Maybe you're an IT worker at a company that happened to decommission one of these, or maybe you've stumbled upon one by the dumpster, the fact is, you are a new and proud owner of a Dell PowerEdge R710. You bring it home (with great effort), you plug it in and you press the power button.
Suddenly, a loud noise fills the room, and to your shock, it's not just at boot - it's somewhere between an angry hornet swarm and A330 Airbus Jet turbine at normal operation.
If you don't want to physically modify your paleozoic-era hardware, and you're okay with some noise, shoutout to some of many scripts created to quiet the fans down:
- 12V to 5V voltage regulator circuit
- LM317T
- 220 Ohm Resistor
- 720 Ohm Resistor (in my case, 220 + 500 in series)
- 0.1uF Ceramic Capacitor (optional)
- 1uF Electrolytic Capacitor (optional)
- heatsink (optional)
- Main Circuit
- 2N2222 NPN transistor (or another NPN like BC547B)
- 1k Ohm Resistor
- Arduino Nano
- Sacrificial proprietary fan, to source the connector
- 12V or 5V non-PWM fans of your choosing
one of the earlier versions with missing common ground on Arduino and molex for the real fans
installed in the server along with two 12V non-PWM fans
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If you do have pwm fan(s), you can simply re-route the RPM (blue) cable to them and use one of the scripts mentioned above to regulate them somewhat
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Originally I routed the PWM cable to A0 to read the signal and then output "accurate" RPM, but returning flat 3000 worked so I didn't bother in the end.
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I used the cheapest fans I could find for this, and they don't move a whole lot of air, especially because they're tilted in the short vertical space of the server. Hence, the server does throttle after a couple of minutes of stress testing, but I personally don't run it at full tilt 100% of the time, so It's not an issue for me.