4 ms·

I would like to do this, but am worried about the noise. I've heard servers that sound like jet engines. Is anything I can look for to avoid that?

fomine3 6y ago
If you need 12-15 HDDs, Rosewill's 4U case (I have RSV-L4500) is good for bedroom because it supports 12cmfan. Fractal Design's Define 7 XL is recently released and also looks good if you prefer normal ATX case dimension rather than rackmount. If you need just about 8 or fewer HDDs and don't need hotswap, there's many options like just normal ATX case. If you need silence, Don't get a server case that supports 8cm fan only!
j45 6y ago
Avoid real servers. Intel NUC, and tiny pcs from lenovo, hp, dell etc are perfectly serviceable for this purpose.
- boring_twenties 6y ago
  AFAIK, none of those support ECC RAM, making them eminently unsuitable for serious storage.
  - j45 6y ago
    ECC ram is definitely a consideration. I've appreciated having it when it was around. The needs of each homelab can be different though. Some homelabs don't need to be that serious from a power/noise/energy cost perspective just to get ECC, unless there is an explicit benefit from it. Making do without ECC can be perfectly possible for some or most portions of a homelab.
  - tuananh 6y ago
    most of the synology units are not using ECC. should we avoid them?
j_walter 6y ago
Do some reasearch. The G8 DL380p I bought sounded fine until I didn't use the built in RAID and opted for software RAID due to the software I wanted to use. Not using that RAID caused the fans to run 100% all the time. I opted to hijack the fan voltage (which was harder than it should be for proprietary fan connectors/sensors) and manually crank down the speed to an acceptable temperature/noise ratio. More than I needed to do if I had just done some research first.
boring_twenties 6y ago
I would love to know, actually. Mine are all annoyingly loud, especially the HP. The worst part is that there is no operator control over the fan speed what so fucking ever, and it automatically goes up much more than necessary just because a PCI card has been added or some such (even an HP-branded PCI card). You can probably do a lot better by building a custom one, but that is going to be a lot more expensive. I would love to hear from anyone with experience in this actually, as I'm kind of starting to get fed up with it. Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago. Another annoyance is that they will mostly come with some kind of hardware RAID card that doesn't passthrough raw disks. Often, a completely worthless one that must be replaced. Even if it's a less terrible one, it will require reflashing if you want to use it in JBOD mode (for ZFS or software RAID). All that being said, considering that I paid $140 shipped for this HP server 3 years ago, I'm not sure how much I can complain. Setup was a pain in the ass, but once I got it done, it's been working mostly flawlessly since. The only ongoing pain points for me are the lack of USB3, and the fan noise. (I could add a USB3 PCI card, perhaps, but I'm sure that would increase the fan noise even more!)
- mike22 6y ago
  > Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago. Newer HPE servers with iLO 5 need any plain browser to access iLO, and for the remote console, give you the choice of HTML5, .Net, or Java. I have a Gen10 Microserver and the HTML5 console works flawlessly in Chrome.
  - boring_twenties 6y ago
    I guess that's a pretty significant improvement, but I still don't understand why a server console needs a web browser at all? Why not just fire up a VNC server and call it a day?

fomine3 6y ago

If you need 12-15 HDDs, Rosewill's 4U case (I have RSV-L4500) is good for bedroom because it supports 12cmfan. Fractal Design's Define 7 XL is recently released and also looks good if you prefer normal ATX case dimension rather than rackmount. If you need just about 8 or fewer HDDs and don't need hotswap, there's many options like just normal ATX case. If you need silence, Don't get a server case that supports 8cm fan only!

j45 6y ago

Avoid real servers. Intel NUC, and tiny pcs from lenovo, hp, dell etc are perfectly serviceable for this purpose.

boring_twenties 6y ago
AFAIK, none of those support ECC RAM, making them eminently unsuitable for serious storage.
- j45 6y ago
  ECC ram is definitely a consideration. I've appreciated having it when it was around. The needs of each homelab can be different though. Some homelabs don't need to be that serious from a power/noise/energy cost perspective just to get ECC, unless there is an explicit benefit from it. Making do without ECC can be perfectly possible for some or most portions of a homelab.
- tuananh 6y ago
  most of the synology units are not using ECC. should we avoid them?

j_walter 6y ago

Do some reasearch. The G8 DL380p I bought sounded fine until I didn't use the built in RAID and opted for software RAID due to the software I wanted to use. Not using that RAID caused the fans to run 100% all the time. I opted to hijack the fan voltage (which was harder than it should be for proprietary fan connectors/sensors) and manually crank down the speed to an acceptable temperature/noise ratio. More than I needed to do if I had just done some research first.

boring_twenties 6y ago

I would love to know, actually. Mine are all annoyingly loud, especially the HP. The worst part is that there is no operator control over the fan speed what so fucking ever, and it automatically goes up much more than necessary just because a PCI card has been added or some such (even an HP-branded PCI card). You can probably do a lot better by building a custom one, but that is going to be a lot more expensive. I would love to hear from anyone with experience in this actually, as I'm kind of starting to get fed up with it. Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago. Another annoyance is that they will mostly come with some kind of hardware RAID card that doesn't passthrough raw disks. Often, a completely worthless one that must be replaced. Even if it's a less terrible one, it will require reflashing if you want to use it in JBOD mode (for ZFS or software RAID). All that being said, considering that I paid $140 shipped for this HP server 3 years ago, I'm not sure how much I can complain. Setup was a pain in the ass, but once I got it done, it's been working mostly flawlessly since. The only ongoing pain points for me are the lack of USB3, and the fan noise. (I could add a USB3 PCI card, perhaps, but I'm sure that would increase the fan noise even more!)

mike22 6y ago
> Aside from aggressively controlling the fans, I find the HP and Dell firmwares to be entirely useless, as they all apparently require a web browser with an ancient version of Java. In one case, Java 6. Yeah... this was a terrible decision even 10 years ago. Newer HPE servers with iLO 5 need any plain browser to access iLO, and for the remote console, give you the choice of HTML5, .Net, or Java. I have a Gen10 Microserver and the HTML5 console works flawlessly in Chrome.
- boring_twenties 6y ago
  I guess that's a pretty significant improvement, but I still don't understand why a server console needs a web browser at all? Why not just fire up a VNC server and call it a day?