I can't believe how well this worked! Soundproofing & Cooling my Home Server Rack
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- Опубликовано: 10 июл 2024
- In this video, we soundproof my ZPAS SJB server rack with some Pyrosorb-S Class 0 acoustic foam. Then, as this form also acts as a thermal insulator, we upgrade the cooling system with an AC Infinity Controller 12 rackmount fan controller and a pair of AC Infinity MULTIFAN S3 fans. We then take a look at some test results to see how much of a difference the sound insulation worked, and I was very pleasantly surprised!
Buy on Amazon (Affiliate):
- AC Infinity Controller 12: geni.us/EVU3X
- AC Infinity MULTIFAN S3: geni.us/tKsAMfd
Pyrosorb-S Class 0 Acoustic Foam: www.efoam.co.uk/Pyrosorb-clas...
ZPAS SJB Rack: zpasgroup.co.uk/floor-standin...
www.camerongray.me/
/ camerongray1515
Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction
03:43 - Acoustic Foam
07:03 - FIRE!
08:39 - AC Infinity Cooling System
17:32 - Tour of the rack
20:50 - Preparing the rack
24:53 - The old "cooling system"
27:03 - Installing the foam
31:26 - Installing the cooling system
33:04 - Fan controller interface demo
39:15 - It works!
46:11 - Noise level test results
50:04 - Cooling test results
51:39 - Conclusion
AFFILIATE LINKS NOTICE:
Product links under this video marked “(Affiliate)” are affiliate links where I may receive a small commission on qualifying sales. Affiliate programs that I am a member of include, but are not limited to: Amazon Associates, eBay Partner Network and AliExpress Affiliates.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Purchasing through these affiliate links will not cost you any more money, however the commission earned significantly helps fund the production of videos on my channel. 
Наука
Buy on Amazon (Affiliate):
- AC Infinity Controller 12: geni.us/EVU3X
- AC Infinity MULTIFAN S3: geni.us/tKsAMfd
Pyrosorb-S Class 0 Acoustic Foam: www.efoam.co.uk/Pyrosorb-class-0-acoustic-foam.php
ZPAS SJB Rack: zpasgroup.co.uk/floor-standing-cabinets-and-open-racks/4-sjb-19-network-cabinet.html
Can you advise where to buy the rack mount controller 12 as I can’t find anywhere
What thickness material did you go for ?
Great video Cameron, I'm bookmarking far too many of your videos in my "future projects" folder. One of these days my partner will go a trip for a few days and I can start cutting holes in the wall to run cables - here's hoping I can fill them back in before she comes home!
Hey Cameron, I also got this rack about 5 years ago when I saw your video about it. I moved resently and it’s still part of my living room and I'll look into soundproofing it with the foam you showed.Thanks for your videos, they are very helpful.
I use these USB fans in all my rack cases too, QUIET and move air perfectly, if mounted at the top of the rack to pull air out. They also work really good at isolating them silent pc's with the heatsinks on the top and keeping them cool. Good video Cameron!
This is a really cool setup now. Recently I worked on cooling security rack with PoE switches and recording boxes, since owner decided to have the server closet permamently closed. There are 2 quad fan boxes blowing non-stop full speed and I managed to get 27C out of it. The rack is designed to suck fresh air alongside all bottom edges, so no bottom fan is required. Only middle and top ones are. I really like that.
You could even put some weather stripping on to seal the door to the chassis as well, I imagine that's where most the remaining noise is coming through.
Very good point, actually looks like the "official" soundproof version of this rack has some sort of seal on the door. Might try and pick some up at some point and give it a go!
Great video!
ZPAS is still making racks and they are located in Poland. The model you got is from "office" line, which are designed to be closer to the human, and that's the reason of smaller air flow.
This looks brilliant!
I have one of those USB fans in a cabinet out on a site just to blow some air over the passively cooled router, works really well. It's not got a controller on it just a simple USB power supply but the switch is mounted at the front so I can slow it down a bit in Winter if I'm on the site, and there's another site with one of those PoE splitter units giving 12v to a case fan that I can turn off with SNMP by turning off the PoE port on the switch.
The discomfort around intake fans on carpet is hilarious. You're right, the carpet would, if anything, act as a filter for dust with most of it getting stuck on the carpet ready to be vacuumed. Do people think dust is magically created within the carpet itself?!
technically, the dust mites, that actually create some part of the mixture we call "dust", have more space to live on in carpet, since the surface area is greater. So one might argue that carpet is a better breeding ground for dust. But honestly I think most people on the internet confuse "PC getting dusty" with "air intake starved of air" - since PC feet usually sink into carpet, and if your carpet is a high pile carpet the carpet might block the intake. So just a regular case of people getting mad on the internet, having understood only half of it ;)
@@klaernie Pinkyblue light kills 99% of all dust mites, dead.
