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I bought a sever and its too loud!

waloshin

waloshin

macrumors 68040
Original poster
You all can laugh at me , but I bought an Hp Proliant dl 140 server 1u, and its way too loud to have running in my bedroom. I bought it just to play with and use as a server, but its way too loud. And recommendations?
 
Take it back?

Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
 
Maybe a large acrylic sound enclosure of the sort used for noisy office equipment... like dot matrix printers back in the day. But you would have to know how much space would be needed for the heat to dissipate from the server inside the enclosure.
 
You should have bought a workstation - HP xw series rocks and they are very quiet and reasonably priced 😉

But now that you have a proliant - all I can suggest is putting it some place away - like in the store room or basement. Just buy a pair of PowerLine Ethernet adapters and configure the Proliant to wake on LAN and you have no need to physically access it any more.

Based on which OS you run - Remote Desktop/VNC/SSH etc. all are your friends.
 
HP DL servers = Density Line. It's meant to be put in a rack, which means it's in a place where it's ok to be loud and needs good cooling.

They're built to support hot-pluggable hard drives, sometimes multiple power supplies, etc.

If you just want to play, what do you want to play with? The operating systems? You could put them in a virtual machine on your Mac. If you really wanted to play with removable HDDs/PSUs, then you're in the right place. Normally servers want to be somewhere cool. Put it in the basement and run a network cable to it so you can manage it remotely.

If all of that sounds daunting, put it on eBay. If you're looking for something to use as a server, any PC will do. If you want production quality server hardware, you're going to always get very well ventilated servers (which means noisy).

I bought a pile of stuff on eBay for my home networking and VMware lab. And it's practically silent. I've got nearly 16 GHz and 16 GB of memory available in a resource pool between two systems for hosting virtual machines.

If you're interested in getting into system administration and such, and have more questions, drop me a PM.

Side note, which generation DL140 did you get? G1, G2 or G3? (Is it a single Xeon, a hyperthreaded Xeon, or a dual/quad core Xeon?)
 
parapup said:
You should have bought a workstation - HP xw series rocks and they are very quiet and reasonably priced 😉

But now that you have a proliant - all I can suggest is putting it some place away - like in the store room or basement. Just buy a pair of PowerLine Ethernet adapters and configure the Proliant to wake on LAN and you have no need to physically access it any more.

Based on which OS you run - Remote Desktop/VNC/SSH etc. all are your friends.
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My lab is built from xw workstations. Great call. I'm getting deals on them on eBay that are just ridiculous. 😱
 
Decrepit said:
My lab is built from xw workstations. Great call. I'm getting deals on them on eBay that are just ridiculous. 😱
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Have you checked the re-manufactured page - I have bought all of mine (3 to be exact) from there and many days there are pretty good deals. Haven't had any problem - could not even figure out they were refurbs.
 
Noise and heat are the big problems. I used to have a half height enclosed rack in the small closet beneath my staircase. Even with the enclosed case and the closet door closed, the noise would hum throughout the house. I had to add more ventilation as well. I finally got rid of most of the old servers.

I still have an old 1U Dell poweredge from 2001 or so. Just a simple file server. It sits on a shelf in the closet. I covered the top with a blanket, and it cut the noise in half. Need to keep both ends open to let the air flow through. I can't wait to retire this last one, pretty soon.
 
parapup said:
Have you checked the re-manufactured page - I have bought all of mine (3 to be exact) from there and many days there are pretty good deals. Haven't had any problem - could not even figure out they were refurbs.
Click to expand...

I buy on eBay for $200 xw workstations. 😀

I bought quite a bit from the HP refurb site though as well for other purposes.
 
If you have another computer in the house...... use Remote Desktop to access it. Stick the sucker in the garage or a spare bedrooms closet. You will need to run cat5 to it. That is what I did and I don't hear thing from it!
 
I saw you said you live in an apartment. Are there any closets that could have some space cleared or empty closets in your apartment that you could put the machine in? Have fun with the server. You've got some pretty awesome hardware to play with. Enjoy! 🙂
 
There's an art to making a server silent and possible to be in the same room as, and it never involves anything below 4U. Unless you build a 1U box with very special CPUs and fanless solutions, it's going to be awfully loud.
 
1RU server way too loud

Now I know servers are not supposed to be ran in bedrooms or even homes. So I have a Hp Proliant dl 140 sevrer in my room it sounds like a hair blow dryer. I was wondering if I put ear plugs in at night time would I still loose hearing, or even go deaf? Any suggestions, I would put it in a closet , but the only closet would be the one in the living room and nobody would want to hear the thing all day long. I was also wondering, could I set it up as wakeup on lan? Would it shutdown after the request was done? If not thats alright. It will be running as a webserver for kicks!
 
How's that new Dodge of yours? Good?


You really should think a bit more before making a purchase. 😉
 
waloshin said:
Now I know servers are not supposed to be ran in bedrooms or even homes. So I have a Hp Proliant dl 140 sevrer in my room it sounds like a hair blow dryer. I was wondering if I put ear plugs in at night time would I still loose hearing, or even go deaf? Any suggestions, I would put it in a closet , but the only closet would be the one in the living room and nobody would want to hear the thing all day long. I was also wondering, could I set it up as wakeup on lan? Would it shutdown after the request was done? If not thats alright. It will be running as a webserver for kicks!
Click to expand...

Don't put it in a closet, it will overheat.

You can't use WOL for standard network requests. It's best for cases where you say OH CRAP, I chose shutdown instead of restart. You can still log into another machine and start the server remotely.

It's not bad for your hearing, but it's bad for your A/C and electric bills.

I have an interesting idea. Look around town for a company that will co-locate for you. It should be cheap since you're using your server, and you can have them ensure your bandwidth is capped so you don't get squashed with a $75,000 bill the day that Slashdot links to you.

Problem solved. You have it in a server class installation, have full remote access rights, and get to sleep at night. 😎
 
jake.f said:
Servers aren't meant to be quiet nor put in someones bedroom.
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x2 i recently upgraded my Dell 2600 to a 2900. I think it only got louder. expect your electric bill to make a noticeable jump as well. servers consume a lot of power and generate A LOT of heat. keep that in my when you decide where to store it.
 
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