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by chasd00 10 days ago
> Very loud high speed fans

if you haven't heard a 5u server intended for a datacenter rack come to life it's quite the experience. Sounds like a plane taking off.

3 comments

"Sounds like a plane taking off."

Helicopter. I live in Yeovil, Somerset, UK - there's a helicopter factory just down the road. I had a IBM "AS/400" or whatever they are called now in our computer room rack for a customer and it made nearly as much noise as everything else put together. It was clearly tuned for start up noise to impress because they would fire up in sequence, rise to a crescendo and then slow down in sequence to just a din instead of painfully loud.

A switch or PC server on boot will normally run up cooling fans instantly to max as a default protection mechanism until the "OS" has started and sensors read and then the fans will slow down to deal with the actual thermal load.

If you switch off your air conn, it gets noisy, quickly. Recently in the UK we are seeing routine temperatures around 30C and we broke 200 odd year records for temperatures a few weeks back. I know its even worse elsewhere but our infrastructure is not designed for this. Here we are at the same latitude as Calgary AB!

That's called staggered spin-up. One does that for sets of HDDs, too.

Anyway, what is it good for? To not overload the PSU for one, because spin-up needs more energy, until it has reached it's intended range of RPM. (for fans & HDDs)

Another reason to spin-up high initially, to fall down to slower when up, is to overcome friction in the bearings, to get stuck things unstuck, and shake dust off. (for fans)

Tell that to my switches and PC servers. They all spin up their fans in one go as soon as power good is received and the initial BIOS thingie has stubbed out its fag on the floor.

The PSUs are painting their nails when the fans go off initially. The GPUs, RAID controllers and co are still waking up.

A further counter example is an Equallogic PS6500. That has 48 3.5" spindles in it and three PSUs plus a few fans and two controllers. The whole thing boots in a couple of minutes.

My workstations are usually tower servers, which are the same design as their 4 and 5u rack counterparts.

Until the thermal management kicks in, they sound like jet planes. When the thermal management starts and assesses the required cooling, it’ll throttle down the fans to reasonable levels.

That is, until the moment you push the machine to its limits. When then happens, you might get back to the same levels of the boot time, but it’ll require you to push everything to the max - CPU, memory, storage (all 24 bays) and so on. For a normal user, there is a lot of room and it’s virtually impossible, even with a dozen of Teams windows open.

Yes, but the line between "reasonably quiet" and 100% isn't a step function.

If these do end up in Home Labs, it's going to be a server rack in the basement and not the server rack at the other end of the room.

> If these do end up in Home Labs, it's going to be a server rack in the basement and not the server rack at the other end of the room.

If they are too loud, yes. In my part of the world basements are not common, but my shed would be a sensible place for one.

Closest thing I can think of is the old LucasFilm "THX" trailer. Only there's no release segment, not until the BMC comes up a minute or so later.