HPE D3600 Enclosure Noise

[f1aret]

Hi. I'm fortunate enough to have come into an HPE Proliant DL380 Gen9 and an accompanying HPE D3600 disk enclosure. The enclosure if fully populated with twelve 6 TB drives. It was a unit that was a duplicate system from work that we had no need for, so I was lucky enough to inherit it.

I'd like to use it in my home and as an esxi environment. I've built it as such and it runs great. However, the fan noise from the D3600 is just a bit much for my house. There is nothing wrong with either the server or the enclosure. Both are patched to the latest versions, cleaned from dust using canned air and wiped down clean. The noise clearly seems to be coming from the two power supplies that are in the unit. It has two fans that are fixed back-to-back. If I pull one out, the other one revs up to compensate, thus creating more noise. The unit will not run if I pull both of them out.

I realize that this is a unit designed for maximum airflow and to live in a datacenter. There may not be anything that I can do about the noise. But I'm just putting this out there to ask if anyone has hacked one of these unit before and has figured out how to quiet this thing. I'd love to use it at home in my lab, but I don't think I can live with the noise

[shuff · Accepted solution]

 Unfortunately, there is no official method to reduce the noise from the unit except one option: installing noise-reducing baffles to mitigate the noise, but this is not a recommended or tested solution by HPE (see page 35: https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/api/document/a00073544enw#page=34?locale=en-US&rangeChunkSize=256000&disableAutoFetch=false&disableCache=true). Any other modifications to the unit could potentially void the warranty.