29 PowerEdge R320 Technical Guide
temperature. Thermal control detects and responds to hardware configuration. Thermal
management adjusts cooling according to what the system really needs, and draws lower fan
power draw and generates lower acoustical noise levels than servers without such controls.
User-configurable settings: An R320 thermal control design target is to minimize the
contribution of fan power to overall system power. However, with the understanding and
realization that every customer has a unique set of circumstances or expectations of the system,
in this generation of servers, we are introducing limited user-configurable settings in the iDRAC7
BIOS setup screen. For more information, see the
Dell PowerEdge R320 Systems Owner’s
Manual
on Dell.com/Support/Manuals and “Advanced Thermal Control: Optimizing across
Environments and Power Goals” on Dell.com/PowerEdge.
Fan fault tolerance: The R320 allows continuous operation with a motor failure in the system.
The base configuration of the R320 has four fans. An additional fan is needed when using
redundant power supplies. The fault tolerance feature allows one motor fan to fail at a time
allowing a fan replacement within 360 hours of a fan failure.
Environmental specifications: The optimized thermal management makes the R320 reliable
under a wide range of operating environments as shown in the environmental specifications in
Table 26. Many configurations are also compliant under expanded operating temperature
environments, but a few are not.
Acoustical design
The acoustical design of the PowerEdge R320 reflects the following:
Versatility: The PowerEdge R320 saves you power draw in the data center, but is quiet enough
for the office environment in typical and minimum configurations. Compare the values for LpA in
Table 18 for these configurations, and note that they are lower than ambient measurements of
typical office environments.
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 and hums. One of the sound quality metrics in the Dell specification is prominence
ratio of a tone, which is listed in Table 18.
Noise ramp and descent during bootup from power off: Fan speeds and noise levels ramp
during the boot process (from power off to power on) in order to add a layer of protection for
component cooling in the case that the system were not to boot properly. To keep bootup as
quiet as possible, the fan speed reached during bootup is limited to about half of full speed.
Noise level dependencies: If acoustics is important to you, you may want to make the following
configuration choices and settings for the PowerEdge R320 for quieter operation:
— In the BIOS, select the power-optimized DAPC rather than performance-optimized for the
system thermal profile
— Turn hot spare feature off in PSU
— Since hard drive noise is highly dependent on spindle speed, the 7200-rpm SATA hard drive
will have the quietest hard drive operation
However, some components cause significant but not necessarily intuitive increases in loudness
when they are installed in the R320. Contributors to acoustical output can include:
— PERC H710 mini or PERC H810
To Next Page
Loading...
Need help?
General
Weight and Dimensions
