As a baseline, all bays are populated with 7,200RPM drives of varying manufacture.

I initially had some issues as the server was stored on the third floor of a non-air-conditioned building which naturally trapped heat, making ambient temps pretty insufferable for humans let alone machines, and setting off the chassis’ thermal alarm. This goes off at 60 degrees C (and the sensor is near the hard drive bays), so the server’s internals weren’t happy.

Since moving it to the bottom floor though, even on a 42 degree C day the thing hasn’t made a peep, and the hard drives haven’t gotten excessively hot even under heavy load (although it’s worth letting them cool down before laying a hand on them, as thanks to the density they’re packed in it still means quite a bit of heat is generated).

Most importantly, not one drive has died since I put them in.

As a side note, I was never able to fit the dual 80mm extraction fans at the rear, there just wasn’t enough room. The airflow is a little low around the motherboard section, so this is something I’d like to revisit.

I’d say so long as it’s kept in a reasonably cool area and you’re not hammering your storage all the time, you’ll likely do just fine in removing the Y.S. Tech fans.

How did using the Noctua’s affect the HDD temperatures? (I’m assuming that you’ve got the front of the chassis populated with 16 HDD’s)

http://kb.lsi.com/Download16574.aspx

Might give it a go soon.