I’m new to these forums and am currently considering to buy an HL15 fully-built (probably with a Xeon Silver 4210 or 4216) and have a few questions:
I would need to keep the unit in an open rack in my home office, so I want to get the unit with the Noctua fan upgrade. Since these fans appear to be PWM, are they connected to any kind of fan controller (e.g. on the motherboard) or do they run at one speed all the time (like the default fans apparently do)?
I don’t want to use Enterprise Class Drives, but probably NAS drives (e.g. WD Red Pro or Seagate IronWolf Pro), since those are quieter. Does that sound feasible or would this (even with the Noctua fans) still be too loud a unit to keep around in the same room?
Is the Staggered Spin-Up (SSU) feature limited to the Rocky Linux OS that the unit ships with or does that work in other environments as well, particularly TrueNas Scale, since I’m planning to use that? If it does work on TrueNas Scale, do I need to do some manual configuration for it to work?
Finally it’s been really difficult to find out, which drives actually do support SSU (or PM2 as WD seems to call it). There is no readily available information on the internet that I was able to find. So does anyone know, if SSU/PM2 is supported by the WD Red Pro line, e.g. the 16TB, 18TB or 20TB versions? Or what is the best way to find out (short of buying the thing)?
Thanks so much in advance for any advice you can give.
Yes, the fans are connected through an NA-FC1 (NA-FC1) and NA-FH1 (NA-FH1) to the PWM fan headers on the motherboard. So, the fans can be controlled through the IPMI fan settings and then tweaked if desired with the controller. You won’t need the install instructions, but if you want an idea of what is installed a link to the instructions is here; Exciting Update - Noctua Fan Kit Available for Purchase! - #20 by astraea.
Everyone has different thresholds for what they find noisy and what types of noise they find distracting. How big a room you have, if the rack is enclosed, etc will factor in. I doint think people generally find HDD noise to be loud, but some people find excessively clicky drives to be distracting. My HL15 is in another room, as much as anything because I have that luxury. Based on my prior experience with a Q30, which was in the same room as me, I don’t think I’d have a problem having the HL15 in the same office room as me with the fan upgrade. The drives in that weren’t that noisy. Unless you are looking for near quiet becase you are doing audio production or on lots of conference calls, etc. If it was a home theater room it might still be a bit noisy, but others seem really pleased with the low noise of the fan upgrade from what I’ve seen here.
My understanding (I can be corrected) is this is a feature of the HDD backplane that seems to work with most modern drives. I forget, but there may be some drives it doesn’t work with, I seem to remember something about certain pins on the drive connectors used to support this. It’s not going to be something in the OS, as this happens before the OS loads.
On SSU, I have a custom build, so I can’t confirm what the full build does. I do have a KillAWatt available, but have a GPU and other things that affect my power draw vs a bare system with just drives. Nonetheless, how insistent are you on using SSU? In my experience, and by the numbers, the 750W PSU of the full build should be sufficient to start the system without SSU unless you are planning to put an additional 6 SSDs in it or something.
Based on this; https://knowledgebase.45drives.com/kb/start-up-power-draw/
you’re looking at 400W max for 3 seconds or so without SSU. And from memory, that’s probably what my whole system maxes at at start including everything–a PCIe GPU, HBA and NIC along with 16 Seagate 16TB HDDs. I don’t think SSU is necessarily required.
Here is another KB article about SSU, but it is a bit old, so take that into consideration. The stuff specific to the the Rocket 750 doesn’t apply, but it might give you some general info about SSU and the different ways it can be implemented; https://knowledgebase.45drives.com/kb/using-staggered-spin-up/
The Pin 11 thing was probably what I was thinking of, but that presumably still is not the way the HL15 would do it since the HDD power comes directly from the PSU.
The staggered spin-up is a combination of the back plane and the HBA supporting it. The motherboard in the HL15 Full Build has support for it through the regular BIOS. If you have an PCIe HBA, I assume that would then need to be set through the HBA BIOS.
Here’s the section from the X11SPH-NCTPF \ X11SPH-NCTF Manual:
Port 0 ~ Port 7 Spin Up Device
On an edge detect from 0 to 1, set this item to allow the PCH to initialize the device. The options are Disable and Enable.
It’s not in the documentation but the same setting is in the SAS3008 option ROM which can also be accessed from the UEFI BIOS. I think it’s even called the same but the verbiage might differ slightly.
The staggered spin-up is a combination of the back plane and the HBA supporting it. The motherboard in the HL15 Full Build has support for it through the regular BIOS. If you have an PCIe HBA, I assume that would then need to be set through the HBA BIOS.
This is way out of my league here, but at 45HomeLab Store 45Homelab states:
For the motherboard in HL15 full build, we’ve chosen a design that can accommodate all 15 connections without the need for an HBA card.
So it seems that there is no HBA card involved, so it’s all set in the BIOS?
There isn’t an HBA card in a PCIe slot, correct. But what the motherboard manufacturer (Supermicro) did in order to support 16 drives is they have the equivalent of an 8-port HBA built into the motherboard, since the chipsets usually only support 8 SATA drives or so. Having support for all 15 drives on the motherboard is one of the ways 45HL can make the HL15 cheaper than a 45Drives unit.
Nonetheless, yes the settings are all set in the BIOS as @rymandle05 pointed to in post #s 4 and 6 above. Seems like there are two different settings, one for 8 of the drives and another for the other 8.