Failed Backup Server Build

9 points by vermaden


dsr

Big thanks for writing up a negative report: usually people only write positive things, and save the negatives for IRC and email where they tend not to be as discoverable later.

The specifics of the thermal problem here are probably useful in the short term; in the long run, this is a valuable reminder that thermal problems aren’t just for GPUs and wildly overclocked CPUs.

DustyFuzzy

Any particular reason you’re using NVMe SSDs for backups? Feels expensive compared to spinning rust, and long consecutive reads and writes are one of the few things HDDs are good at.

it seems that even that small Intel N100 with 6W TDP can be REALLY hot.

Intel TDPs are misleading. To quote ARK, “Thermal Design Power (TDP) represents the average power, in watts, the processor dissipates when operating at Base Frequency with all cores active under an Intel-defined, high-complexity workload.” On mobile chips (including the N100), the real maximum TDP is set by the BIOS through the power limits combined with the thermals. It wouldn’t surprise me if it output a lot more heat than 6W.

johnklos

It sounds like someone forgot to add heat sink compound or left the plastic over the compount. A 6 watt CPU should never be able to get to 85º C when a decent heat sink is on it. I have several Athlon 5350 that has a TDP of 20 watts, and even with the fan off and the tiniest, cutest heat sink, I don’t think I could ever get above 60º even when I tried.

One thing worth noting is that the temperature of SSDs isn’t proportional to the transfer speed.