You know, it is interesting just how much difference airflow and position makes for drive temps. I've got a once-a-month scheduled parity check going right now and glanced at the status of the drives while it's under full activity on all drives (primarily wanting to see how the temps looked). I've got an Ultra m923 case with the original two 3-drive cages in it. Those have a 120mm fan in the front of each drive cage (which has screwless 5.25" horizontal mounts for 3 drives a piece). Well, only the top cage actually comes with the fan, but I added one once I started using the second cage. So essentially, the are 5 equally spaced drives above each other. The top three are part of one cage, and share one fan airflow. The bottom 2 of the five are in the top 2 slots of that second drive cage, with open space below. It's possible that the bottom fan that I added has a higher CFM rate, fwiw.

 

So the middle of the top three runs warmer between the other 2 drives of its cage. While the bottom two run cooler than any of the top 3 (surely some "heat rises" implications towards the top set being warmer as well), with the bottom drive of them slightly cooler next to the open space below. It's just kinda fun seeing the effects of good ol' physics when it comes to airflow and position. Just a random set of observations...

 

Oh, and fwiw, all 4 of those Barracuda LP drives are on CC34, with no problems whatsoever (and I've not noticed the infamous "clicking sound" coming from them much, if at all). And also fwiw, that EARS drive at the bottom of the list has only been in the array for a few days and had zero problems with the advanced format pre-clear process (which took just a hair over 30 hours). So far, a great and problem free 1.5 month track record for my first unRAID box.

 

 

 

I as well was doing some tinkering. I changed my front 120MM fans from 12volts to 7volts and noticed a 5degrees rise in temp. The fans went from barely noticeable to nearly whisper quite. Both readings are during a Parity Check last week when I wanted to see if there would be any issues. Of course later when its hotter there could be, but other than that I"m happy with it.

 

12Volts

 

 

 

7Volts

 

I'm actually not sure which voltage fans I've got going in my unRAID box. Probably the lower 7v. My unRAID box is extremely quiet, but not actually by any attempt to design it to be so. I have my unRAID box running in the next room over from where I'm usually at that I use for storage, so as long as it's not running very loud I don't mind loud fans.

 

My main workstation that I use, however, is noisier than my unRAID box (by a considerable amount). That's one of my next projects - trying to get quieter fans for that thing. I also have 5 different internal drives in the thing (ranging from 500gb to 1.5tb - all of which are 7200's, I think). I'm working to organize all the stuff on them and get it all transfered over to the unRAID box, and will eventually pull those drives out (well, except for the main OS drive obviously), which will surely cut down considerably on the noise that machine makes. Months from now, perhaps I'll have everything just the way I want it.

 

Just finished setting up my first XBMC box last night using a neato Zotac ZBox as my home theater front-end for all the stuff I'm piling onto the unRAID box. That thing runs darn near silent. Was impressed. Runs fairly warm, but not particularly hot.