@@travisash8180 time to fire up the RGB then!
perfect video. i bought that same server rack (but in black, much better) three weeks ago and still have noise cancelling to do
Do you have pinkyblue lights in your rack ?
I've had so many ac infinity fans and I've actually mounted them into my PC case and ran the USB cable out the back.
I know I can just get a PWM splitter but I already had the fans because I was cooling my laptop by putting those fans on top of the keyboard and a laptop cooler
Buy a small shelf, mount it in the back of the rack. You can almost double the space in some racks by mounting short devices back to back.
AC Infinity is very handy, I've used them for quite some time now and I have a 2U (4 fan) temperature controlled unit. Looks similar to what you have in the controller, but just 2U and with 2 sets of 2 fans to the side of the one you've got. The option you've got works very well if you have your fans installed in the rack. I may switch out the fans they came with for some Noctua ones. It is a great option, bit pricy, and their power bricks are particularly cr*p - I've had to replace multiple of them over time. The thing I like about the more recent models, is that they have the ability to turn off the display, plus the quality of the metal is good.
I will check out the external brick option, that is a way better option.
You could also mount the 1u rackshelf in the back of the rack at the same height as the fan controller, then you won't need deeper screws to mount them together at the front.
Interesting that there's products sold for that kind of cooling! 5 or so years ago I wanted some temperature based cooling for my TV stand to keep the video game consoles cool. I searched around a bit for a product that might do that, but ended up just assuming that's not something there's a consumer market for. So instead I made my own basic circuit to run PWM PC fans with an Arduino. It was an interesting project and the end result did do what it needed to but I spent a long time tweaking the temperature response and attempting to get a quiet acceleration but eventually just left it at good enough.
It would have been nice if I had run across the AC Infinity at the time. Would have saved a lot of time that I put in for the small benefits gained from adding the cooling fans.
It will be interesting to see how many years it lasts, I had some acoustic foam installed in an old music pc that turned to mush after 10 years or so
you may also use soundproofing transparent film for the door.
The copper legs under the lid look great.. 10x better then nuts.. and considering the colour of the lid.. I would just leave them. No need to replace.
Yeah, starting to think that, they've definitely grown on me
You might also get some added benefit from sealing around the door with rubber draft seals
I've been a fire alarm engineer for 20 years so I've a fair idea about how much of a difference a 9dB drop in sound pressures can be and it really is massive.
One way to maybe demonstrate it is that 65dB is considered the minimum for a fire alarm sounder.
However, in areas of high background noise, the fire alarm needs to sound at a minimum of 5dB above the background noise. Ie, a 5dB increase above other noises is considered sufficient to make that noise distinguishable from every other noise in the background.
Another way of putting it is that you'll generally lose about 5dB going through a standard hollow door, or 10 dB going through a 60 minute fire door.
Are you going to put any pinkyblue lights on the ZPAS SJB server rack ?
The way that power adaptor is positioned, it wouldn't block any ports. It's actually 90 degrees from what a normal US power adaptor plug would be. I have a couple in my cabinet just like that.
Starting to set up my own 22 U HP network rack that I got of Ebay for next to nothing (£35) I might have to sound insulate it to when I switch on my Netgear ProSafe GS748TS.
It's a bit loud when I start it up, hopefully it won;t be loud constantly but if it is I'll have to do something about it.
Please can you tell me how many watts the fan controller and fans combined use once they reaches steady state?
Nice set up Cameron!
I am somewhat disappointed to not see standard PWM fan headers on the back of that AC Infinity device, but no doubt the proprietary ones are of high quality even if you pay a premium for them.
Yeah, those would have been ideal since they would also give fan speed monitoring, I was surprised that such a device just doesn't really exist! I suppose this does give a more "polished" end result but if it existed, I'd have definitely rather just had a 1U 4 pin PWM fan controller hooked up to a pair of Noctua fans.
I suppose the demand for a nearly silent rack is so low that many manufacturers just don't bother.
@camerongray1515 I know you are in the UK. Do you have suggestions on where to get the same foam you got but in the United States? This is a project I need to do on my 25U APC Cabinet.
I was actually going to mention just as you did that a bread knife works the best on foam. If you were to do this on the regular you’d benefit by investing in an electric carving knife.
