CMC Forums

You still need to examine the splitter to see if it correctly has the 4th pin for only one of the 3 fans.

yes, I have been thinking that it might be the splitter that is the issue

Here's a high-level overview on what should be your cooling goals:

1) You want to use Dynamix Fan Auto Control to control the three 120mm case fans that pull air through the drives. Note, you may want to be more aggressive in your temps - I have low temps at 30 and high temps at 36. But of course target whatever temps and sound levels you are comfortable with. When drive temps fall below the low temp threshold, the fans will slow down to the minimum PWM value - which you can set to whatever you want. I have my minimum at 135 (trial-and-error testing) which seems to be the slowest that they actually spin, which is 53% of full speed (255). As your temps increase, the hottest drive will be used to control the fan speed, linearly increasing from your minimum PWM value to max speed as the temps increase from your low temp threshold to the high temp threshold.

2) Because Dynamix Fan Auto Control can only control a single fan header, you will want all three 120mm case fans connect to a single header, using a splitter that only measures the speed of 1 fan. This is also good in that all 3 fans will be speed synced together, for optimum sound vs. airflow. If you don't have all 3 fans synced together, you might have 1 fan spinning faster and making more noise, but overall have lower air movement if the other two fans are spinning slowly.

3) Your other fans (CPU, rear of case) will be controlled by the motherboard settings.

One other tip: Since your drive bays are only half populated, you may want to plug the airflow in the empty trays to force air to be pulled around the HD's. I had concerns that my empty drive bays were allowing air to easily flow through them, decreasing airflow through the tight passages around HD's in the populated trays. While I can't prove my solution worked, what I did is cut rectangle shaped blocks of packing foam, slightly larger than the end of each tray (next to the front grill). I would then wedge the foam block into the tray, effectively simulating the air flow impedance of a HD. I used the packing foam that the server chassis came in.

Hopefully that makes sense. Let me know if you need a picture.

Thanks, Paul. I will play with this tonight. I played with it a little earlier and It doesn't seem that I can get the fan auto control to stop or increase the speed of the fans. So I apparent haven't found the right driver yet. Right now they are running at the 2nd of 3 BIOS settings. I have 2 drives that are at 40 degrees c. They have gone up 5 degrees since I booted the unraid at 11 this morning. I would think that they would level off sometime. Is this heat from a couple of drives normal. Seems to be the middle columns that have the hottest drives.

Jamie

Okay, I got my drives to ramp up and down as I change the low and Max temperature In the dynamix auto fan app. It has maintained my drive temps at 35 to 36 degrees C, or below, throughout the day. I restarted my preclears.

Excellent.

Going from memory, the fan speed control plugin only monitors the array drives. The drives you are preclearing are outside the array, so I think the fan control won't respond to their temps. You can always bump up your minimum fan speeds manually in the settings whenever you're running a preclear.

Okay, today I finished migrating my Drobos to my unraid server. I now have all my movies and music on unraid. Now I will sit back and watch a few movies and play some tunes.

I have 22 TB of free space on unraid. All of my Drobos combined only had 2 - 3 TB of free space. Shows you all the wasted disc space due to Drobo overhead. I only had 1 drive protection with each of the Drobos too.

I guess I will now purchase Hell boy, Captain Marvel and a few blurays to see how the ripping behaves. I already see better response when playing music and movies. It took a while for the Drobos to wake up and spin up. I don't notice as much with unraid.

Jamie

Very nice!

I don't remember if I told you to use the Cache Dirs plugin, I highly recommend it. It leverages a side effect of the Linux system that when you list a directory the contents are stored in RAM for a little while. Cache Dirs constantly lists all the directories for your media folders, about once a minute, which keeps the contents in RAM so your drives can sleep and you can still browse your directories.

good to know. Thanks!!!!

Hello @Pauven

I found this thread to be very informative and helpful. Thank you so much for the high level of detail in your setup.

I am coming from a failed FlexRAID setup... So, I do have a few questions about your shares and parameters.

But first... How are your rips structured? Most of my BDs (1200 or so) are in folder structure format... but have recently gone to MKVs. The same goes for my DVDs. My 3D BDs are in ISO, and my UHDs are MKV as well. Most of my TV Shows are individual MKVs as well. But the problem I may have with my TV shows is that there are multiple formats, DVD, BD, and UHD... all with multiple structures...

I plan on using the fill-up method. But unsure which minimum space to use for each user share. AND definitely not sure on which split level to use.

UHD... 200GB
BD... 120GB
3D... 120GB
DVD... ???
TV_Shows... ???

In the past... I only had one share... Media. It worked very well. For my media players. What are the advantages of having multiple shares?

Thanks