Lenovo RD350 spin fan loud with no stress

[Mycobacterium]

Hi, i have Lenovo RD350 server (2.5 bay version) with one stock CPU and 100GB of RAM

I have four SATA hdd drives (2x SSD and 2x HDD), only one stock PSU.

 

Now, everything work's fine, today I try to add 2 more SATA hard drives (500GB each), and something strange happened with my CPU fans -> that got started spin very loud .

 

 

When I remove that 2 new hard drives and restart server, everything goes back to normal, fans work's quiet (3k rpm). 

When I try to add that drives again, CPU fans goes crazy and spin very loud all the time on idle.

Can you point me right direction to figure it out, what is going on with fan when i add 2 more drives ?

I have latest BIOS and latest firmwares.

I try to reset BIOS to safe default values.

[Blue4130]

My guess is the bios senses more hardware and automatically compensates the fan speed, regardless of if is actually needed. 

[Mycobacterium]

Well BIOS have safe default settings right now. I try to make some changes on power consumption settings.

I bought 2x Samsung 860 QVO today, I was still thinking that maybe this is due to increased power consumption, but no, regardless of the type of disk, just insert disk no. 5 and it starts spin fans like hell.

[Blue4130]

7 hours ago, Mycobacterium said:

Well BIOS have safe default settings right now. I try to make some changes on power consumption settings.

I bought 2x Samsung 860 QVO today, I was still thinking that maybe this is due to increased power consumption, but no, regardless of the type of disk, just insert disk no. 5 and it starts spin fans like hell.

It's not power consumption relate. My guess is that it is just seeing more drives, so it spins up. 

 

It's a 1u server that is meant to be in densely populated rack in a server room. When they are designed, quiet operation isn't a goal. 

[Mycobacterium]

So that would not be issue but Intended action of system design . ?

 

Well this is my development server placed in room where I work, so in that case I think that I will limit myself to 4 disks, but a little bit larger. 

 

However, I think that this class of system should better control temperature because at the 5th disk the fans start turning to 13K rpm unnecessarily

 

The system is completely idle without any load.

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, Mycobacterium said:

So that would not be issue but Intended action of system design . ?

 

Well this is my development server placed in room where I work, so in that case I think that I will limit myself to 4 disks, but a little bit larger. 

 

However, I think that this class of system should better control temperature because at the 5th disk the fans start turning to 13K rpm unnecessarily

 

The system is completely idle without any load.

Rack systems were never designed to be used in the same room as the user. That's why they have direct tower equivalents. 

 

And 13k is necessary when you have a full 42u rack populated and have the doors on. 

 

And all systems are idle without load... That's what idle is. If you mean silent when idle, it's fine, but pretty useless. Nobody buys a server for it to sit idle. 

[Mycobacterium]

Well i work with ESXi and some development stuff like ELK, Kafka or databases. So most of the time my RD350 is in idle.

 

Nobody buys a server for it to sit idle ? I agree with this, however, when your server is not loaded with anything should work a little bit quietly.

[Blue4130]

2 minutes ago, Mycobacterium said:

Well i work with ESXi and some development stuff like ELK, Kafka or databases. So most of the time my RD350 is in idle.

 

Nobody buys a server for it to sit idle ? I agree with this, however, when your server is not loaded with anything should work a little bit quietly.

But I reiterate, rack servers are not supposed to be quiet, there is no need. Lenovo made the rd350 for server rooms. They made equivalent td350 for use cases like yours. And they run *much* quieter. 

[Mycobacterium]

Thank You  Blue4130 .. Now i know a little bit more

 

Ok, so the following setup is a temporary solution for me:

• 2x 1TB Samsung 860 QVO SSD
• 2x 4TB Seagate BARRACUDA 2,5
• 1x Samsung 250GB M.2 PCIe NVMe 970 EVO Plus on Delock PCI Express x4-1x NVMe M2 low profile ( for ESXi or Proxmox )