ReadyNAS Pro Business: Fan spinning often?

Blues wrote:
The fan in my ReadyNAS Pro Business has been tending to spin a lot in the last few weeks and I don't know what the cause is.

Apologies for asking this rather obvious question, but have you cleaned the dust out of the fans and heatsinks? If you haven't, it might really make a difference.

Best way to clean the NAS is to shut it down, open the case, and use a can of compressed air to blow the dust out of the fans and heatsinks (and out of the power supply, and from between the drives, and off the mesh on the front-panel door, etc.). Hold the fan blades still while you're cleaning them; the fan bearings can't withstand high RPMs and will fail if you spin them up with the compressed air.

No need to apologize. It's a valid question.

I did a fairly thorough cleaning a month or two ago, but I did not remove the drives to get at the spaces between them. I also did not know about the compressed air and the fan blades. (However, I never move the air's nozzle close to the fans.)

Regardless, I will do another, even better cleaning in the next couple of days. I'll report back one way or the other.

Thank you much for the assistance.

Update

fastfwd, I followed your suggestions. I shut it down, took out each drive, and used compressed air to blow out all the dust. Did the same to the bays, screen door and the remainder of the inside, carefully holding the fans when working on them.

In general, the machine is quieter with the fan speed usually in the 900-1100 range, but it still has some periods (10-15 minutes) where the fans will get up over 2000 RPM.

My concern is that I may have injured one or more of the fans when previously doing this process (and not holding the fans). This might be causing the diminishment of the problem, but not its elimination.

If I did damage the fans, can I replace them myself? If so, where would I order replacements?

Thank you again.

If you are only seeing the higher RPMs occasionally then I suspect the fans are ok.

Maybe post the temps when the fans are quiet?

BTW, some drives run cooler than others. The WD5000AAKX uses 6 watts, replacing them with an ST2000NV000 or an WD20EFRX would lower your temperatures. The ST2000DM0001 is better than the WD5000AAKX, but the NV and WDC Reds are still about a watt less.

It's currently in normal operating noise mode:
Fan SYS 927 RPM
Fan CPU 2008 RPM
Temp SYS 55 C / 131 F [Normal 0-65 C / 32-149 F]
Temp CPU 14.5 C / 58 F [Normal 0-60 C / 32-140 F]

It has 4 Seagate 3TB drives (all Seagate ST33000650NS 2794 GB) and 1 WDC 3 TB drive (WD30EFRX-68AX9N0 2794 GB).

The temps for the Seagates are between 35 C and 40 C. The WDC is at 29 C.

Does this help?

I somehow read fastfwd's equipment list as yours. :oops:

Your Seagate drives are pumping out over 9 watts each during use, and 7.4 watts each while idling. So I am not surprised that your fans sometimes kick into high gear. I'm a bit surprised that it wasn't doing this before.

The WDC Red uses 4 watts during use, and 3 during idle - which is why it is so much cooler.

Anyway, there are some threads about replacing the fans, including one here: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=39652. Though I don't think I'd change them if the NAS is still under warranty.

Blues wrote:
In general, the machine is quieter with the fan speed usually in the 900-1100 range, but it still has some periods (10-15 minutes) where the fans will get up over 2000 RPM.

If the high-speed periods correlate with known periods of high load on the NAS, that's nothing to worry about; the fans are just doing their job. On my Pro 6, for example, the fans spin up for a few minutes every four hours when a complete rsnapshot backup is run, and every night when the updatedb command runs, etc.

Blues wrote:
My concern is that I may have injured one or more of the fans when previously doing this process (and not holding the fans).

Fan bearings will usually start to make more noise when they're damaged, and the noise often gets progressively worse with time. If your fans aren't noticeably louder now than they were before, and if you don't see any other symptoms of a damaged fan (fan unable to run at low speed without stopping, or refusing to spin at all, or running constantly at a much slower speed than normal -- or an "Out of Spec" warning on the Frontview "Health" page) I wouldn't be concerned.

Blues wrote:
If I did damage the fans, can I replace them myself? If so, where would I order replacements?

It's easy to replace the case fan at the upper rear of the NAS. It's slightly harder to replace the CPU fan on the side. Replacing the fan in the power supply (at the lower rear of the case) is a time-consuming, awkward, potentially dangerous process that's probably more trouble than it's worth; if that fan goes out, I'd recommend replacing the whole power supply.

I replaced all the perfectly-good fans in my Pro 6 with fancy Noctua fans, but that was mostly because I was bored and didn't have anything else to spend time or money on that week. The fans that come with the NAS have been carefully chosen for it; they're excellent performers with really good airflow specs, and they don't cost a lot of money or draw a lot of current -- their only shortcoming is that they're a little loud -- so if one of your fans needs to be replaced, it would make sense to replace it with exactly the same model.

These are the fans that came with my Pro 6:

Case: Crown Electronics AGE12025B12M(-067)
CPU: Crown Electronics AGE08015B12V
Power Supply: ADDA Corp AD0812HB-A70GL

You can probably find replacements by searching the web for those part numbers.

OK. Thanks to all for the information.

I'll keep an eye on things more regularly than I have been, although I don't plan to do anything drastic just yet.

The majority of the data is video footage I've shot and music from close to a thousand CDs. It doesn't change or get updated often. I make a complete backup of the unit once a week. I also plan to get a couple of additional drives so I have a second complete set of backups.

It's good to know that there are replacements available for the fans.

Again: Thanks.

My NAS is doing the same, with some tests disks from Seagate. Their temperature rise over 46°C every now and then - even when idle - and that is kicking the fan to spin up. When the temperature goes below 46°C, the fan slows down, till next time.

I'd like a better fan management. I think the unit should realise the temperature is rising and spin up the fan *a little* to prevent it without waiting till it's too late and then try to catch up. WDC are much cooler and do not have this problem.

I posted in a different section, but repeating basics here. My Pro6 and Pro BE spin up the fan as expected under high load, but don't always spin back down properly even though the temperature has dropped well within normal bounds. It seems you have to access the NAS in some way for it to recognize it needs to adjust the speed. Going into Frontview to check the speed is enough for it to wake up and reduce the speed. This has only happened since I upgraded to 4.2.26, but I was at 4.2.21 for a long time.

My suspicion is that this happens if it has not yet adjusted the speed down when it spins down the drives. My concern is that it would likewise fail to spin the fan up if my A/C should fail while the drives are spun down.