There are actuality two fans. There's an intake on the bottom full cold air, and the top is exhaust. I posted temps if you wanna see how it is at full tilt

But enclosed in a box without much airflow and those temps are going to creep up over time. And take even longer to cool down. Hopefully there’s fans in the bottom or side. Because one exhaust is not great for even just the heat from those hard drives.

I think the best way to handle airflow out is to have a turn or two on the intake/exhausts for the noise to get trapped. I personally just put mine in my basement though. That limits the sound pretty well.

All of those hard drives will produce quite a bit of heat just sitting idle.

They usually do transcoding when you watch a movie or so. Depending on hardware that may heat it up a bit. I guess if it would have heating problems then OP would have resolved that already though.

I think even just installing an intake would do wonders for this setup. A hole cut with a filter would be good, an additional fan directing air at the bottom would be even better. I'm assuming this PC case has some kind of intake / exhaust. Right now it's prob just recirculating its own air. That single fan on the prob isn't doing that much.

I hate the sound of Disk Drives spinning up and clicking

We just have the file server in another room and use a mini itx pc slaved to the tv as a player with a bequiet psu

Are the fans quiet too?

Is there high tennis?

I just sent a ddos attack to his ip. In an unrelated event my doorbell camera has stopped working?

Super quiet, and had been running non stop for over a year no with no problems 😊 also that i9 runs super hot. When it was in my lil gaming rig it was always running up near 90. So retiring to the server had been much more gentle on it, lol

You are a bigger person than I <3 what youre doing is a great solution to noise in a living space and if you have no thermal throttling its designed exactly for what its intended for. Thanks for sharing you have given me some ideas for managing my own noise issues regarding homelabbing.

I hate hearing fans and computers and have always wanted to do a project like this, but have always been concerned about heat buildup, like anyone would be. And while it LOOKS like it would be an issue... If it works, it works.

I keep my place at 74, and basically have a per room heat pump to never have the temp be an issue even on a 108 day. I've been running the setup for over two years now and have monitored thermals the whole time and have never had an issue. I understand the concern, and had the same concerns at first too, but the results don't lie. It's just very well tuned for it's environment

Not sure if stroke or just above my head.

Plus the other fan hiding behind the system 😉 posted temps in a comment of you eye curious

Yeah its one of the ones that I think went off the define 6 design, I've got a Corsair case with a similar design/layout but no latches, I had to do a closer look too.

Yeah but I bet they could be better because your intake/exhaust do not look like they can keep up with your CPU cooler. I would install bigger fans with a higher CFM, and remove the insulating foam padding.

Oof, do NOT run a server over WIFI. If plain old Ethernet is not an option, get something like this which, no, is not cheap but will offer a MUCH better experience.

It was a common comment after a few hours 😂 also looking forward to spaceballs the sequel!!

What part of the world calls temperatures "tennis"? Sounds like something the Aussies would come up with

Also high density mass loaded vinyl works better for your enclosure. Foam helps against reflections but they still let sound trough. Mass loaded vinyl basically adds mass to the walls of your enclosure which stops them from transferring the sound waves to the outside.

That's it! Though when I was first seting up my new place 😊 it's on my comment history so I don't think that's snooping

I know for sure Intel server CPUs (for example, Xeons) don't have integrated graphics and somebody else mentioned that many Ryzen CPUs don't either.

That said, I'm not sure if they need integrated graphics to have hardware decoding for certain video codecs (though it makes sense that those things come together). Personally when I was looking into buying a mini-PC to transform into a media server for my living room, I made sure to check in the CPU specs if it had both integrated graphics (as it's connected to my TV) and hardware decoding for the most recent codecs (I ended up going for a mini-PC with an N100 processor, since it has all that plus its power consumption is pretty low with a TDP of 6W so I can leave it always on as it also doubles as homeserver).

underclock and undervolt

If I'm not mistake only hobbyist level motherboards let you control the voltages and if one knows enough to get one of those they probably don't need the advice I gave.

Also it's hard to end up with a non-working or unstable configuration with underclocking, whilst it's pretty easy to do so with undervoltage.

That said, for those who know what they're doing, your suggestion definitely delivers lowers temperatures than underclocking alone though at the risk of a less stable system (which can be ameliorated with proper stress testing).

