Cooling Home Server room

MassiveJim · 13 Jan 2018 at 13:01

I have recently moved my home server cabinet from an open room to its own little (tiny) cupboard.
At present I have the door open to the cupboard to prevent it overheating.
However the room is in my office so i want to shut the door and eliminate some noise.

At present it has a single 120mm intake fan mounted to the bottom of the rack.
the rack contains
1 x modem
1 x router
1 x 24 port gigabit Hp switch
1 x homebuilt NAS, (8 HDDs)
1 x APC UPS

temps are fine at present, however as I said the door is open, further to that I havent reattached the front door of the cab yet either.
The cab is made of metal but has had a wooden veneered top put on it.

I am happy to cut holes in the cabinet for additional cooling to be installed.
The only place I can really vent the warm air to is the room I am stood in taking the picture, I assume via some kind of vent above the door, which is also fine.

I'm looking for a bit of advice on exact kit to buy and best way to tackle this.
I'll probably need some kind of hole to allow cooler air to be drawn in to the cupboard, then i assume best way to vent would be a vent directly from top of cabinet through some ducting and out of the cupboard ?

ANDARIAL · 13 Jan 2018 at 13:46

Drill a hole through external wall and fit an extractor fan?
That an option?

MassiveJim · 13 Jan 2018 at 20:21

no, but I can extract the warm air into the main room.
I kinda already knew before posting that is what I would need to do.
I am more interested in exactly what I should be installing.

ie how many intake/exhaust fans will I need?
can you buy ducting and adapters for PC fans or would it be better to use something else ?
Is there an easy way to add a vent to the room so that cold air can actually be drawn in ?

LewisRaz · 13 Jan 2018 at 23:09

Could you fit something temperature controlled that activated once the room hit a certain point?

Plec · 13 Jan 2018 at 23:16

What's above the cupboard?

If it's the attic you could extract the warm air in the summer and in the winter draw the cold air in?

MassiveJim · 14 Jan 2018 at 01:54

Plec said:
What's above the cupboard?

If it's the attic you could extract the warm air in the summer and in the winter draw the cold air in?

this room is in the attic

BongoHunter · 14 Jan 2018 at 11:35

I would put 4 x 140mm or 200mm fans in the top to pull the warm air out, definitely get filters. A cheap brick PSU with a molex conector/adapter can supply the power. I would repeat the same arrangement at the bottom of the cupboard / door for intake fans.

Almost any PC case fan will be fine to pick, as long as you can power it, remember that fans are rated by CFM - this is cubic feet per minute, so 4 x 200mm extraction fans could extract 800 cubic feat of air per minute if you went for 200 CFM fans for example. Fan placement will be important to prevent hotpots, but being as you know the warm air will rise to the top, and your lab hosts probably vent to the rear, it shouldn't be to complex to figure out.

Might also be worth experimenting if you get better performance with positive pressure (so have a slightly higher total CFM for your intake).

Thought about adding some other lighting at the same time as you add the fans? Might make it easier to work and do maintainance on the kit, cathodes or leds could share you new fan PSU.

Also - might be worth mounting a fan controller on the door so you can control / tweak things, if you get one with some temperature monitors that would be a bonus.

You could easily run all of this off a tiny cheap PSU - if I was doing this I would definitely add a RGB light somewhere to represent temperature (green/blue = cold, red/orange = hot) - especially if you don't have any system monitoring in place, you could probably rig something to gracefully power down your hosts too.

MassiveJim · 14 Jan 2018 at 19:04

Where can I find an adapter and ducting that will connect to a 140mm pc fan?
I would like to just add ducting that will run to a vent above the door.

I do have a light in that cupboard by the way, it's only a single GU10 but it's plenty. I've always got my head torch if I need to do dive in the back of the cupboard for anything.

Not bothered about over complicating things and having it temperature controlled, I'm happy just having it running 24/7.
Fans will also be plugged in to the ups just in case power goes.

MassiveJim · 15 Jan 2018 at 14:19

I think I found what I needed, I ordered several bits of ducting and connectors last night, along with a vent/grill for the door.

However was looking at replacement cases for my NAS last night and am probably going to end up with one that is too big to fit in the cabinet.
Which will mean removing the rear panel (somehow)

so drilling holes in it might not be necessary, just some sort of extraction from the room itself.