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0 pointsbuckminster6y ago0 comments

I once had a borrowed Sun blade server in my home office. The fan in it sounded like an industrial vacuum cleaner. It got moved to a different room and was powered on as little as possible.

Your plan makes sense but be mindful of the acoustics or your devs may grow to hate you.

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10 comments · 3 top-level

m0zg6y ago· 6 in thread

BTW, the only reason why consumer vacuum cleaners are so loud is because consumers associate loudness with suction power.

"Backpack" style commercial vacuum cleaners have more suction, and are barely audible in comparison.

buckminsterOP6y ago

I stand corrected. It was much louder than a consumer vacuum but my analogy skills are weak.

ggm6y ago

Your analogy skills were strong, because analogy is rooted in myth, not fact. Achilles did not actually have an Achilles tendon because Achilles did not exist

There does not have to be an increadibly loud functional industrial vacuum cleaner, for figuratively everyone to get your analogy, because the Herculean reality of vacuum cleaners is that you cannot clean an augean stable of lego on the floor, without a lot of noise. If you get my analogy.

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roel_v6y ago

I don't know about backpack style vacuums (the few I've seen seem plenty loud), but the idea that manufacturers deliberately create loud vacuums to make them seem more powerful is ridiculous. There is an entire market segment of vacuums that are marketed as 'quiet', so there is plenty of demand for quiet vacuums. There is simply a trade off between suction / loudness / price, and various models make different trade offs (corresponding to various points in the market).

wpietri6y ago

That some people want quiet vacuums is not proof that some people don't want loud vacuums. Cars and motorcycles are good examples of markets where you see both deliberately quiet and deliberately loud examples.

steev6y ago

This doesn't seem any more ridiculous than companies setting a higher price and then always having the item on sale. I think JCPenny famously tried simply lowering their prices and sales went down. I guarantee if you ask the average person "would you rather companies cut the BS and just lower their prices rather than have items on sale in perpetuity" they would of course say lower the prices. But as the anecdote would demonstrate, that isn't how things actually play out.

The point is, when it comes to consumer behavior, I don't think anyone has a clue what to expect. It would not surprise one bit if vacuum companies make louder vacuums because the consumer thinks it works better.

m0zg6y ago

Is BMW piping in fake "engine noise" through the speakers also "ridiculous" in your opinion?

bob10296y ago· 1 in thread

Excellent point. If we are building these rigs by hand (which is a likely option considering the initial usage context), the cooling solution would probably be a Noctua NH-U14S or similar. I already have one of these in my office attached to a 2950X and it is dead silent. You can definitely hear it when every core is pegged, but it's hardly noticeable over any other arbitrary workstation. The sound is nowhere near as intrusive as something like a blower on a GPU (or god forbid a sun microsystems blade).

maremp6y ago

What you’re saying sounds like a PC custom build enthusiast. I respect that, I like it too.

Please be mindful of the fact that consumer products are not designed for the workstation/server type of load. It’s related to why the hardware is cheaper compared to the server hardware. Also, the consumer ISP connection is most likely not as reliable as that of a data center. I’m working remotely from home and I experienced this many times, bad performance in peak times or a half of a day of downtime can happen, without any warning. And account for maintenance, everyone on the team must be able to figure out a problem or deal with getting someone else in to fix it.

I know I sound like a buzzkill. I am writing this with good intentions.

Even if this works right now, it’s not a reliable long-term solution. Maybe instead of dumping a couple of grand on consumer PCs to handle server’s work, look into building a proper server. Or you could find a datacenter provider to rent their hardware, something that is not as shiny and full of features like AWS.

linksnapzz6y ago

Once upon a time, a company I worked for convinced Sun Microsystems that it would be cool to provide us with hardware at a discount. The discount hardware was six UltraSPARC E4000 servers, each with 8 cpus and 8GB of memory, and a creator3d card in the io mezzanine upa slot.

This company was using them as desktop workstations, in an open office.

One was used as a build host. Often, the shopvac wail of E4000 fans would be cut short by some poor dev going berserk and unplugging the thing when nobody was looking...

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