#Fancontrol poweredge 1950 ubuntu how to#
#Fancontrol poweredge 1950 ubuntu full#

I can’t believe what a difference it made. Connecting them is just a matter of cutting the cables away from the power connectors and soldering them together. Both the Nexus and the Nidec fans have the same number of wires, and the same color codes. You’ll need to bust out the solder gun to cut the Dell fan cable leads and attach them to the Nexus fan’s power cables. Unfortunately, even with PWM-controlled fans, the pin connections don’t match Dell’s proprietary connector.įan power cables aren’t plug-and-play either.

The power cable is even easy to remove, but about that power cable… The Bad News: The Power Cables are Proprietary One side of the fan cage has click-on tabs that hold the fan in, so even thin ones are fine. Just pop the fans out of their orange cases – no tools required – and pop in the new one.Īny 92mm fan up to 38mm thick will work, and thinner fans like this work fine too. Unlike some vendors, Dell’s fans use a removable cage surrounding an industry-standard fan.

The Good News: It’s Easy to Swap the Fans Some models will wait for the user to hit a key to acknowledge that error, and I don’t want that happening – I leave my servers in the closet without a monitor attached. If you don’t get fans that are PWM-controlled, then the Dell motherboard will freak out upon boot-up and think there’s no fans connected. I highly recommend these Artic F9 PWM 92MM fans. I bought six quiet 92mm PWM-controlled fans for under $10 each that: Quiet-PC freaks like me turn to fans that turn slower, yet still push a lot of air.

Have pulse width modulation (PWM) speed control – the motherboard can control the fan speed based on how hot the server getsįans like this rely on very fast rotation speeds to push a lot of air, but the faster the blade spins, the more noise it makes.

Scream at 57 decibels – not quite as loud as yo momma, but close.

Move up to 150 cubic feet of air per minute.

The stock fans are Nidec BetaV TA350DC 92mm fans that: I can’t run cables inside the walls since it’s a rented condo, and I can’t run cables along the floor because I’ve got a girlfriend with a keen sense of design. This wasn’t a problem when I had the server in the basement, but now that I’ve moved to Chicago and my “datacenter” is my home office closet, it’s a problem. I couldn’t carry on a conversation next to this server, let alone record a podcast.

#Fancontrol poweredge 1950 ubuntu full#

They’re temperature-controlled, so they don’t go full blast unless the server’s working hard, but even at very light loads they’re just way too loud. It’s got 6 92mm fans that can wake the dead. Seriously, the case is bulletproof and gawdawful heavy.īut it’s loud.

Two quad-core CPUs, 16gb of memory, six SATA drives in a RAID 10, and about a hundred pounds of solid steel. Quest got me a Dell PowerEdge 1900 to use as a virtualization host, and it’s been great.

#Fancontrol poweredge 1950 ubuntu how to#

I’ve blogged about how to build a silent PC, but today I’m tackling another noisy beast – an off-the-rack server. I like running my lab out of my office closet, but I don’t want to hear any of them running. I’ve got a few servers in my home lab and I’ve always taken steps to make sure they’re quiet.