I’m considering building a hyperconvered Beast with the RomeD8-2T. Here’s my planned PCI-E slot layout:
Slot7 - 4x WD SN640 7mm SSD on a 10Gtek PCI-E card
Slot6 - 4x WD SN640 7mm SSD on a 10Gtek PCI-E card
Slot5 - 4x WD SN640 7mm SSD on a 10Gtek PCI-E card
Slot4 - 4x M.2 for L2ARC & 3x Special VDEV (both for HDD pool)
Slot3 -
Slot2 - Intel 100Gbps NIC
Slot1 - HBA
On paper there are sufficient lanes / bifurcation support for that all to work. However, that might be a considerable amount of heat generated in that area. Would I have sufficient airflow - perhaps I could manually set all the fans to 100%? I could add this PCI-E fan mount? Any other ideas to cool this area more - or is that even needed?
Admittedly, I’m not very familiar with how hot U.2 drives and 100G NIC’s usually run. That said, I do like the 10GTek cards have perforated brackets. That should help the airflow situation. Essentially, you’re going to have two 140MM fans pushing/pulling air across a set of HDD’s first and then your PCIe cards. It’s probably ok at higher speeds but I wouldn’t be surprised if you end up adding something.
My 2 cents. You definitely need to be sure the PCIE area is getting sufficient airflow. Adding up the wattages you’re looking at something like 95W at idle and 220W at max load.
I don’t know where that top-down cooler would draw air from; I don’t think it would be particularly effective. I’d try to isolate the CPU and the PCIE areas as two different chambers with baffling. There is this on the store for the HL15 but it probably isn’t big enough for the Beast; https://store.45homelab.com/products/5. You can 3D print something, but some stiff cardboard probably works.
Direct air through the case for the PCIE cards separately from the CPU, don’t let them mix. You want a constant flow of cool air in and hot air out and not for the hot air to start swirling around in the case. You should be able to configure the fans with different speeds on each side if necessary.