The Chenbro RM41416B is a 4U file server case. Thus it has fans built for pushing around huge volumes of air, with complete disregard for the auditory senses of normal human beings. Obviously for a file server in a house, this is an issue.

The case by default comes kitted out with five Y.S. Tech FD128032HB 80mm fans, with room for another two at the back to draw hot air out. Upon spinning up, these were loud enough to shatter a pensioner’s dentures at 50 paces. The decision was made to swap them out with Noctua NF-R8s —certainly not a one to one replacement in terms of air flow, but a heck of a lot quieter.

The Noctua NF-R8 is pretty darn quiet.

While slightly less deep than the fans they’re replacing and featuring a cable long enough to require four zip-ties to keep under control, the Noctuas are dramatically quieter than the Y.S. Techs. Putting a human value on how much quieter is an issue though it seems; while there’s no doubt a 3dBA increase is a doubling in sound intensity, there’s arguments over how this relates to perceived volume.

They also put out significantly less cubic feet per minute of air – however I’m confident the server will survive with the extra heat, and some of the load will be lifted by two additional 80mm fans at the back drawing hot air out.

Power Supplies are Noisy too

As a consequence of all this silencing, a new problem became apparent: the power supply. The immensely noisy Emacs Zippy MX3-5750P 750W triple redundant power supply to be precise, worth around AUD$1,000. Looks like picking up the case for AUD$503 on eBay was a magic deal, around an AUD$1,800 discount thanks to the also included SATA backplane.

The power supply features three 375W hot-swappable units (MX1-5375P), of which two are active and one is spare. The top power supply sadly has an electrical squeal, which I’m not sure how to address. I’m quite sensitive to high pitched noises (like say, CRTs being left on) and so it’s destined to become annoying.

Squeal aside, the main issue is the horrific noise generated by the three PSU fans. These 40x40x28mm banshees are AVC F4028B12HBs, like the Y.S. Techs are ball bearing based, and howl like there’s no tomorrow. After some creative screwdriver work the PSU came apart with little resistance, revealing that the fine chaps at Emacs had glued the fan’s three pin power plug down in an attempt to stop fan replacement. Fortunately it’s nothing some short work with a scalpel shouldn’t be able to fix.

There’s no specs available on the AVCs, but I’m pretty damn sure the 40x40x10mm Scythe Mini Kaze SY124010L, rated at 14dBA and pushing 4.11CFM is going to be a lot quieter. The rated amperage is lower (0.06A vs 0.3A) so powering shouldn’t be an issue, however I am slightly concerned that the incredibly low CFM could impact the performance of the PSU due to excess heat build up, potentially already a threat due to the lowered exhaust power of the swapped in Noctuas.

The third issue with the power supply comes down to replacements — specifically, it seems only stores in Belgium, Russia and the Netherlands list the individual replacement modules for sale (often under the Chieftec brand) yet none of them have them in stock, while in Australia we’re limited to buying the whole expensive power supply again. At least, this is the case through regular channels, perhaps a disty may be able to help out.

Areca Abandonment

After distributors Digicor failed completely to reply to my query about bringing the ARC-1300ix-16 into the country, I decided to hunt them down at CeBIT Australia. The rep schmoozed that I shouldn’t bother with Areca and that they’re “focusing on 3Ware” — distributor speak for “we lost the contract”. Sure enough, FortuneTec picked up the deal shortly after and were blazingly fast in responding. Sadly there’s no intent to bring the 1300 series into Australia since as non-RAID cards, they’re perceived as niche market.

Looks like I’ll have to import, unless the Promise SuperTrak EX16350 shows, er, promise in Solaris.

The Promise Super Trak EX16350 is based off the Intel IOP333 and is extremely cheap due to being an end of life product - but there are no Solaris guarantees.