Slow Servers: Hosts / Spare

A picture of Spare.

No Greek or Norse God name here. This is our (currently cold) spare host. It's racked, but off.

Hardware

Supermicro short depth 1U chassis (CSE-512), 200W 80+ Gold powersupply, and motherboard.

Power usage

38W idle, to about 54W max (when using hw.setperf=1.)

Ballpark figures, from a cheap meter.

Issues

This chassis uses a blower fan. Some CSE-512s have two sets of counterrotating fans. My experience so far has been with this one blower and a few with the counterrotating fans. The blower appears to use more power, while being louder and less redundant.

This particular blower works fine, but doesn't sound healthy. I'm expecting to have to replace it at some point. Unfortunately, the chassis fan mounting setups are different and it doesn't appear trivial to use fans when one is not used.

Update (July, 2026): I now have more experience and testing with blowers and find that they are more efficient. Not redundant, no, but quieter (if healthy) and uses less power. It must just be that spare's blower is not quite right.

Endpoints