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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

https://www-uploads.scaleway.com/Mac_mini_rack_1_e31ad1da6e....

This is not the image I expected to encounter under the title, “high density”.

Make those sleds taller and do three, maybe four per sled with a pair of large diameter fans. That’ll would be high density. This is medium at best.

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The fan would move the heat off that given sled but if the channel between the sleds can’t remove that extra heat you probably didn’t help yourself.

My point is the picture doesn’t show any details on the room or what’s outside the rack so it’s hard to know what’s optimal.

Fans generally are used to move cold air from in front of a rack behind the rack. There appear to be no fans at all here except those in the mini,which would cause the problem you discuss. I’m talking about supplemental cooling with a high volume low noise fan in a 2 or 3u enclosure.

I agree the picture doesn't do it justice, it doesn't show the full cabling, we might share a new one.

Also keep in mind that these SLEDs are compatible both with the M2 & the M4. M2 require more surface area & cover the whole free space on the SLED

It might be that they're limited by something else in their existing racks; say power or networking ports, so this is an easy hack to get into their existing rack scheme.

My guess is its the size of the blades.

e.g. https://servermall.com/fr/sets/serveurs-blade-dell/?srsltid=...

Seriosuly, like surely they could've at least used 1 rpi per rack ?

Or find cable with matching length?

Interesting that they run them upside down.

It’s because the power button is on the bottom.

also hot air rises, and the vent is on the bottom

Fans can move a lot more air than convection.

Why are they still even in the cases? I would assume that shucking them would ever so slightly improve thermals.

Aluminium designed in as heat sink perhaps? But not sure if this is so relevant in an actively cooled DC setting as passive buried under cables at a home workspace!

We were a little team, doing the API dev, the infra, the hardware and countless things. The product is improving and it was impossible to even imagine remoing the case as we spent so many time wiring everything, going to DC and setting up everything. Yes the team is actually doing all of this, even going to DC installing the macs in the racks.

But I agree that for a big scale, this is a good solution. (cf: github)

Agree, removing the case is a lot of effort. Github does a lot of fancy things but you might want to consider how much they're charging by the minute as well

Our way is quite efficient & we're able to quickly adapt to new HW gens

Had a similar problem in T43 HDD.

Actually the power button is pretty useless, they set it up like this for the airflow as the mac mini fans are on the back.

Also, it's useless during the lifecycle but it simplifies operations a lot during the initial install & any kind of servicing.

We're actually thinking about features which will that power button to good use in a near feature, stay tuned !

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