Excessive fan noise on Sun Fire x4200
- From: David Kirkby <drkirkby@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2012 01:29:23 -0800 (PST)
I've got a Sun Fire x4200 (2U high), and have installed Solaris 11.
But the thing is incredibly noisy. Far more so than a 1 U IBM x3550
server, despite the IBM has a lot more processing power.
Unlike many of you here, I've not spent my working life in server
rooms, but there's a complaint from someone else about the noise of
this
http://forums.techsoup.org/cs/community/f/23/p/29941/105798.aspx
where the person says he has configured loads of HP, Dell and IBM
boxes, but not found anything as loud as this x4200.
I've used:
$ ipmitool sensor
(not sure if I needed to be root to run that or not. The machine is
off now)
and find the fans are running at about 5000-6000 rpm in a room about
21 deg C in my house. They are making a huge amount of noise, but the
components inside are barely warm. The heat sinks on the CPUs are
barely above blood temperature.
As a test, I removed 4 of the 6 fans at the front. The noise level
reduced a fair amount, and cooling was still adequate. The speed of
two working fans did not increase, suggesting to me that whatever
temperature sensor was adjusting the fan speed was happy with just two
fans running. If two fans running at 6000 rpm can keep the machine
cool, why the hell does it need 6 of them going at that speed?
It's obvious the fan speed control is working, as running a very CPU
intensive benchmark, or blocking a lot of the air intake, does result
in the fan speed increasing.
I've got a friend staying here with me, who has worked a lot in server
rooms, and he says although servers are noisy, the x4200 is
excessive.
I think if I kept this machine (which is looking unlikely), i'd
probably stick some resistors in series with the fans to slow them
down a bit.
Does anyone have any less drastic ways to reduce the fan speed?
Obviously 6 fans provides redundancy, so me removing 4 of the 6 is not
a long term solution, but as a test it proved to me that the machine
is excessively cooled.
Dave
.
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