I have a 24U acoustic rack - basically a 19" rack encased in nice-looking wood panelling and buffered with sound-deadening material. The unit sits on casters, has plenty of room, has survived several house moves and is in need of tidying.
Temperature-wise, the top-of-rack reaches a max of 37C in summer which is tolerable given the airflow - there’s a fair blast at the rear!
I’m not bothered about noise but given the increasing cost of electricity (I’m in the UK) it seems sensible to reduce the 37W the fan array consumes. As you can see from the photo below I can’t tell the fan make or model so lack info on the fan performance. The one positive thing is that they’ve been spinning near continuously for 7 years !
Notwithstanding this, my idea was to replace the mains fans with - for example - 2000-rpm Noctua industrial units. Specs here, max input power 1.2W with the power supply coming from a system or a 12V PSU.
Has anyone got any experience with replacing mains fans with low(er)-power units?
Excellent point and I’d hope we’ve already done all those swaps (might be an outside night light or two which still have the original lamp).
That said, it’s the 24/7/365 which gets (got?) me and, as examples go, it is a small number. My main virtualisation server consumes 91W and while it is old (Supermicro X9DRD-iF inside SuperChassis 825TQ-563LPB), replacing THAT will require a little more thought !
The idea only came as I started totting up power usages last night. Nothing jumps out but the mains fans “offended” me with their consumption (for want of a better description)
Thanks for your comment - plugging in $$$ numbers actually did put that in perspective which is always good.
You might be able to find some 2011v3 stuff pretty cheap these days or upgrade the CPU to v2 if it’s still v1 CPU, that would be even cheaper than the fans
I did the math on HDD power usage recently, turns out you can save quite a bit of power and money by going with less higher capacity drives vs more lower capacity drives (with the extreme case of 12x used 1TB 3.5" costing twice as much as 1x refurb 12TB in a year, despite nearly the same initial $/TB). 37W in a year tallies up to 324kWh in a year (of 24/7 usage). Assuming 0.283 €/kWh this amounts to 91.72€.
My current Synology DS-1821+ contains 6x 14Tb Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives in RAID6. This draws 81W during operation. This was measured with a Brennenstuhl power meter.
As an aside I tend to keep systems under observation for at least 24 hours to allow for variation in usage, collection of some sort of kWh usage figure, etc. This also means that I can compute cost from Watts and POH as well as kWh to cross-check myself.
Anyways, this replaced a Synology DS-1812+ (yes, quite a few generations difference!) which also had 2wo fully populated DX513 5-bay expansion units. That setup contained a mix of Hitachi DeskStar 4Tb and WD RE3 1Tb drives - think “organic growth” with a bit of a mess of Volumes!
The last power readings I have on record (again via a Brennenstuhl power meter) were 110W idling and 163W “under load”.
Our kWh cost is similarly high: 32.59p per kWh (circa 0.37 Eurocent) so I am pleased at the power savings and that the new unit allows me to run 10GbE too.
Replacing HDD’s with SSD’s in the virtualisation server and VM storage server is high on my priority list.
Edit: reading your linked post I think we appear to have similar generations of server hardware - both my systems have Supermicro X9-generation motherboards with the virtualisation server being dual-processor with 2x Intel Xeon E5-2630Lv2 for example. Again, clearly something where in the light of usage, experience and gnerational updates, “things can be improved”
I tend to have WD RE or WD Pro drives - all getting older, spinning fast and consuming too much wonga (and power!).
and is in need of tidying.
.