Thermal Design; Acoustical Design - Dell PowerEdge T320 Technical Manual

Thermal design

The thermal design of the PowerEdge T320 reflects the following:
 Multiple sensors are monitored for thermal feedback control: The PowerEdge T320
dynamically controls system cooling fan speed based on responses from component
temperature sensors, including processors, hard disk drives, DIMMs, storage cards and the inlet
ambient temperature. Thermal control detects and responds to hardware configuration. Thermal
management adjusts cooling according to what the system really needs, draws lower fan power
and generates lower acoustical noise levels than servers without such controls.
Environmental specifications: The optimized thermal management makes the T320 reliable

under a wide range of operating environments as shown in the environmental specifications in
Table 27. Many configurations are also compliant under expanded operating temperature
environments, but a few are not.

Acoustical design

The acoustical design of the PowerEdge T320 reflects the following:
Quiet library acoustics: The PowerEdge T320 is quiet enough for an office setting when

minimally configured and for the office under the desk with a typical configuration.
Adherence to Dell's high sound quality standards: Sound quality is different from sound power

level and sound pressure level in that it describes how humans respond to annoyances in sound,
like whistles, hums and so on. One of the sound quality metrics in the Dell specification is
prominence ratio of a tone, which is listed in Table 18.
 Configurable for low acoustics: The following are configuration considerations you should
make if acoustics are important to you:
Storage devices:
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Because hard drive noise scales with spindle speed, the quietest option for rotational
>
storage media is a 7200-rpm SATA drive. The loudest option is a 15k SAS drive.
Solid-state drives are even quieter than rotational drives because they have no sound
>
associated with spinning.
Noise levels increase with the quantity of hard drives; using fewer hard drives has a
>
lower acoustical output.
Impact of cards:
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Quantity of PCIe cards: When more than two PCIe cards are installed, the system fan
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speed/noise level is higher.
Types of PCIe cards: The fan speed/noise level will be higher if a GPU and PERC H710
>
are installed.
System profile settings in BIOS and thermal settings in iDRAC7: Performance Per Watt is
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the quietest option. Other options such as Performance Optimized or Dense
Configuration require higher fan speeds, which produce higher acoustic levels.
Hot spare feature of power supply unit: In system default setting, the hot spare feature is
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disabled; acoustical output from the power supplies is lowest in this setting. If the feature
is enabled and the system power loading is low, the power supply fan speed, hence noise
will be higher.
RAID setup with PERC H310: A system configured as non-RAID has a higher noise level
-
than a system configured as RAID. With non-RAID, the temperature of the hard disk drives
is not monitored, which causes the fan speed to be higher to ensure sufficient cooling
resulting in higher noise level.
30 PowerEdge T320 Technical Guide