4 ms·

I naively put an old LaCie 1U server under a Lack table 13 years ago, thinking it would be a great media server in my living room. I had no idea how loud rackmo

I naively put an old LaCie 1U server under a Lack table 13 years ago, thinking it would be a great media server in my living room. I had no idea how loud rackmount fans were. It was obviously unusable for watching any kind of media.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 4y ago
2U is a lot quieter than 1U. Those little fans spin louder and put out higher frequency noise. Though probably still not quiet enough for a media room. I’ve got a ruckus 10g switch and a 2U server in my utility room and you can sleep nearby and can’t hear anything with the door closed. What drives me nuts is power supply noise actually. I finally bit the bullet and got a Mac mini for my home office.
bombcar 4y ago
Modern rack servers at least spin down the fans when the system isn't heavily loaded, but it's still way too loud for a media room. For those playing at home, buying a 2U or even 4U rack will on average be quieter (still sounds like a jet engine just after reboot until the SMC comes online).
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  > even 4U rack Supermicro builds some workstations[0] which were quite quiet back in Xeon 5xxx days. [0] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/x11/systems/workstation https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/x11/systems/workstati... be sure to check for the 'quiet fans', not the 'heavy duty' ones!
  - justinlloyd 4y ago
    Interestingly Supermicro has a line of, in their words, super-quiet fans they produced for their workstations. Not quite noctua, but better than most. You can take those same Sanyo fans in their plastic quick connect green cowlings and put them in an 847 rackmount chassis. They are a drop in replacement. And if you get the 1250 platinum PSU, those fans run far quieter than their silver & gold line. I've got a water cooled 847 4U server with a small rack of 847 4U 45 drive disc expanders and it is a constant background hum, rather than a small jet aircraft taxiing around the room when using the stock fans.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Most 4U cases use standard sized fans (in fact a standard PC tower is 4U wide) so you can replace them with e.g. Noctua fans that are a lot quieter.
  - bjoli 4y ago
    I did this to a 6-fan 4u case and it went from loud to just loud when it needed to be, and boy did it move some air!
gregmac 4y ago
For all the effort (and money) put into making a media server as quiet as possible (which is still not silent), I think you're way further ahead to just not put the server in your living room. Instead, put it in the basement/closet/garage/utility room -- somewhere you won't hear it. Then, broadly speaking, you have three options: A commercial box, like NVidia shield, Chromecast, Roku, Amazon Fire stick or AppleTV. This is by far the easiest as you get a remote, a "10 foot user interface" and they work with online services like Youtube, Netflix, etc. If you care about everything being open source software this obviously isn't a good option. You can also DIY your own box on a Raspberry Pi. Be prepared to do lots of tinkering, though. The other option is to get the media server's UI remotely. Long HDMI cable, HDMI-over-cat5 or wireless HDMI gets audio/video; some of those also do USB, or you can do wireless control if it's close enough. Almost as much tinkering as a Raspberry Pi, but could be cheaper if it's not far. Another big benefit of the first two options is it scales to multiple clients, if you have more than one TV.
- lgbr 4y ago
  I can't recommend the long HDMI (or HDMI-over-CAT5, or long Thunderbolt) enough. The noise isolation you can achieve by doing so is unbeatable. Even moving anything short of a 1U server into a neighboring closet means no perceptible noise, so you're really buying yourself more flexibility such that you can use almost any computer without thinking about noise constraints. Even more than that, I'll bet a lot of people who are connecting a media PC to their living room TV also have another PC somewhere in the house. With a long HDMI cable, you can connect an existing PC to the TV, thus saving the entire expense of a new PC. This is particularly interesting for gaming, since a good gaming PC is a lot more expensive than even some of the longest HDMI cables.
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    Until your mom is flipping channels and gets to see what you really do in the basement all night…
  - muttled 4y ago
    To add to the HDMI-over-CAT5 instead of long-run HDMI, I wanted to offer an anecdote: we tried doing HDMI with extenders at a previous MSP shop. We had random de-syncs. We were probably far past the 50ft spec for how long to run an HDMI cable and the extenders were unpowered (basically female-to-female boxes). HDMI-over-CAT5, however, handled the distance flawlessly without powered boosters in the middle.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 4y ago

