Quietest 1U Rack Server?

[Brent Bice]

Richard Hurt wrote:
> I know noise is not normally a concern for rack mounted servers, but my 
> "data center" is in my small office and I would like to make it as 
> comfortable as possible.  As I don't require a lot of horsepower and am 
> running on a bit of a budget, I have been using PE1650s for all my 
> computing needs.  They are cheap and fairly quiet and so suite me pretty 
> well, but I would like to know if there are any other systems on the 
> market that make less noise.  My theory is that the higher power Xeon 
> processors generate more heat and therefor make more noise.  Is that 
> accurate?  What are your experiences with noisy vs. quiet servers?  What 
> server would you purchase if you had to live next to it?

    Well, one thing you might consider would be one of these:
http://www.soekris.com/Pictures/net4801_T1_Rear.jpg

    It's a cute little embedded system that boots off of a flash card or 
off of one of those tiny 2.5 inch ide laptop drives. I used one of these 
as a caching squid proxy that I could have on my desk. It's only 8.5 x 6 
x1.3 inches and has no fan at all.

    The 48xx series systems only have (I think) up to 512 megs of memory 
and only run 266 mhz though so it really depends on what you want to do 
with it, but they also have a faster model now (500 mhz?) with more 
memory. They make great little firewalls, proxies, etc. They seem to be 
pretty rock solid. I've got one running a firewall that's been up for a 
few years and a buddy has two with vpn tunnels between 'em that have 
been solid for several years. My squid proxy was very reliable... until 
my hand-me-down laptop-drive finally died. :-) I'll probably go get a 
new drive and turn it into a plone server in the next week or two...

Brent