I corrected a hardware error which had one of my my CPU turbo fans directed the wrong way in one of my NAS chassis. The past week I have been doing incremental work on getting my NAS and Virtual infrastructure environment updated with more disk space and newer versions of FreeNAS and XenServer. The resilvering process of FreeNAS takes a very long time 24 hours and another 34 hours and I have other chores but that is for a much longer post coming soon.
Since I had migrated all of my data to my other NAS I was free to look into a few other issues that have been bugging me about this NAS. After plugging in and insuring I could recognize another new drive I pulled the NAS partially out of the rack to see if I could tell why the high velocity chassis fans were kicked on more than the other identical NAS. Initially I blew out and moved the fans to other spots but whatever fan was near my power supply kept blowing full speed regardless if the system needed cooling or not. I then spotted the issue and I had placed one of my turbo CPU fans the wrong way!
The turbo CPU fan was pointing straight into the chassis fan that is why it was always blowing and mt temps were off!
You can see the arrow going the wrong way even! What was I thinking when I did this I don’t know! This makes for horrible airflow turbulence in a system that should have a steady consistent flow out the back of the system away from the hard drives over the RAM straight out the back to some more waiting fans pointing out of the back of the system!
Well I should just have been able to loosen the screws on the offending CPU fan put down some more thermal compound on the CPU and fan assembly but that would not make me suffer enough. the standoffs decided to come loose from the chassis and not the fan assembly so I had to pull this heavy 70 pound system with drives out of the bottom of my rack late at night and take it to the hallway on my test bench after moving some other items I was working on from the bench. I had to take the motherboard and all the components completely out of the system to properly unscrew the chassis standoffs from the CPU cooling assembly.
Also if you look close enough you can see the second set of standoffs for the other CPU that had the fan assembly pointed in the proper direction had no issue staying in place. Well I put the standoffs tightly back in place then put the system back together and used my leveraging tricks to get my heavy system back into the rack. The system sounds so much better without two high powered fans blowing right into each other from about an inch away!
Tomorrow I resume my other upgrades!
Here is my NAS baby back in in place at the bottom of my 7 foot rack with a stack of my leverage pieces in the foreground.