2U is a lot quieter than 1U. Those little fans spin louder and put out higher frequency noise. Though probably still not quiet enough for a media room. I’ve got a ruckus 10g switch and a 2U server in my utility room and you can sleep nearby and can’t hear anything with the door closed. What drives me nuts is power supply noise actually. I finally bit the bullet and got a Mac mini for my home office.

bombcar 4y ago

Modern rack servers at least spin down the fans when the system isn't heavily loaded, but it's still way too loud for a media room. For those playing at home, buying a 2U or even 4U rack will on average be quieter (still sounds like a jet engine just after reboot until the SMC comes online).

justsomehnguy 4y ago
> even 4U rack Supermicro builds some workstations[0] which were quite quiet back in Xeon 5xxx days. [0] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/x11/systems/workstation https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/x11/systems/workstati... be sure to check for the 'quiet fans', not the 'heavy duty' ones!
- justinlloyd 4y ago
  Interestingly Supermicro has a line of, in their words, super-quiet fans they produced for their workstations. Not quite noctua, but better than most. You can take those same Sanyo fans in their plastic quick connect green cowlings and put them in an 847 rackmount chassis. They are a drop in replacement. And if you get the 1250 platinum PSU, those fans run far quieter than their silver & gold line. I've got a water cooled 847 4U server with a small rack of 847 4U 45 drive disc expanders and it is a constant background hum, rather than a small jet aircraft taxiing around the room when using the stock fans.
aidenn0 4y ago
Most 4U cases use standard sized fans (in fact a standard PC tower is 4U wide) so you can replace them with e.g. Noctua fans that are a lot quieter.
- bjoli 4y ago
  I did this to a 6-fan 4u case and it went from loud to just loud when it needed to be, and boy did it move some air!

gregmac 4y ago

For all the effort (and money) put into making a media server as quiet as possible (which is still not silent), I think you're way further ahead to just not put the server in your living room. Instead, put it in the basement/closet/garage/utility room -- somewhere you won't hear it. Then, broadly speaking, you have three options: A commercial box, like NVidia shield, Chromecast, Roku, Amazon Fire stick or AppleTV. This is by far the easiest as you get a remote, a "10 foot user interface" and they work with online services like Youtube, Netflix, etc. If you care about everything being open source software this obviously isn't a good option. You can also DIY your own box on a Raspberry Pi. Be prepared to do lots of tinkering, though. The other option is to get the media server's UI remotely. Long HDMI cable, HDMI-over-cat5 or wireless HDMI gets audio/video; some of those also do USB, or you can do wireless control if it's close enough. Almost as much tinkering as a Raspberry Pi, but could be cheaper if it's not far. Another big benefit of the first two options is it scales to multiple clients, if you have more than one TV.

lgbr 4y ago
I can't recommend the long HDMI (or HDMI-over-CAT5, or long Thunderbolt) enough. The noise isolation you can achieve by doing so is unbeatable. Even moving anything short of a 1U server into a neighboring closet means no perceptible noise, so you're really buying yourself more flexibility such that you can use almost any computer without thinking about noise constraints. Even more than that, I'll bet a lot of people who are connecting a media PC to their living room TV also have another PC somewhere in the house. With a long HDMI cable, you can connect an existing PC to the TV, thus saving the entire expense of a new PC. This is particularly interesting for gaming, since a good gaming PC is a lot more expensive than even some of the longest HDMI cables.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  Until your mom is flipping channels and gets to see what you really do in the basement all night…
- muttled 4y ago
  To add to the HDMI-over-CAT5 instead of long-run HDMI, I wanted to offer an anecdote: we tried doing HDMI with extenders at a previous MSP shop. We had random de-syncs. We were probably far past the 50ft spec for how long to run an HDMI cable and the extenders were unpowered (basically female-to-female boxes). HDMI-over-CAT5, however, handled the distance flawlessly without powered boosters in the middle.