# Drive fan control question



## adamthekiwi (Nov 24, 2011)

Hi All,

Another fan control question, but this one is a little different and I'm not even certain that this is the right place to ask it - but it might start leading me in the right direction.

I have a small home fileserver. The mainboard is an Asus AT3IONT-I Deluxe. I'm actually using FreeNAS (I hope you'll forgive me that!). I have a number (4 initially, room to expand to 8) 1TB 2.5" SATA drives housed in a pair of 5.25" 4-drive hot-swap backplanes (this one, in fact). These are controlled by a seperate controller card.

The enclosures each have a pair of 40mm fans, and these are always on if there is a drive in place. They make quite a bit of noise - everything else in the system is passive. What I'd really like to do is find a way of controlling them so they they only come on to provide extra cooling if the S.M.A.R.T. temperature readings for a drive indicate that it's gone above a certain threshold.

What I haven't tried doing yet is running the system for a while with the fans disconnected and monitoring the S.M.A.R.T. temperature readings - that's a task I'll try to schedule soon. In the interim can anyone start to offer any advice on how this level of control might be achieved?

Thanks - Adam...


----------



## wblock@ (Nov 24, 2011)

Why not use a hardware fan controller panel?  That should provide multiple temperature sensors and act as a programmable thermostat for the fans.  This is remarkably cheap.

To control add-on fans through software, I suspect you'll need some additional hardware.


----------



## Dru (Nov 24, 2011)

Dunno if you had them running quiet behind a system before, but 40mm fans are hard to run very silent, there is a reason you only mostly see them in server applications, besides size. They will probably either be fast and loud, slow and not moving any air, or not turning at all.

If you just wanted fan power only, incase of overheating, you could DIY a simple temperature switch with just a direct on or off. I like passive systems, those 40mm's would probably drive me nuts.


----------