These are more pricey than the alternatives but it's clearly much better
A thought on mounting the PSU - you've got a four-post rack, why not take advantage of that? Mount the fan controller on the front posts and a shelf on the rear posts at the same U.
That's what he said he is planning on doing in the video.
Not complaining about the carpet!!! But is it worth putting some dust filter on the fan intakes to prevent any dust getting in?
It's something I considered although the difficulty would be being able to get it out easily to clean - might see if I can fit something on the bottom that would allow me to slide a fan filter out from under the rack while it's sitting on the floor.
I clean my Carpets - Cameron Gray 2023
:)
I didn't see that 10gb aliexpress firewall in the rack. Do you still use that thing? I'm thinking about getting one and I'm still weighing my options.
Yep, it's in a different rack - all of my structured cabling terminates in a wall mounted cabinet in a cupboard so I keep my router and core switches in there, this rack is in my office and holds my actual servers which are too large for the wall cabinet.
If the foam is too big for the cabinet, take one of the scraps and see how difficult it is to set fire to it. Do it outside, foam and similar stuff often releases a lot of black smoke and maybe bad chemicals too. That is possible even if it does not catch fire, it may still release bad chemicals when heated to an extreme.
I tried that in this video with a small offcut, it didn't ignite at all, the most it did was slightly glow and produce a small amount of smoke
A correction a 3dB reduction in sound level is halving of the sound level. So a 9 dB reduction is nearly a 90% reduction in the sound level.
I'm definitely not an expert, but the way I understand it is that while a 3dB change does represent a halving/doubling of sound energy and a 6dB change represents a halving/doubling of sound pressure, human perception also works somewhat logarithmically so many people see 10dB as a doubling/halving of how "loud" a person will experience a sound as being.
@@camerongray1515 Wow, I was gonna comment the same 3db =-half/double but you are basically correct in there's a differnece between db vs dbA (db weighted) and human sound perception. Did a bit of research and it all basically comes down to the frequency of the actual sound.
So all that said, based on your chart, you would subjectively estimate that 9db sound reduction was roughly half what it was before the project?
Next improvement: wheels?
Damn.. cant get this anywhere
So annoying they dont sell that rack anymore , used one in my old work also for an AV rack but wanted one for home recently and could not get it , had to get a normal style rack that is a fair bit deeper .
I have that AC Infinity controller, it's not bad but I hate their fans. Noctua's USB fans work with it and they move a lot more air for a lot less noise.
just use a tempter sensor set to control 2 fans one that's always on one with a smart plug or wire in a smart fan switch that goes on a wall make a automation if it goes over this temp increase the speeds below this cut the power to the fans plus you get to use it manually too look at the apple home kit fan wall controls you can do this if you use this
While I could do that, I wanted a system that was completely standalone and didn't rely on any sort of network connection or server. Otherwise, a network or server issue could cause the fans to stay off and the rack to overheat.
17:39 lol
I think that racks like this have a VERY limited cooling power capacity.
If you put a bigger, more powerful server in there than what you have, then it will easily and quickly overwhelm the "cooling" capacity of the new fans to be able to draw in enough cooler, ambient air, to cool the rack, which will reduce it's ability to cool the rack.
I have I think it's like a 23U networking rack and it has fans as well, but when I had my 8 Xeons running at 100% load in the server rack, it got REALLY got inside said server rack.
Yeah, a rack like this is never designed to run a large amount of high power equipment. For running a lot of servers you're going to need an open mesh rack in an air conditioned room. Racks like mine are designed for running a small amount of equipment where the rack is sitting out on show and needs to look decent. In my situation, it's almost certain that I'd end up limiting what I'm running from a power cost perspective long before I hit the thermal limits of this rack. I would be unreasonably expensive to run anything more than a couple of low power, single CPU servers.
@@camerongray1515
Gotcha.
I have a similar, but taller rack like this as well.
I found out AFTER purchasing that it was really meant for networking gear rather than a 4-node, dual socket, Xeon (64-core/128-thread total) server.
Since then, I've replaced my four-node Xeon server with two Ryzen 5950X systems (for CAE/HPC workloads), but am looking to grow to to more nodes, but that's been put on hold for a while.
Expensive for what it is, arduino, temp sensor and relay for the fraction of the price
This does have the ability to adjust the fan speed based on the temperature so it's more than a simple thermostat (which is all you could build by using a relay). Sure, the overall cost of materials to build something like this is nowhere near the cost of the finished product, but you also need to factor in that it comes in a nice rackmount case with connectors for the fans and a user interface to allow monitoring and controlling of it. I'll gladly pay extra for that over having an Arduino and a bunch of associated components bodged somewhere into the rack. And sure, I could buy a rack case, display and some buttons and build this myself for cheaper, but it would only be cheaper if I don't put a value on my time which I'd have to spend a lot of to build it vs this completely plug and play solution.