I posted specs and temps if you were curious 😊

I actually have a Mini-PC with an N100 CPU and no dedicated GPU as media server and it uses very little CPU (less than 20%) whilst playing 1080p video even with a torrent server over a wireguard VPN running on the background.

You don't really need much CPU or GPU for playing or streaming videos from compress video files as long as you have hardware decoding on either processing unit (just make sure it implements all the way up to the AV1 coded).

You only need lots of CPU or GPU power if the codec you're decoding from or encoding to is not implemented in hardware since in that case it will use software decoding or encoding so it's down to raw CPU or GPU power.

In fact if all you want is a media server that solution I have is probably one of the best ones, mainly because it uses very little power (tops at 25W, usually much less) and runs silent, which is why I can have it in my living room using it as a media player connected to my TV, and with a wireless remote people can't really tell it's a PC since it just looks and works like a store bought media player rather than one I put together myself.

However that option means buying new stuff, and I can see the value in using old hardware if you have it around, plus the old hardware will still likely be more powerful so you can also use it for more demanding stuff or just more stuff at the same time, which is why I didn't suggest it and instead just suggested some tweaks to make that old hardware consume less and make less noise.

thanks for sharing, i was hoping for more specifics to experiment with; i have a powershell script i'm running that does the same thing:

    try {
        ffmpeg -y -hwaccel nvdec -i "$input" `
            -map 0:v? -map 0:a? -map 0:s? `
            -c:v h264_nvenc -preset slow -rc vbr -cq 21 -b:v 0 `
            -pix_fmt yuv420p `
            -c:a aac -b:a 160k `
            @subtitleArgs `
            "$temp"

        if ($LASTEXITCODE -eq 0 -and (Test-Path $temp)) {
            $encoded = $true
        }
        else {
            throw "GPU encode failed"
        }
    }
    catch {
        Write-Warning "GPU failed -> CPU fallback"
        Add-Content $logFile "GPU failed, CPU fallback: $input"
        $gpuFallbackCount++

        ffmpeg -y -i "$input" `
            -map 0:v? -map 0:a? -map 0:s? `
            -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 20 `
            -pix_fmt yuv420p `
            -c:a aac -b:a 160k `
            @subtitleArgs `
            "$temp"

        if ($LASTEXITCODE -eq 0 -and (Test-Path $temp)) {
            $encoded = $true
        }
    }

cool gaming rig, too! you also know the SFF pains 🤣😂

I just built a new rig and was soooo close to going mITX, but I just didn't want to deal with the cramped build space. And the selection of MoBo's was abysmal compared to ATX and mATX.

I still always get a bit jelly when I see people do it, as they are clean AF. Good on you!

And as others have said: you're taking the criticism on the chin like a champ. It's fun to experiment with weird things and you found something that works for you. That's all that matters.

Enjoy the weekend!

Yeah man, that's the perfect choice. I use a very similar card myself. They outperform gaming GPU's for this purpose!

Good lord, 114!

And here I thought I was doing something at 10-20 TB.

You go!

Oh man, treat those drives well. The last 18TB drive I bought a few years back went up $500 in price!

Haha fair enough. Fixing it after the fact basically requires a second server of equal or greater storage. I fear a rebuild on my 16tb disks.

Hey, I've been upgrading the same freenas (now trunas) for 15 years. I need 40tb of space to redo the raid lmao. It's striped and mirrored, so I'm losing 18tb. It is what it is for now, works great for my files and Plex.

Makes sense. Might as well wait for the zfs anyraid coming out “soon”

Would be nice to be able to mismatch my drive size though

I gotta look into this sometime. I'm still doing Z mirrors of 4TB drives. I was lucky to score those.

I have a bunch of 500GB / 1TBs just sitting there though that would need power and a SATA extension, maybe to put non-critical stuff on...

If you can click a link, you can copy and paste into a search engine.

WHOA, that is a lot of energy. What CPU are you using? That thing must run HOT.

I've got a new setup (runs what you're running and a few others) that takes in 60 watts. I live in SoCal, though, so our rates are insane. For me 350 watts would run me $125 a month. It's so bad here...