Norco ITX-S8 nas case 7 - The build (Fans continued)

October 25, 2016

What I thought would be a simple fan installation has become a bit more involved unfortunately. Because of this I have decided to try a few things simply because the fans are what will ultimately keep the hard drives from dying which is very important. And since I am testing just the hardware so far, it's not a problem to try whatever I can to make them work as best as they can. So first, the reason you want brushless fans is because fans tend to run endlessly over time. So this is the first thing I wanted to cover first. The second part was I wanted to use the temperature control feature from the board because I can actually change the fan settings in the bios if they ran too slow. This was assuming both fans were running at the same rpm.

Yesterday I received my other two fan splitters and guess what, they are exactly the same as my first one. One pin is missing from the second fan. So this is not going to be as simple fan swap as I thought. So I went to plan B here using this fan controller I had lying around.

It's a very old one with very stiff wires, but still works fine so I thought I try to use this between the fans and the board with just the three wires running the fans at full speed. This would allow me to slow them down or speed them up manually to find the best speed once I get a drive or two while checking the temps just to make sure before I leave it all alone.

I figured I could just put the wires through this card slot. I would just have to remove that cover with holes which I actually find is a really nice touch they did here. More holes means more cooling, specially in something like this.

The first problem here is the plugs. The controller has only three pins, but the smaller plastic pieces or covers which don't fit the four pin extensions. Ahhhh....

Same goes for the other side.

So I went back to the bin and found me a three pin plug from this.

Now I need to replace the black one for the white one. Sounds easy enough.

I take the first pin out and I pushed the tab a bit too much and spend a good half hour trying to get this back to the other side. Needless to say, the first splitter is no longer good on this end. The pin won't stay the way it was any longer and it also has that curl to it. That's how they come out too so it's not something I bent.

Needless to say, it didn't fit correctly on the white plug. The pins are a little different on the white plug. I got it in there but you can see it's all the way to the front and just pops out when I plug it in. So not a good fit either.

Test two on another pin and I finally got it out without too much hassle, see the little tab at the top, that's the one that went to the other side on my first one. So I tested with another wire on the already bad connector to try and figure out how to remove these pins.

So it was time for plan C. I decided to just take out the yellow wire from the one that has it since that's the wire missing from the second fan connector.

I figured this way they can run at the same speed and I can just control them from the bios since I can't use the controller at this point either.

The weird thing is that as soon as I took that yellow wire off, the cpu fan rpm disappears! Hmmm, it looks like both fan headers are somehow connected. I thought they were totally separate from each other. So I definitely don't want to do anything to overload this in any way, just to be safe.

Here are the fan options that I can choose from. These are the same ones the cpu has too.

I changed it to silent and re-booted and this is the lowest speed I get from these fans. Just under 1200 rpm.

I switched this to full speed, re-booted and checked. I get just over 2000 rpm for the brush-less fans. I can't say for sure what the total ranges are but this is what I see in the bios. This is all I can go with for now as far as numbers are concerned with these two delta brushless fans.

I brought this setting down to the performance option to bring them down a bit for now. Again I still have no hard drives so I'm just leaving the hardware on to test temperatures. Obviously leaving them at full speed should cause no harm since more air is always better than not enough. Now I'm not sure if the board needs an update which there is none as of now to make sure I get my cpu rpm back or if it's just the way I have the fans connected and how this works. Either way you can see this is a bit more pain in the rear than what I would prefer, but I can leave it like this for now. I can see the cpu fan spinning from the front since I left that cover off anyway or I can just plug in the third splitter and just use it the way it came with one fan on temp control and not the other. Not ideal since I want to make sure both fans are running at the same speed. The last option is for me to find a fan splitter with only the three pins and four pins on the other two ends. The original fans that came with the case are only three pin fans, but still use the four pin connector so I still wouldn't be able to use those either, even if I wanted to. I can also look for a splitter to run the fans of that floppy extra plug on the psu so I can make use of it, but until I find one or something that can work better, I'll leave it alone.

In short, everything has gone fine with the build except what was supposed to be a simple fan improvement.  Also, having only one fan header hasn't helped this one bit. Sure I could just add another yellow line to that missing secondary plug and test it, but the truth is, this is not something I want to test that on and I rather run it like this because I know it's working even if my cpu rpm is missing as I know it's working. Of course the ideal would be to see that rpm as well, but there's not much else I can do at the moment.

Now that you know, this is something to keep in mind for future builds. Usually with a small computer setup it's not that big of a deal, but in something like this, having the correct fan speeds and cooling is extremely important which is the reason I have gone into more detail about it. Another thing I should mention is that I did contact both asrock about more fan header information and norco about the fan specifications and I have not heard back from either of them. So the good thing is that the hardware works, but not hearing back from the manufacturers, well that's never a good thing. I was just inquiring about information on their products nothing more. And I would still love to hear from them about these. Maybe they will help later on, I don't know.

I know this has been a bit long, but I wanted to cover every part of the built as much as I could since I wanted to build my own nas from scratch. I hope this will help others or at least give you an idea of what to look for or even avoid a few things with your builds.

Note: After leaving this on all night and listening to it, it's not quiet, but you can hear it. I have decided to go back to the original setup of using the splitter with the yellow wire on. I now got back the cpu rpm and from what I have been reading this is how these splitters are supposed to work as long as you have both fans being the same. I figured if the temps go up after adding more drives I can always change the fans to full speed in the bios which is just over 2000 rpm for these brushless fans.
I also added that front bottom cover since it felt like the bottom fan was working slower, but I think this will help keep the air going through the front of the drive bays instead of the bottom. The case I think should also get a bit quieter once hard drives are installed. I think most of what I hear is all the empty air space since I have no hard drives installed.
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 1 - The build
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 2 - The build
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 3 - The build
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 4 - The build (Software)
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 5 - The build (Software continued)
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 6 - The build (Fan replacements)
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 8 - The build (2.5 Hard drive update)
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 9 - The build (2.5 hard drive update continues)
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 10 - The end (OS and hard drives)
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 11 - Upgrading the memory in 2022