Shut off fan/Silencing mods

[gruber]

Short:

Two questions:
- How do I turn off the fan completely? If I remove it, the Thecus beeps every 30 minutes. Can I turn off that beep?
- How can I get rid of the need to turn on the Thecus manually? I would like it to startup as soon as I plug the power in. Or how do you turn on your Thecus if you put it into another case?

Update: Fan problem solved (there is the META module, which runs a script at startup, and which in turn switches off the alarm).


Long:

Dear all,

just received my Thecus n2100, and started silencing it.

1. Got everything out of its box and put it into an old Commodore 1541. It was relatively straightforward to use the front LED as a power LED for the Thecus. (Thecus gives 3.4V for the blue ones, so use a resistor to calm it a little.)

I decided to separate the drives, so they do not heat up each other. It turned out to be difficult to get hold of a female-male SATA extension, though. Eventually, a SATA slotpane did the trick.

Now, the drives are not above each other, but in front of each other. We do not really need a fan anymore, I think.

BTW: It was tricky to find a solution for turning it on. Eventually, I soldered wires to the microswitch, and triggered them using a second microswitch that should probably be connected to the latch of the 1541 or something. Not very nice. Is there a better way than soldering if you want to put the Thecus into a new case?

2. Alas, even with the fan gone, the harddisks are way too noisy. The Commodore has only a plastic casing with a lot of holes, after all. So I have bought two Scythe Quiet Drive harddisk enclosures. (They even come with - very short - male-female SATA extensions.) The noise is much better now, but the harddisks to not fit into the 1541 any more.

I am currently looking for other solutions. Either, I will try to stuff all the parts into my main PC, so I have a computer inside a computer. The Thecus will be running even when the main PC is turned off, and hopefully benefit from the silencing that I did to the main PC. (Hey, it would be so great if Thecus would give us the board on a (non connected) PCI card! Maybe with a little frontplane, so we could turn it on and sync our memory cards. The back of the card would have connectors for power, ethernet and so on.

Alternatively, I will just try to get a small HTPC enclosure and put the Thecus in there. Again, I hope that I can do without a fan, and I really need some advice on disabling the missing-fan-beeping, and perhaps on how to turn the thing on without using the original micro-switch.

I can not offer really much in return. If someone is interested in the wiring of Thecus' LEDs, I could post it here

Thanks!

[gruber]

It is real quiet now...

The Thecus has found a new home in small PC enclosure. Pin 19 and 20 are the light for HD1, and Pin 5 and 12 signal power. I have these connected to the LEDs for HD and Power on the case. To turn it on, I have soldered two pins to the left microswitch and connected these to the power-button of the case. It is sufficient to have HD1 connected, because the disks are set up as a RAID 1. (I need to check the RAID status using an external script now. Alternatively, I would need to solder additional LEDs to the case.)

To fixate the Thecus board inside the PC case, I screwed it on four small pieces of wood (using the four holes on the board) and hot-glued these to the back-wall of the board. The harddisks went into a couple of Skythe Quiet drive enclosures, which come with handy SATA cable extensions.

As a result, I do not need a fan any more, and even with the drives spinning, the NAS is not audible.

[dbridges]

Sounds interesting.

Any Pictures???

[gruber]

I do not see how I can upload pix on this board. Do I have to use external storage?

[laonightwolf]

yes you can use eg. imageshack.us

[gruber]

Thanks for the suggestion. It is really quite boring:


As you can see, the Thecus main board is fixed to the back wall of an old PC case. The blue-white wires are from one of the buttons of the PC case and are used to switch the NAS on - they are simply attached to a couple of pins that have been soldered in place of the original microswitch.

The whole contraption is silent, does not need a fan and runs really cool. Ie, after two hours of writing in RAID 1 mode, the temperature of the system is 42 degrees, the temperature of the HDs is 38 degrees (at least that is what the web interface tells me). Practically freezing ;D

I have attached a printer and put it into a corner.



My preferred solution would have been the use of a 1541:



Unfortunately, the HDs fit in without enclosures only, so it is not completely silent. The HD cage had to go, and the drives are being put in in a row to dissipate the heat better. They simply rest on a bit of hotglued styrofoam, and the nicely aligned back openings of the floppy enclosure only require a single additional Dremel hole for the ethernet connectors. I had even used to original power and drive LEDs and attached a microswitch to the latch of the floppy drive (I decided to leave the original slot glued in place to maintain the original appearance. Eventually, I disassembled it again, because two unsilenced 500GB HDs make too much noise for my taste.

Currently, I think about either:
- getting a really flat and elegant box (for instance an old receiver), which can be put under the printer. In order to flatten the mainboard, I will also need a riser for the riser. Did anybody try this?

- hotglueing the mainboard to the ceiling of my ATX tower and using the upper 5.24 in slots for the drives. I would use the reset button of my PC to switch on the Thecus, and use its HD LED as a power LED for my NAS. This way, I would have a silent PC within my PC...