Creating a quiet fileserver

This project spanned over a rather long period, but can be summorized like this. I have a bunch of decent PC hardware that makes a perfect fileserver. Disks, NIC, PSU, MB, CPU et al. In order for a file server to be useful, it must be 24/7 imho.. so the idea was to somehow make all those hardware components quiet enough to have in your bedroom without being annoying.

This is what I have to work with:
As most of you can figure, 3 HDDs @ 7200 rpm, some being 2 years old, will generate a lot of noise. This lovely metallic screeking sound we all love. Furthermore, the PSU is not especially silent either.. so I had to come up with a nice solution.

I discarded the idea of modding a standard case, (such as my spare AOpen HX08), simply because that would not get quiet enough. Instead I proceeded with the idea of creating a box large enough to room all components, but with really thick walls, thick enough to absorb any sound from the inside. Still, it had to have some cooling to extract the warm air out. The result is my lovely fileserver box, currently named "Stratosphere".

This is what it looks like.


I'll give you a short tour around "Stratosphere", hope you like it.

You already seen the front, now lets have a look at the backside.


As you can see, there are two holes through the sides of the "box". The lower one takes cool air from the outside, and the higher one extracts hot air from the inside. Both fans are 8cm PAPST fans, so noise is not really an issue here. On each side, there are long "screws" holding the top in position, under significant preassure I might add.


One of the key elements to how quiet the box is is actually that the top is squeezed hard in place. Lets move along, and take that top off.



As you can see. the top is not as thick as it seems, but rather it contains a thick "foam rubber". The sides are made out of two layers of plywood squeezing a thick layer of foam rubber in between. The key here is preasure, the harder the preasure, the better insulation (to a limit of course...). I'm actually compressing 6 cm foam into about half a cm.

Moving on to some shots from inside the box. This top-down view gives a good overlook.



As you can see, the PSU is mounted on the rear wall. The inner walls are all covered with a layer of Magic Fleece (tm), a material specially made for sound insulation. You can see the fans pushing air in and out of the box, as well as the HDDs lined up on a wooden construction. Between two HDDs there's also an extra fan pushing air over them to keep temperature down. Heat is an issue here, that's why there are no sound, gfx and other cards installed. Only what really counts... At the very bottom you can see the motherboard. Lets have a closer look deep down the case.
   

Here you can clearly see the Zalman copper cooler, a really good cooling device actually. Looks neat too :). As you can see there is also a GFX installed for the moment, but thats only there for debugging.

The system works great, reached 100 days of uptime, not a single crash, so heat is under control.

Hope you enjoyed the reading :-)

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