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Running a Server at Freezing Temperatures?
mw13068 asks: "As a part of a backup solution, I'm thinking of running a backup server in my unheated, unattached garage. I live in central New York State, and the temperatures very often drop below zero degrees Celsius. The computer is a Pentium III Celeron running at 733MHz. Has anyone else tried this sort of thing? If you have, please share your experiences."
Make sure your case is hardened. Every little critter, including mice, will want to live in the warm case. We had a computer in an astronomical observatory dome and mice built their nest on the CPU. The acid in urine from the mice destroyed the motherboard.
Look up the specs on all the hardware. Most have an operating temps guideline. If your within it you should be alright.
I ran a couple of dual PIII 450's in my garage in Minnesota last winter with no problem. I didn't have any room in my small apartment for them so I put them in the garage and used a couple of Linksys WAP11's in bridge mode to get them talking to my cable modem in my apartment. The average temp in the garage was about 5 degrees above zero last winter.
The one thing you need to watch out for though is static. When it gets cold and dry, you don't want to be ripping open your machines in the garage. My machines stayed up from October through last June without any problems.
I wouldn't worry too much about it being too cold. if you have a pusher fan, take that out. puller fans (that exhaust air, instead of pulling it in) will have the temp of the air inside the case, rather than the temp of the outside air. lubricants become more viscous with colder temps, so you want you fan to breathe the warmer air from inside the case.
you probably want to make it a smaller fan also, you don't want too much cold air going through. cold is good for CPUs but too much cold breaks solder joints.
if you can control your fan thermostatically i would recommend that. having computer parts get hot, then cold, then hot, then cold, then hot, then cold, due to day/night cycles KILLS solder joints quick. condensation is also a concern with widely varying temperatures. condensation is bad, of course.
as someone else said, rodent-proof the case and check it for infestation often. mice will chew right through sheet metal when they need to. Try mounting it on a wall somehow so rodents can't get to it.
i'm not worried about the below zero C temps, i'm worried about temperature fluctuation. using a smaller than OEM fan will keep what warm air there is inside the case there a little longer, and should keep the insides of the case above 0C constantly.
At lower temperatures electrical wires have less resistance and it could do some damage (theoretically of course) to some electronic components.
Bullshit. Wire resistance in an electronic component should be negligible. The resistance change caused by temperature is just about impossible to detect without very sensitive instruments.
In general, electronics do not care about temperature much. Most chips, for instance, are rated from -40 to +70 degrees C. It's the mechanical stuff (hard drives and, to a lesser extent, fans) that you have to worry about. The only electrical problems that could occur would be related to condensation.
I have had some overheating problems with my athlon xp 1900+ in the past, so I started to keep my windows in my bedroom open 24x7 durring the winter, this solved my overheating problems and the computer seemed to run better as I was sitting in front of it seeing my breath. As far as the dust goes, I used to work in an IT Dept. for a factory that made security doors for mall shops, They had some old computers through out the factory that were used to operate some of the machines. I did maintainance on a few of them and when they were opened there was literally a layer of thick dust covering everything inside, this didn't effect any internal parts, the only thing we ever had to replace on these pc's were floppy drives. I am talking pentium 1 generation boxes here, so I would venture that yours should be pretty safe since your garage should not produce near the amount of dust that this factory produced.
It's not an issue of hard drives melting, it's an issue of thermal expansion of the platters. Hard drive platters go through a normal amount of expansion because solids expand when heated and contract when cooled. Drive controllers are designed to recalibrate occasionally to check for expansion, to insure the heads are positioned correctly, off-track positioning leads to errors. But I seriously doubt the calibration would work outside the range of temps designed into the controller.
Another issue is lubrication viscosity. Lubricants become more viscous at low temps, if it got really cold, the lubricants in the drive spindle could actually become solid, freezing the bearings and burning out the motor.
