Temperatures in the Mini Fileserver

One of our concerns in the the Mini Fileserver is the heat. 5 harddrives and a motherboard squeezed into this small box generates quite some heat. So we decided to do some testing in our prototypes.

We have tested the case with several different fans. All tests are available in this post. In general, all tests were performed with the following hardware but each step usually involves different prototypes:

VIA EPIA-EN12000EG motherboard which is fanless
Morex 80W (luckily, the actual PSU is outside the box. Only power board is inside)
5 harddrives (4 x 7200 RPM and 1 x 5400 RPM different brands). Unfortunately, one of the drives didn’t support temperature reading from SMART.
Windows 2003 operating system
SpeedFan 4.31 to measure temperatures
HeavyLoad and HDTach and good old .bat-files to simulate load. Tip: To see your HD performance, you can use HD Tune.

Test using Scythe 120mm S-FDB

* Prototype case 1.0
* Scythe 120mm S-FDB

Here are the temperatures before we got started when the server had been idle for many hours:

HD0: 38C
HD1: 33C
HD2: 32C
HD3: 33C

Here are two charts showing the HDs and motherboard temperatures during idle which showed pretty stable:

temp2

temp3

Then we started some testing with HeavyLoad. However, none of the harddrives went up more than 2-3C so we decided to go a step further. We created numreous looping batfiles that copied 200 MB files between all the different harddrives. We ran them all simultaneous. To break the risk of just using sequentual reading, we also started some looping “dir /s” that continously made a dir /s on all harddrives. At this time, also the CPU went up 100%.

We left that running until we saw the temperatures stabilizing (around 1 hour) monitoring the temperatures and here are the maximum results we got to. Here are two examples:

HD0: 42C
HD1: 39C
HD2: 36C
HD3: 36C

So in general, the temperature went up 3-6C (4C average).

If you look at the manufactures specifications (Examples: Samsung=60C, IBM=55C, WD=55C, VIA=50C), we didn’t cross any of the recommended limits. However, we’re pretty close. Do remember that this was the most silent, and therefore not the most efficient, fan we could find. There are some very quiet fans out there that will be able to move more air that would probably lower the temperature even more. One reason why the case keeps the harddrives pretty cool is because there are about 5-10mm’s between the harddrives which lets the airflow through.

Temperature testing using Noctua NF-S12-1200

* Prototype case 4.0. This also included a dustfilter which will stop the airflow a bit
* Noctua NF-S12-1200 120mm fan

Thank you very much Noctua for sending us a sample of your fan. The NF-S12-1200 comes with a 6 years warranty and MTBF of >150.000 hours so we expect it to keep on running for a very long time in our server. Read the detailed datasheet.

Noctua NF-S12-1200

We used the included rubber vibration compensators to attach the fan more easily and also for less noise.

Noctua Vibration compensators

We started out with a normal server running under low load and these were the temperatures of the harddrives:

HD0: 45C
HD1: 39C
HD2: 35C
HD3: 40C

One thing to notice regarding the fan was that we couldn’t even hear the noise from the fan, even though we changed it from 10% to 100% fan speed. All we could hear was the harddrives, the fan was extremely silent.

Then we put some load on the system using HeavyLoad and normal file copying.

HD0: 49C
HD1: 45C
HD2: 37C
HD3: 41C

So in general, the temperature went up 2-6C (3C average) - less than with the other fan. The reason why the temperature in general is higher is probably because of the dustfilter.

March 24, 2007 | Filed Under Blog