The little Linux file server that sits under my desk has been getting louder and louder over the past few weeks. Yesterday it got to the point where I just couldn’t work anymore with the noise, and I was a little worried about it crashing because of heat. A fan that I assumed was part of the power supply was making a noise that sounded like a car revving up over and over again.
Off came the case. Turns out the guilty party was one of the small fans sitting on the CPU heatsink. It wasn’t spinning smoothly. It was bad enough that I could tell that the speed was changing along with the sound. I removed both the small fans and blew the dust off of them and it seemed to be quieter. But I figured while I had the case off I might as well go ahead and add the PCI slot fan I’d been thinking about for the past couple of weeks.
Since I can’t come back from a computer store with just what I went in for I came back with a 500w power supply for my Windows computer and a new dual head PCI-e video card which I’ve wanted for a while, along with two PCI slot fans – one for each computer.
Two hours later I had a server with a fairly dust free motherboard and a new slot fan and a desktop with a new video card and power supply. I finally could sit down and work without the annoying noise, or so I thought.
The server started making the same noise that started this whole ordeal. Off came the case again. This time I pulled the sticker off the fans and put a couple drops of lubricating oil on the bearings. I went ahead and oiled the large case fan as well while I was in there. Now the server is nice and quiet.
At the end of the day I’ve spent about 300 bucks while trying to fix a problem that was solved with a few pennies of oil. I suppose there’s a lesson in there somewhere.
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