Hello!

I'm about to buy the SNT-2131 enclosure to keep three large slow (I call them "barges") SATA drives reasonably happy.

Somewhere else on this forum I saw somebody saying, the 80mm (?) fan on the enclosure is noisy, and I'd like to have a better replacement handy to avoid being kicked out of the house.

What are my options? Thanks!

The solution mentioned my someone on that forum you linked to should be fine (i.e., cutting a hole in the top for a slow 120 mm fan).

Actually with low power drives you would probably be okay without a fan. Limit yourself to 2 platter 5400 rpm drives like WD6400AACS (2.5 - 5.4 W) or Samsung EcoGreen (4.2 - 5.4 W).

No, I'd like the enclosure to be self-contained... The machine has other drives (three SAVVIOs) and running air-ducts inside it is not really an option.



One of the drives already faulted a few days ago (and is on its way back to Seagate). I'd rather not take chances -- the three disks are going to host my video- and photo collection in RAID5. And the first rule of RAID5 is to not have correlated failures -- such as those induced by high-temperatures affecting all drives at once. "At once" here is the interval between one of the three drives failing and the replacement arriving by mail -- easily a week or two...

Running a software-based RAID 5 with this thing is a very bad idea. It also sounds like you have made a poor choice of drives. Drive manufacturer's often don't send identical drives as replacements. You need to buy extra identical drives to have on hand, before you create your array. Running a RAID 5 with a missing/failed drive for any length of time is asking for trouble.

Why?



Why? The failed one so far did not fail completely -- using smartctl I was able to cause it to remap the bad sectors and have not lost data. The cause of the failure is also likely, to have been heat, which is why I don't want to be running fanless.



That's Ok, as long as the replacement is of same or larger size.



Unless there is a danger of a correlated failure (disks dying for the same reason), the risk of another RAID5-member going bad within even a few months of the array going into "degraded mode" is lower then me being struck by lightning on the way to work.

In fact, with proper cooling, it is quite improbable, that even one drive will fail, before some new technology obsoletes the entire arrangement with the whole 2Tb, that my array will hold, fitting on some Purple Ray DVD...

Now, can we go back to the question of a fan-replacement?

Heat related failures are more likely to damage the PCB components, not cause bad sectors.


Well the holes in the PCB are rather small and are sure to create turbulence. There is no magic fan that is going to quiety flow enough air through this thing. You might find some medium speed sleeve bearing fan that is slightly better than the current one.

Thanks. Any particular maker and/or model?

The best small fan I have experience with are Sanyo Denki Mini Ace 92 x 92 x 32 mm 0.31 A 55 cfm. Someone else could probably give you a part number for a 80 mm Yate Loon that would be quieter. This D80SM-12 might be too slow. A Yate Loon D80SH-12 (32 cfm) might be enough. SPCR reviewed the Sunon KS1208PTS3 (31 cfm) and Panaflo FBA08A12M (32 cfm) which might work well for you. Most people around here probably have fans like this they want to get rid of.

I know this is a realy old post, but i would like to know if anyone managed to replace the noisy fans in the snt-2131. Which fan did you use?

Thanks in advance

I ended-up not bothering -- using whatever it came with. Was not too bad. I don't use it any more, though. The old machine passed away and the new one has plenty of room for drives.