My 1.1TB RAID has been down for over a month since I've been swapping from my old case where drives were jammed in w/o any real airflow. As I mentioned previously, my new case is a 3U RMC3E-XP w/ 16 IDE hot-swap drive bays (+ a few internal bays). The 650W power supply finally arrived today (a $120 cheap-o model) and today marked the first time I booted up the new system.

The noise level was ridiculous! Basically my office now sounds like I'm sitting in a commercial airline. Except louder. Commercial rack mount disk servers are clearly not design for residential use out of the box (I expected it to be loud, just not bearing on ridiculous). At least my neighbors haven't started complaining.

Everything is hot-swappable, including the internal fans, so I played a bit w/ removing some of the fans since I won't need as much cooling as what is provided. I'm currently only using 8 drives and access patterns aren't constant so figured I might be able to get away with a few less. Didn't really help much as it's unfortunately the internal fan for the 650W power supply fan that's the worst. I'm not willing to take the risk of doing the replacement myself. Especially since it's unclear if I can even get the system reasonably quiet regardless of whether I replaced all the fans or not.

I decided to whip out my trusty sound meter used for audio calibration for some quick measurements. Where I'm typing the noise level is currently 62.5dB. Within 1 foot of the RAID case (opened) it peaks out at 79dB! Putting the cover on really only dropped the noise level a couple of decibels. Doh. Normal noise with the rest of my current machines running is not even measurable by my sound meter (well under 50dB).

A single small Sunon (there are three) tops the system out at almost 90dB from 8 inches vs 68dB when that one is removed (running two the peak was 94dB). Those measurements were taken from a point inside the case.

Summary: The current setup is not an option. I can either start replacing fans, or sell the entire thing and start over w/ just a 4-5 400GB drives stuffed into a small case with better cooling. Given that I've had the 1.1TB up and running in mid-2002 w/ 160GB drives it might be time to think about replacing. Just hate to replace something that is still working well and solves what I need (mass storage).

[Update] It doesn't help that the Delta EFB0812SHF 80mm fans shipped with the case runs 4700RPM @ 45.5dBA! The two rear Sunon KDE1206PTV1 60mm is 34dBA w/ 23.5 CFM. The power supply Delta AFB0612EH 60mm runs 6800RPM @ 46.5 dBA (seems louder than that) for a fairly high 37.61 CFM.