounds much quieter. i’ll have a think before i pull the trigger on anything.

Dell 13th Gen Acoustics:

Dell 14th Gen Acoustics:

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Some part of me wants to suggest 3D printing ducting to accept bigger, quieter fans and pushing it through the same 1U…

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That was my suggestion as well. But perhaps stop looking at Dell and move to the likes of SuperMicro? You may even get a chance to have an EPYC experience. :wink:

Alternatively, consider Asrock Rack cross-over boards: server grade boards for desktop CPU’s, come with IPMI/BCM and ECC support.

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I would explore SuperMicro but they are rare as hens teeth where i am.

The most common thing on the used market where i am is Dell and HP. You see some other brands here and there.

Going 2U may give me some options in a custom build, which could mean i would end up with better hardware.

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Smaller size → more cooling needed for a given amount of power

Larger == more room for larger fans with lower RPM.

Going 1U and having >100W of power → always loud.

Other small form factors just reduce power output, like laptops and miniPCs. OEM Rack servers just increase fan RPM to 10-15k and call it a day, which isn’t an option for MiniPC customers.

I went with 2U and hand-picked components and fans. Sizing stuff up a bit and toning power down a bit…works well for me. They are 19" components, they are space-efficient by design no matter the height.

Buying stuff designed for a datacenter gets you a datacenter in your living space. Design stuff for your living room, and it will fit nicely.

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2U is certainly where i should be looking in hindsight i was just set on 1U because well that was the size of the device i was going to replace.

I’m a bit stuck with what i have at the moment my best bet might be to see if i could arrange a sort of exchange for a 2U server if where i purchased this one from has one and is willing to swap.

A full refund might be a harder as since it’s all used gear.

@Exard3k when you say you hand picked components was that server gear build in specific configurations to fit your needs or was it consumer gear in a 2U case?

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I run 2x2U Servers atm, both Ryzen-based. NVMe+HDD Ceph Cluster (teenage cluster, but growing).
Low-power → low heat → loudest thing are the 40mm Noctua fans@2500RPM and the HDD access noise (I hate HDD scrubs). 65-95W per node.

Goal was living room compatible rackmount + 4xNVMe and 2xHDD per node + dual 25Gbit NIC.

Certainly not your one build to rule them all, but I found my niche with non-EPYC/Xeon parts available to keep costs and power down. Even LTT stole my build :smiley:

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For some more context. I have several 2U Supermicro 826 chassis. One with an epyc rome and some GPUs etc. It lives in the main server rack on the unfinished side of the basement and during heavy workloads it can be heard upstairs on the first floor. Not loudly, but you can hear the whine. In the same room it’s not something I’d want to sit next to for any amount of time. This is with the stock fans, the “SQ” varient are in another server and are a bit quieter but still can get loud. I’ve also tried the noctua fan mod with the 3d printed adapters and they did not move anywhere near enough air to keep the components and drives happy. Thankfully I have a spot in the basement for the server and networking racks.

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https://www.arctic.de/us/S4028-6K/ACFAN00185A i just replaced these in my 1u cisco devices that were screaming loud before, took hardly any time, drop in same size replacement for most, worked great.

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That’s a nice build, i like the 65W target of the CPU!

I’ve thought about moving in a similar direction for a while but rack space and compute density are what have held me back. I just bite the bullet on the power costs :melting_face:

Seems like even in a 2U factor I’ll still need to thread carefully based on @anon94159786’s experience.

I suppose in a worst case scenario if i can’t swap out what i have or sell it i could jam a few Tesla P4’s or something in and make a not so great LLM server haha

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Out of curiosity i had a look at my fan speeds on the Dell R630 and they are sitting between 12-19% depending on the fan so around 4,000-5,500RPM.

Makes all the difference, strange that the iDRAC on the R640 seemingly just ignores the minimum fan speed (which defaults to as low as 15% i think) and just sits at 33%. Whether that was a firmware update or just a hardware trigger based on the NVMe backplane or something like that who knows.

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I went through something like this with the HP DL180 G6 “Dreamliner” back in 2014.

DAMN was that thing loud.

I tried everything to mod it down to a tolerable level, and never succeeded.

In the end I wound up salvaging the CPU and RAM out of it, and buying a Supermicro motherboard and 4U chassis, and taking it as a lesson learned.

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In general are the SuperMicro platforms more friendly to having more control of the fans or was it the 4U form factor that made the difference?

Currently stuck with a near full 12U so 4U is a tough ask.

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Having thought my situation over a bit more and doing some research on the R740s I’m not likely to be able to have a guaranteed quiet server its very much dependant on hardware config and how Dell feel they are going to configure the fan profile in iDRAC at that point in time.

While reading the acoustical documentation for the 14th gen series it sounds like it can be fairly quiet at under 40db. That document dates from 2018 and i have a suspicion that with recent iDRAC updates the thermal and acoustic profiles are not the same as when that document was written.

I’m toying with the idea of moving my current workstation hardware, a Ryzen 3900X into a SuperMicro SC825 which i can actually find used and set that up as my main VM host. Versus an OEM server i should be able to achieve a quieter build that is still rack mounted and that can replace the duties of the R630 currently.

I’ll just cut my losses on the R640 and keep it to toy around with on demand or sell it. I don’t think it’s worth the hassle trying to exchange for an R740 if i possibly just end up in the same situation with a bigger loud server. As @mattlach said lesson learned i guess.

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In my experience having used a few Supermicro boards over the years now, they are a little bit better from a control standpoint.

You can choose between different fan modes in the BMC. On my current two systems (one Supermicro H12SSL-NT with an Epyc 7542, and one Supermicro X12STL-F with a Xeon E-2314) the fan mode options are:

  • Standard Speed
  • Full Speed
  • Optimal Speed
  • Heavy I/O Speed

Generally this works really well, though on occasion upon a fresh boot, the fans can get confused and oscillate back and forth between high and low fan speeds until things stabilize.

That said, most of the noise reduction comes simply from being able to use larger fans, as for the same amount of airflow, a slower larger fan will always be quieter than a smaller faster fan.

Being able to use 120mm fans instead of those little 80mm Delta screamers makes most of the difference.

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“No replacement for fan dimension” :wink:

I can pick up a Supermicro 2U case that i can gut and put my own hardware in for a reasonable price. It’s worth a shot i reckon granted it won’t be whisper quiet like a 4U chassis but it should be quieter than a 1U and have a decent chance of being quieter an OEM 2U system.

I don’t need dead silent just something that isn’t overly distracting.

Failing this I’d need to start re-thinking my entire setup since I’ll be stuck on what i have with no path forward hardware wise.

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Continuing my journey of a 2U home lab server build in this thread.