Fixing up the Pi Server Rack with new fans
I built a server rack housing 4 Raspberry Pi 4s a long time ago now - nearly 4 years ago. The fans have been on their way out for a while now, with them making that noise that tells you they're struggling somewhat.
I finally decided to do something about this when trying to read and having that as my background track the whole time, which was rather annoying. I pulled out the Pi's and saw that it was both the back fans for the case (2x 8015 - 80mm wide/tall and 15mm deep) and 3 of the 4 PoE card fans (4x 3007 - 30mm wide/tall and 7mm deep). I didn't capture many images of it in this state, but you can see the fans are fairly clogged up with years of floor dust:
And that was after disassembling it and moving it about - there were large chunks of dust in there. I suppose I should've expected it with it living in the corner which seems to collect Dust Bunnies first, although this is where my Router is, so I don't really want to place it anywhere else.
You can see some of the other dust in this image, as well as one of the back fans (the other one had already been removed as it was very noisy). I don't blame the fans for giving up in this environment, in fact I'd say they did rather well.
Because of the way all these circuit boards are built (see above) - the fans are user replaceable and can easily be unscrewed and connected to the pins (thanks to the designers of the board). So, rather than purchase a bunch of new boards and a new case, I took to everyone's favourite place for cheap (and slightly niche) electronic components - Aliexpress
Considering that the original PoE boards cost me something like £20 each - this is a significant saving over just replacing them wholesale (and is a lot less wasteful, of course).
Here's the boards after all the fans have been replaced.
As an aside, the first set of these fans I received were stolen - I really hope someone enjoyed the really specific fans with no other real uses.
After the fans were replaced, here is how it sounded (a lot better)!
And that'll hopefully be me set for another few years now - I originally bought this because one of my Pi's was overheating in it's sub-optimal setup, so keeping the fans working at their best is certainly a good idea.
Next thing for these, is probably to update the 2 which haven't been reinstalled recently to run a 64-bit version of the raspbian operating system, but I need to drum up the motivation to want to redo all of the configurations first!
All the best,
~ CA
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This post was last edited 2 months, 1 week ago.