OT: Sun Ultra5 fan replacement...

[RichardS]

Sorry for OT post, but we all know the brightest and best hang out here.... DIY angle is I'm doing it myself and it may involve mods....

Scenario is this: I have a Sun Ultra5 which is a great little workstation, runs my dev Domino servers where all the minimum specs say it shoudl fail, and it confuses the kids when they come round and see something that doesn't run windows... (next project is Domino on an XBox - that'll confuse 'em).

The downside to it is a noisy fan situated right on the front of the case, you can hear it throughout the top of the house at night. So, thought I'd replace it with an ultra quiet fan.... thought it looked like a standard 8cm case fan.

Unfortunately, not a standard PC connector, and the fan has only two wires whereas the normal PC fans appear to have 3.

Anyone any ideas what the 3rd wire is for, and whether one can be discarded if I replace the connector with the smaller pattern connector that the Sun uses? If, indeed I can find such a connector.

Any pointers most welcomed...

cheers Richard

-- Richard Sampson

email me at richard at olifant d-ot co do-t uk

[Chris Oates]

workstation,

Speed measurement - modern PCs have something like 'system health' in their BIOS where, amongst other parameters, fan speed is measured.

or a choc block

[RichardS]

workstation,

Ah, it's always the way - post something and then the next search you do seems to throw up the answer....

Apparently 3rd wire is speed sensing thing for motherboard. Sun doesn't use this so I'll discard it.

As for connector, thought strikes me that I should snip off the cable of the existing fan an inch or so from the connector and simply solder the new fan wires to it (sans blue).

And... if you thought price gouging was bad in the Sheds or car dealer's parts depts, then this is a hoot: top quality quiet Papst fan, £14. Ultra quiet Vanwotsit fan £8. Bog standard Sun replacement fan, $40.

Sorry if anyone's replied and I've ignored you - I did see a response flash up on the newsreader, but when I opened it my newsserver had helpfully already dropped it, and it hadnt propagated to google groups yet. My news server appears to be up the spout once more... grrrr... 3rd party news provider becoming more appealing idea every day...

ta

Richard

-- Richard Sampson

email me at richard at olifant d-ot co do-t uk

[James Hart]

Try one of my suppliers for a good dose of gouging, here's a small selection of their wares, 64MB RAM £26

20x CDROM £70 both plus VAT of course. The equipment they supply is basically a PC running custom software but they are adamant that ordinary PC parts won't work with the gear so you have to pay for their overpriced spares. I soon proved them wrong, the only stumbling point I've had so far is that they use a development version (not the production version) of a low end Pentium class CPU and it took a bit of googling and a phonecall to source a replacement when one died. 50 notes from the UK importer, 300 from the supplier. In the old days they'd have got away with it and I'd be none the wiser but when it only takes a couple of minutes in front of the computer to put a chip number in a search engine and get some real info it's maddening to think how many are paying over the odds without questioning it.