It's even simpler. Just give them the license plate numbers and profram the software to not ticket them. In most states the systems are automated and no one really looks at them unless challenged.
Did you comment on the wrong video?
Too bad AC Infinity discontinued the Controller.
Why not mount them in a Samsung wine fridge with its back cut out ?...just a thought, would be awesome to see that.
Feels like a bit of a waste of a fridge, not to mention the environmental side of dealing with all of the refrigerant.etc. When it comes to things like server racks, I prefer to stick with purpose built solutions rather than trying to make my own.
I think the word you’re looking for is “hysteresis”.
Yeah, that's definitely the correct technical term, although the AC Infinity unit uses the term "buffer" which is why I said that.
This fokin nail bro
Instead of acoustic foam, you might explore some noise cancellation ideas where you would use a speaker and microphone to play the inverse of the fan noise similar to a noise cancelling headphone. That might work better and wouldn’t add heat to the cabinet.
That wouldn't be possible unfortunately. Noise cancelling headphones work by picking up the sound exactly where it enters your ears and then plays the inverse directly into your ear. When it comes to a whole room you have to deal with sound travelling in all directions, reflecting off surfaces.etc - Sure you could pick up the sound in one location with a microphone and play an inverse from a speaker at that location, but that won't do anything to stop sound that has reflected off of other surfaces.
Put the speakers facing your fans. That’s probably where the noise is coming from. So 4 speakers total that cancels the sidewall reflections. That would reduce the noise by 85-90%.
@@camerongray1515 I’m having a similar problem with my Bambu Lab 3D printer. It’s noisy! And there isn’t room to put foam inside. So an active noise cancelation idea is really the only option.
Do you have any information showing this actually working in practice, I simply can't see how this could be possible - sound will be emitted from all sides of every single piece of equipment in the rack and then be reflected around inside the rack. The servers will also vibrate and therefore cause everything in the rack to also emit some level of noise. I can't see how some sort of speaker emitting the inverse of the sound picked up at a single location is going to do anything to reduce the overall noise in the room.
A similar scenario would be where you have a pair of speakers wired out of phase with each other. Sure, one speaker will be playing the inverse of the other, but it doesn't mean you don't hear anything - the sound level will change as you move throughout the room with some areas being loud, and others being almost silent. Noise cancelling headphones work because your ears are always going to be in the same position relative to the speaker, but this isn't the case when talking about a whole room.
The noise cancellation feature on the 3D printer you mentioned does seem to work, but this looks like it's using a microphone to listen to the sound produced and then tunes the motor driver to actually stop the motor from emitting certain frequencies - A clever idea for sure, but not the sort of thing that can be retrofitted to any noise source.
@@camerongray1515 Do you always wait for someone else to prove to you it works before trying it? lol The lightbulb would never have been invented if Edison had done that. lol
Wholly crap. A whole lotta yappin and very little activity here. 😅😂😂😂
Insane.
Goddamn you ramble a lot! Just get to the damn point. Almost an hour long video of you installing a fan man. 😂😂😂
I said the same thing!!! 90% of the video was just insane amounts of useless rambling. Never watching another video from this guy again.
@@AlmightyEye yeah don't bother! I saved you the trouble... I checked another couple videos to see if they're all like that and they are lol.
A bit off topic but what English accent is this guy have? I thought it's difficult to understand Indians talking in English, but now this accent is even more unbearable... it does not sound like British but it's so difficult to understand, as if he is swallowing the words or something. absurdly enough English is not even my native language but this is the first time my ears hurt from trying to understand the talking
"This guy" is Scottish and is also a human being who reads comments and maybe doesn't appreciate having his natural voice referred to as "unbearable"... Feel free to watch another channel who's accent you prefer...
@@camerongray1515 I am sorry, in my culture, being honest and direct is just the normal. I was saying what I think. and yes it's extremely hard to understand you, and you are not the first Scottish I have heard.. but maybe it's a region-specific accent? anyway sorry that I upset you, I did not mean to do it
@@davideyt1242 I am trying to understand you. Nothing in his video was hard to understand. I'm American, if that matters but he spoke clearly and very understandable.
@@obsidiandarrinI am not "American" but I was born in the US and lived there for a few good years until my parents got back to our country, and the accent was difficult for me to understand.. of course I understood everything that was said, but it required a lot of listening and focusing, so not natural. anyway its not too important just wanted to comment on that