Intro

A year+ ago, I set myself to the task of rack mounting my entire homelab. My main motivation at the time was to consolidate all the gear that laid in various places in the appartment, and that was very prompt to collect dust and tangle.

I learnt a tremendous lot in the process. Rack mount hardware is a class of its own in certain aspects, and you only truly learn about it by getting you hands onto some. The topic, surely, will deserve a future artcile.

Long story short, to keep things rather silent, I took the approach of limiting servers front to back to the minimum while topping up the hardware with small fans wherever a chipset needed it. A sort of spot cooling, you could.

One such example is a NVMe drive I have in my storage server. I live in Singapore and the weather here is hot! The rack is only enjoying the luxury or air con a small part of the day - whenever someone is in the living room - and this lead our poor NVMe to routinely see temperatures in excess of 60 degrees. Obviously, not that great.

One thing leading to another, I went on Taobao hunt the perfect (aka cheap and efficient) NVMe cooling fan.

Temperatures

Let’s first take a quick look at temperatures before the upgrade.

$ sudo sensors                                                                                                                   
[...]

drivetemp-scsi-2-0
Adapter: SCSI adapter
temp1:        +38.0°C  (low  =  +5.0°C, high = +55.0°C)
                       (crit low = -40.0°C, crit = +70.0°C)
                       (lowest = +24.0°C, highest = +39.0°C)

nvme-pci-0300
Adapter: PCI adapter
Composite:    +53.9°C  (low  =  -0.1°C, high = +84.8°C)
                       (crit = +94.8°C)
Sensor 1:     +53.9°C  (low  = -273.1°C, high = +65261.8°C)
Sensor 2:     +61.9°C  (low  = -273.1°C, high = +65261.8°C)
Sensor 8:     +53.9°C  (low  = -273.1°C, high = +65261.8°C)

I’ve trimmed the log but retained drivetemp-scsi-2-0 as an indication. Obviously, the airflow is enough to properly cool SATA hard drives that site in the front caddies.

nvme-pci-0300 however, is swaeting a fair bit.

Installing the new hardware

Purchase link:

[fan photo]

The installation is pretty straightforward.

• Screw the NVMe onto the heatsink with a thermal pad in between
• Screw back down the who assembly onto your motherboard
• Plug the PWM fan connector onto the motherboard. You’re done!

Results

We have gain approx 10 degrees. Not a huge lot, but a noteworthy improvment notheless. NVMe just run hot, regardless of what you do.

Hopefully, this might help extend the drives lifespan. At least until I execute on my plan of retiring it to the benefit of enterprise class flash drives with higher IOPS.