Western Digital Red/Seagate Barracuda and high fan speed?

[Royco 15]

Hello everybody.

 

I'm new to the forum and this is my first post.

 

I was wondering about the western digital red/Seagate Barracuda and "fan compatibility". 

 

I've installed three drives in my Microserver Gen 8:

Raid 0 - Seagate barracuda 2TB (salvaged from different system) with OS

Raid 1- Two Western Digital Reds 2TB

 

I installed Ubuntu 14.04 and included the HPVSA linux drivers (and blacklisted AHCI). The drives are correctly recognized as 2 HP logical volumes and lsmod lists the HPVSA driver. 

 

When I access ILO and look at the HD temperature probe, the temperature is always 50 degrees Celsius (even after a cold boot). This seems rather high and suspect I get an incorrect reading. My fan spins around 20-30%.

 

Can someone tell me whether the WD Red's give a good temperature reading and can give the low 6% fan speed? I'm considering pulling the Seagate drive and hoping to get a good temp reading from the WD. (Using dd now to clone my drive, will know more in 10 hours).

 

I updated the ILO firmware to 1.51 and the BIOS is also recent (somewhere middle 2014, 06/06/2014?).

Edited August 4, 2014 by Royco

[Royco 15]

I was forced to re-install Ubuntu and now I get a nice HD max reading of 35 degrees Celsius. However, the fan still spins between 20-30%. 

 

If there's a member with 6% fan speed, could they perhaps share their ILO temperature measurements? Maybe I've another hot component and this would help me identify it.

[stix01 10]

I was forced to re-install Ubuntu and now I get a nice HD max reading of 35 degrees Celsius. However, the fan still spins between 20-30%. 

 

If there's a member with 6% fan speed, could they perhaps share their ILO temperature measurements? Maybe I've another hot component and this would help me identify it.

To get 6% the server needs to be set in the cooling mode in the bios that's the top option.  You probably will find you are set in another. 

 

I have an ambient of about 28C today my box is sitting at a low 7% and when I'm down to the usual 18 - 22c it drops to 6% and even sometimes when it goes below 12c here the fan stops and goes to 0% for periods of 20 - 30 minutes.

[Royco 15]

Those are impressive numbers.

 

Do you mean the HP power profile setting in the BIOS? Balanced power and performance would be the top option.

 

I also had a discussion at the HP forum (see here) and found my issue was not Ubuntu specific. Could my PCI graphics be the problem (Sapphire HD5450)? There is a topic at HP about the fan and PCI (see HP ML350e Gen8 Fan Noise). They remove a PCI card and the system becomes quiet.

 

I'm sure people use non-HP parts in the PCI slot and they should have similar problems, unless it is indeed caused by the hot graphics card and not related to a failsafe mechanism. Do you've an expansion card perhaps?

[ikon 438]

 

You didn't mention an add-in GPU previously. That could be rather critical to temperature control.

[Royco 15]

You didn't mention an add-in GPU previously. That could be rather critical to temperature control.

When I googled "noisy fan", most hits were related to the B120i controller and HDDs. I got distracted.

[Royco 15]

For those who might be interested, I pulled the PCI card and now I get the 6% fanspeed under Ubuntu 14.04 with HPVSA.

 

Here I post a temperature screengrab.

TOP: With card (19% fan).

Bottom: No card (6% fan).

 

Update:

I put back in the card: started with a 10% fanspeed, which slowly crept up to 19%. That seems hopeful.

Edited August 7, 2014 by Royco