Cooling a Dell Poweredge R210-II (quietly!)

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26 May 2015
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Hi all,

I wonder whether anyone might be able to offer some suggestions here that I haven't thought of. I use a pair of Dell R210-II rackmounted servers for my home infrastructure and recently moved house. Now they've gone from a perfect distant location to a central cupboard. They're by no means loud as the BMC and iDRAC firmware are all up to date and there were some improvements made in previous BMC firmware revisions to the fan thresholds that quitened them down substantially.

That said, they're still not as quiet as I'd like. I'm only really aware of two options on where to take them from here:
  1. Replace the fans with quieter fans
  2. employ a fan speed reducer with a resister to slow the existing fans

Both have their drawbacks. The fans are 4-pin PWM fans, and are 40x40x28mm. Worse, they also have custom wiring order and custom connectors and bespoke receiving sockets on the motherboard such that normal fans do not fit. To top it off, it would appear as though 40x40mm PWM fans are somewhat of a rarity. I've had a search and can find several available from the US but none so far within the UK.

I've bought fan speed resisters but not being very ghetto with my soldering skills I'm reluctant to attempt to alter them to use the same pinout as the existing fans.

My next thought centred around a post by Tealc that I read on this forum which describes a way to utilise 3-pin fans with a 4-pin PWM connector using an additional circuit. I can find plenty of pretty decent 3-pin 40x40mm fans, so thought I'd give this a go as my next port of call.

I guess before I go through the process of attempting something like that or seeking help with making the circuits, does anyone have any thoughts on where one might get 40x40mm PWM fans that are reasonably quiet? Cooling's not an issue. The fans within are currently running at 1100RPM and keeping the servers at not far past 20C, they're just particularly noisy fans.

If anyone has any suggestions that I haven't thought of or ideas of where I could get stocks of 40x40mm PWM fans I'd appreciate any help offered!

Cheers,
Q.
 
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