What this will do is create a "bubble" of warm air inside the box that is vented when the fan is running and stable when it is off. This will keep your box temperature roughly even. If you are concerned about cold-starting hard disks after a period of off-time, make sure you have a power supply which remains off after a power loss and add a 100 W light bulb inside the box. When you want to power the system back on, switch the bulb on and leave it for an hour or two before you hit the power button, then turn the bulb off again. Do not bring cold hardware into a warm, humid house to warm up - you will get condensation.
As long as you have the bottom of the box screened against critters and otherwise isolated, you probably won't have to worry about static or other environmental nastiness.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Tell your PC to never turn off hard disks, never turn off fans. (might freeze if they stop, and not start again). Take the floppy out of the machine, and replace the hole in the front with a blank panel. It might be a good idea to do that with the CD/DVD drives as well. Make sure that the back of the case is all sealed up, (ie, no open holes for old PCI devices you no longer have). Lastly, Don't put anything over or close to it. Your going to need it to be able to suck in air, and evacuate the air with the fans. you do not want to be recycling the air (like you would if it was under a blanket) as it can increase the moisture of the air.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
My stepdad has a garage and I maintain his systems (or at least talk him through it on the phone if I can get away with not going there it). The average lifespan of a machine there is about a year. He used to use DEC VT-100s. Those things lasted 10+ years easily (except the keyboards), but in a PC, he needs new fans every six months or so and a new hard drive every year or so. FOr his current batch I've got him using rack mount equipment since it has built-in air filtration, but he hasn't been using it long enough for me to tell you if that's helping.
We keep his server in a dehumidified space in a rack with doors and air filters over all the openings. That machine seems to be OK...
You also want the circulation within the case to be good so that you don't end up with hot or cold spots (cooked/frozen).
You'd also want to use a heat exchanger to preheat the incoming air to above freezing so that you don't get instant condensation from the inrush of sub zero moist air and make sure there is a fail safe in case the control system dies.
Rapid temperature change is what you need to watch for - I used to run 486-PII machines in unheated buildings in Minnesota all the time, ambient temps over those winters and in my area (central) got as low as -40 (that's Fahrenheit and Celsius - the scales cross there...) no troubles that I can recall.
and I only had to worry about dust from the shop - BTW, under no circumstances put your box near anything that grinds metal! That's a real quick kill.
STOP. You're being farmed.
Garage north of the mason-dixon during the winter usually have temperatures much, much less than 50F. In northern Iowa, the temperature inside the garage can get down to 0F (don't even think about how cold it is outside!)
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
...it's an issue of thermal expansion of the platters.
Also a consideration in tape drive head alignment.
I wouldn't suggest shutting down the CPU fan no matter what. It can be very cold a few inches from the CPU and the heat sink too hot to touch... Without a fan your system will turn itself off within a minute or two (if you are lucky)
Oh yeah, I forgot, there's one other component that will fail under severely low temps: barrel capacitors. They're generally filled with a semi-liquid paste that can freeze at low temps, unless you've got mil-spec computers like the guy who described his aircraft maintenance computers that are rated for operating temps down to -70F. Look at some of the overclocker websites with experimental liquid nitrogen cooling, they take great pains to cool only the CPU chip, if they cool the whole motherboard, the capacitors freeze and fail.
I have an old IBM Aptiva P2/350 in a closet that's open to the outside and has very little insulation and a leaking door. It's been there for the last three years and it's still working fine 24/7 - the only times it's been down have been when the power has gone down.
So, what's so special about this one?
I live in Finland. It's cold here. It has survived weeks of -30C with NO problems. The only things that have borked are a CPU fan (which had no bearings to begin with) and a brand new Seagate hard drive which lasted for exactly two weeks - the replacement has worked fine for a year and a half now.
I've been thinking about replacing the machine with a nice 4U industrial PC that I have laying around - it's just that the Aptiva has proven to work in extreme conditions so I'm not sure if I wanna replace it. Ever.