Cooling fans

[Huge]

Any suggestions as to how I can quiet down the fans in my Netgear hub? It lives on a shelf right next to my desk and it has 2 cooling fans howling away at about 1000rpm - it's way the loudest thing in my study, more than the 3 computers and UPS put together.

I took the cooling fan out of the HP hub which preceded it, but it died shortly thereafter, which I don't regard as a co-incidence. My theory was that these things are designed to go in a rack, so sitting on a shelf they shouldn't need so much cooling, but perhaps not.

Put resistors in series with the fan power? Are there "quiet fans"? I was thinking of putting some reasonably permeable foam over the fan outlets...?

[Graham.]

I've wondered about the same thing. The little D-Link 5 port Gigabit switches I install on an almost daily basis seem to fair perfectly well with no fans at all.

[Robin]

I suggest you seek the views of the fan maven at

IMLE she is the most helpful of vendors.

[Cicero]

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There's plenty of stuff available. Try a 'google' for 'Zalman Fanmate' or 'quiet PC fans'. I prefer adjustable rather than fixed but it depends to some extent on what connections you have. If you have Molex connectors have a look at this simple but fiddly method:

[Adrian]

Huge gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Buy a different one, one that doesn't have a fan in... HP do some 24port fanless gigabit switches, and there's a whole stack of

[pete]

If it was me (and I have done this), use diodes rather than resisitors. Each diode will drop the supply voltage to the fan by about half a volt irrespective of the current drawn. They're quite cheap - a penny or two each. So you can put more or fewer in series to the fan supply to get it to spin at a rate that reduces the noise but still provides enough airflow. One thing: check that the fan will start up reliably - plus you may find that as more dust builds up in the fan's mechanism it needs more ooomph to get it running.

[Huge]

Good lord. I thought you were winding me up, and yet, lo! A cornucopia of fans!

Thank you very much.

[Huge]

Ahhhh. That's worth trying. Especially since I think I have some diodes knocking about here somewhere.

[Clive George]

There are people who sell quieter fans - quietpc is one such I think. If there isn't a direct replacement I wonder if bodging a bigger slower fan with some appropriate ducting would do?

[geoff]

down your left side, the painful ones ?

[Adrian C]

Remove the fans and dump the whole thing in a tank of Silicone (mineral) oil.

Could use a fish tank.

From the top -

[Jules Richardson]

I did exactly that on a switch I once had - tore out the case fan, then added a bigger, slower, quieter fan external to the case with a suitable homebrew shroud. It ran for about five years like that before I eventually retired it.

cheers

Jules

[John Rumm]

I wonder if 0 That would the same Dorothy Bradbury who used to post here * with a tendency to make every post look like - some sort of power point - or bullet list - ?

[Adrian C]

Yes, that's her.

[NT]

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