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Comment by MivLives | Hacker News Reader

Kinda curious what the noise level is with those fans. I know there's no proper rack mount servers there that need the fans running full blast, but I imagine 4x120mm fans is still loud.

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120mm + closed loop watercooling makes almost no noise. 140mm makes no noise (compared to background), but don't fit in the standard "U" format. 3U (ATX) can fit a full 120mm, but not a closed loop. 4U (ATX) take a lot of space, but the airflow and WC flow is easy to get right. I used to be a self employed embedded system (Linux) engineer and had to compile whole OS images all day long on air-gapped, on premise, systems, so I ran my own "semi-pro home lab" for a few years.

Another trick is to have 5v, 12v and 48v DC lines with silent PSU like Corsair RM series directly feeding some servers so they didn't have to use an internal PSU, that leaves only the CPU and GPU as "hot" components (and the NAS, but that's another story and a solved problem).

https://imgur.com/a/cGYxIPW

Yeah that was my first thought. Noise is really what killed my home lab in the 00s. It was over 3kW when all turned on and was audible from any room in the house.

Lasted about 18 months before my wife vetoed it.

From memory -

    Sun ultra 60 x 2
    Sun ultra 80 with the big foam sound deadening kit option
    Sun ultra 5 x many (6?)
    Sun ultra 10 x 2
    Sun 6 bay scsi external disk caddy

    Cisco 24 port 10/100 managed switch but i forget the model, something XL (ios 11 or something truly ancient like that)
    2 cisco routers with PPPoA adsl adapters
    3com unmanaged kit with POE
    Terminal server

    IBM AIX b50 telco 1u server

Several linux x86 hosts in a “beowulf” cluster - single machine image spread over commodity nodes. Seriously cool, even today i’m in awe of the concept (but not the practicalities)

An openbsd host on an old x86 desktop

A freebsd node on a beefy (for the time) AMD opteron host

And probably a bunch of other toys i’ve forgotten by now.

That's a serious amount of kit, and there's no way 20+ machines isn't going to emit a constant roar. At some point, if you're going to have that kind of setup, it needs to be in a dedicated workshop that's either free-standing, or somehow otherwise sound-isolated from the main house. I know I'd never get away with running that much equipment all at once!

18 months, lol. His wife must be a saint.

She probably complained earlier, but couldn't hear her over all the noise!

Any rackmount server will be a nuisance. I ran rack servers at home for years but recently replaced my servers with ATX form factor machines, which are super quiet, ventilate much better and still stack nicely. There are plenty of ATX Xeon motherboards that support ECC ram.

I won't be the first to admit that the rackmount hardware is a nuisance, but at the same time, it's relatively inexpensive since there's no practical reason to buy new hardware for a homelab and the IT renewal companies are absolutely overflowing with reclaimed hardware on the cheap. Also it's often easier to find hardware configurations that require no tinkering at all, verses having to slog through a PC build and hope that nothing goes wrong. My favorite hardware though are workstations and tower servers, since they're basically the best of both worlds - commercial machines with a decent amount of replacement parts with tool-less (or even hot) swapping and people with experience servicing them while still being fairly quiet at heavy load.

I've done it every other way - I have a dual chip Xeon Silver machine that I hand built, an IT reclaimed Dell rack server, three NUCs (used to be 4 but one bit the dust after 4.5 years of hard service), and a smathering of other hardware (NASes, 10G and 1G switches, etc.)...

After the absolute pain of the Xeon Silver build - having a brand new motherboard that was DOA and basically being told I was out $600 after multiple rounds of escalation, then having the replacement board fight with my GPUs, I'm not sure if I'm willing to bother doing it again. It would have been worth it to pay the markup on a gently used commercial machine and I would have been up and running faster... Probably would have been cheaper, in fact.

Yeah everything you mentioned is spot on. I wish I had a garage to operate all my equipment, but have to work within the constraints of my small apartment.

Depends on your storage needs. More than 6-8 hard drives and getting an ATX form factor machine is near impossible, while many brands/generations of rack mount servers fit the bill for cheap.

Fair point.

My log machine uses six 16TB SATA drives configured as ZFS mirrors, so effectively 48TB of storage, which I back up to S3.

SAS drives are better but the current setup meets my needs.

SAS are better, but for my NAS/Media server needs I use SATA. I have 8x8TB, 2x4TB and 1x500GB SSD...all within a 2U rackmount server that set me back less than $250 that includes things like backup power supplies and 192GB of RAM. I bought another 1U rackmount to run my personal website and NVR (Zoneminder).

Out of all the setups I've read about here, I would love to hear more about yours and the costs involved, please?

I haven't tallied all the costs...nor do I want to.

The media server is an 2U HP G8 DL380P with the 12LFF drive cage. I run Xpenology (synology hacked to run on other hardware). That allows me to run Plex and Docker along with some auto backup stuff from my other computers (also serves as a central point for VM images to roll out to my computers depending on which I am using that week). I was incorrect about the RAM, this server is only 48GB since Xpenology can't use it all. Server has dual E5-2440s.

The other server/NVR is a 1U HP G8 DL380e that has a 4LFF drive cage. Came with the 4x2TB setup already and it's running Ubuntu server 20.04. Zoneminder is a great software package and easily handles my 8 1080P or better PoE cameras around my house/shop. I think it was also ~$250 on ebay...with another $50-60 in RAM from eBay (Zoneminder does a lot of caching in RAM for prior to recording movement detection). This machine sports 192GB of RAM and dual E5-2650s.

Now it's possible thanks to Fractal Design's Define 7 XL.

So for the just under the price of a used 4-5 year old server you can get that case...not really practical for someone on a budget.

Holy crap: "18 HDD/SSDs plus five SSDs"

That's a lot of spindles.

a 4U rackmount server is identical form-factor to a 19" tall tower.

That’s right, though 4U cases generally only ventilate from the front and back, which seems to contribute to their noise level. I figure that only a small minority of the 4U market runs their servers in apartment kitchens.

I’ve had good luck using horizontal Silverstone ATX cases with fans on three sides. That said, I’m sure there are 4U units that offer huge but low rpm fans that would satisfy the bedroom server-lab niche market.

I guess I've never owned a tower that ventilated on the top or bottom. I don't like top fans because gravity means things get in them, and bottom fans don't work on carpet.

Usually 4U cases have a lot of fan mounts so rather than a few large radius fans you have lots of small radius fans. It used to be that all small fans were loud but in the past decade or so you've been able to get smaller fans at just about any noise point you want.

Off-the-shelf rack servers are the worst with noise level, so I personally don't recommend that for a homelab. With my latest upgrade I went custom for this reason. You can build a quiet ATX-based NAS with fairly cheap consumer/gamer-grade components these days.

Using a Rosewill 4U ATX enclosure (RSV-L4312); replaced the stock case fans with Noctua NF-A12/NF-A8 (120mm / 80mm). It's extremely quiet, and now I have a full custom 4U with hot swappable drives, while still maintaining plenty of airflow.

My only gripe is the quality of Rosewill case isn't what I'm used to with enterprise-grade or even gamer-grade chassis. I really wish other companies would get into the homelab space and start making quality ATX rack-mounted chassis. I think there's a decent sized DIY market for this.

I had a rosewill and hated it so much I replaced it with an iStarUSA case. I have the 3U because I wanted to fit it, plus a power-strip in a 4U rack, but I would recommend the 4U version to anyone who has the space, because iStar uses a removable motherboard tray that makes some "3U ready" parts not actually fit in the case. 4U is the same height as a standard tower is wide, so there should be zero issues with that in their 4U cases.

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