silencing a Sun Enteprise 450

[kamina]

Hi!

I was just offered to have a Sun Enteprise 450 with atleast 2 (and maby 4) 400mhz processors.



I just went to have a look at it, and the size is definatly impressive. I turned it on, and the airflow going through it seems like part of the design team used to design airplanes!

The processors are passivly cooled, and if I don't put another 2 processors in it there would be space to put some 80mm panaflow's (that I allready have) in the slots where the other two processors would go.

My main concern is the case ventilation. I opened it up, and in the front it has 3 large (between 92 and 120mm) NMB fans blowing at full blast. I'm thinking of trying to slow them down to 5v or 7v, but everyone here at work think I'm crazy. I guess they are used to servers in a bit of a differant context.

What do you think, would it be safe to slow down the fans? I think the computer has room for over 20 hardisks, and currently there is only 2 installed. This will allready bring down the potential heat production quite a bit.

[alglove]

I guess part of it depends on what you are going to use the server for. Is it for your own personal use, or are other people going to be depending on it, as well?

I have no idea what the thermal power specs of the CPUs would be. I am guessing that the hard drives are some relatively old, high-RPM SCSI drives. Those NMB fans were probably chosen to run full blast all the time. As such, I do not know how they would handle undervolting. For example, what happens if they require a start voltage of +8V?

Heh, I know exactly what you mean about using the server as a test chamber for airplanes!

[ky]

The Sun Enterprise 450 was not designed to be silent by any stretch of the imagination. Having up to 4 CPUs and 20 hard drives requires a lot of active cooling and most installations have the E450 in a server room or data center where noise is not a concern.

If you -really- want to use it as a desktop workstation, at least put it under your desk where the sound will not be as noticable.

If you have a choice of other hardware to be "offered", see if there is an Ultra 80 around... the Ultra 80 is the desktop version of the E450 and is not nearly as noisy.

My last Sun workstation was the Sun Blade 1000 and it wasn't noisy at all.