Alright, I have had an EX485 for the past few weeks and I love it, but the noise from the PSU fan is driving me BATTY! I currently having it sitting on the floor in the corner of my office where it has plenty of ventilation. I'd like to shove it into the CPU "drawer" in my desk, but it only has a relatively small circular hole that used to feed through cables and stuff.

I know that with a mission critical server, cooling is important and you don't want to fry your hard drives, but I can't take the noise any longer. At least tossing it in here would drown out much of the noise.

Is it worth the risk to stick it in here to avoid the noise?



Want to move it here:

I put my MSS in a similiar cabinet and it works fine. I did cut some more ventilation holes at the top area hidden by the desk drawer. I also have the door left open about an inch or two to help with air circulation. If that is a stand alone desk and not a built in desk consider cutting some large vent holes in the back side of the enclosure space.

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HP MSS EX490 with Intel E6300
4 GB RAM
7 TB Drive Storage

MediaSmartServer.net Wiki, it's loaded with helpful information about WHS and the HP MediaSmart Server.

I just noticed that there is another hole near the top of the cabinet close to the rear of the desk to feed keyboard/mouse cables. I'll go ahead and stick it in there and watch the temps.

OK, CPU temp went from 51 C out in the optn to about 58-60 C in the cabinet (this is while performing a Time Machine backup). I guess that's within reason. The control panel isn't flippin' out with warnings or anything.

If your MSS is still under warranty (you can check the serial number on the HP web site) then give HP a call and they'll run through some checks with you, like cleaning the fans with air etc.

They found that the PSU fan on mine was not fitted properly so was vibrating and causing the noise. They offered to send me a new chassis and can send my old chassis back once I've swapped the drives over.

This was the first time I've called HP for support and was very impressed with their help.

Thanks for the advice. I called them up and they're sending me out a new chassis.

Have you received your replacement? Is it any quieter?

I just got my replacement chassis in today. It is MUCH quieter -- so quiet in fact that I now have it back sitting in the open in my study with no intrusion! Thanks for the tip about calling HP!!

Having the same problem with mine, I just called HP support to have a new chassis sent out and I was told I would receive a refurbished one and that a $400 hold would have to be placed on my credit card. Nice warranty.

This is the only PC/HP product I own, everything else is Apple. And when I have an issue under warranty with them they will exchange it for a NEW item on the spot. THAT's how you get repeat business.

I think this is not unusual for most CE companies. I guess they could have you ship it to HP for service and then fix it and ship back to you but then your server would be off line for some time. My guess is that HP's warranty and product design is intentional in that it allows easy repair if the units in house after customer return and easy to ship client a factory refurbed unit and then client can just swap in drives.



Apple does indeed have good customer support. My experience with Apple's warranty has not been the same as your experience.

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HP MSS EX490 with Intel E6300
4 GB RAM
7 TB Drive Storage

MediaSmartServer.net Wiki, it's loaded with helpful information about WHS and the HP MediaSmart Server.

Funny thing happened this weekend...

A client of mine called me Friday asking me to take a look at something over the weekend. I could not remote in to the box. He assured me I had a valid id and password but I still could not get in. He tried and HE could not get in. THEN, as we were commisutating a bit(e.g., BSing some), he told me he how great the HP service was, sending him a replacement unit within 24 hours some six weeks ago. (Care to guess how long ago it was when he or I last used the remote access?)

See the connection here yet, folks?

Another hint... His DNS supplier (TZO, I believe) evidently determines where his box is on the network based on the MAC address. (I did not know that until Friday evening but since saw Alex posted something about that recently.)

He had not updated his information with TZO. We were trying to log into the WRONG box. (I wonder if the guy on the other end was having similar problems....???)

Moral to the story: be sure to update your remote settings when you get a new unit!

(Yep, I am billing him for ALL the time spent on this.)

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....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

Very useful post I think I will be calling HP as my fan is getting more noisy by the week.

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If you only have 1 copy of a file you do not have a copy! Back-up off site!!!
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Hi all,

An update... I had 3 replacements from HP: the first was as loud as my old EX485, so I sent that back, the second was much quieter but unfortunately wouldn't boot up (the system light stayed white), so I sent that back, and the third was slightly quieter, so I decided to keep it. But it's still whining just like my original EX485 and now sounds the same... HP wouldn't replace it with a 495 so perhaps the only option is to replace the PSU fan myself.

After reading this thread, I found out I was not alone which was sort of comforting. I called HP, gave them my details on Thursday and Fedex dropped off the MSS this morning (Monday). I was holding my breath when I started it up for the first time and it was in fact A LOT quieter. I currently have an OCZ stealth PSU for my computer which is very quiet and the MSS is more or less in line with that noise level. Just like some of the other posts here, it's not sitting tucked away behind a desk, it's back to being on show and out in the open.

Thanks for posting feedback everyone. I feel this is another success story.

I too had a whiney PSU fan. I called once and the guy told me there was nothing he could do. A month later, I couldn't stand it any more so I called again. This time, they did the chassis swap.

At first the replacement chassis's PSU fan was quite quiet (hehe). However, over time, it too has become as whiney as the first one.

I'd really like to 'upgrade' to a 49x chassis with the reverse direction and better designed PSU. But I doubt they'd let me do that.