The fan I got yesterday for my drive array was the only one I could find at Tran Micro that came with a finger guard. I should have looked at the fan more carefully. It's a crystal fan with blue LEDs in it, which wasn't obvious from the packaging. That probably ended up costing me an extra $5.
The fan moves an impressive 52.6 CFM, but the cost of that is the noise level of 41.7 dBA—the damn thing sounds like a muffled vacuum cleaner. That's okay in some ways, though, as I kind of wanted overkill for testing my 10,000 RPM drives. I'll have to get something quieter if I actually want to keep the array, since I can't stand to be in the same room as this thing for very long.
I figure I'll try to find a fan that pushes about half the airflow. Hopefully that can get me down to 24-32 dBA, which is a lot less, as decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale. Technically, 30 dBA is ten times less pressure than 40 dBA, but to human hearing it seems like a 3-4x change. Getting it to just sound half as loud would be really nice.
I realized that my previous entry's discussion on the relative merits of different storage types neglected a serious point. Used FibreChannel drives can be obtained fairly inexpensively, but new ones are still spendy. Taking this into account, FibreChannel and SCSI probably end up being pretty close in cost.
Ugh, I suppose I was just desperately trying to justify my purchase of broken drives.. My eBaying for replacements isn't going too well yet, but I should just try to be patient.
Posted by mike at June 3, 2003 02:10 PM | Hardware | TrackBack