Saturday, April 16, 2011

Controlling the fan of the netgear stora

I recently bought a netgear stora. I like the small form-factor of the device and also the fact that it can be hacked easily and you can put a plain vanilla debian on it. While the fan is not nearly as noisy as the fan of the dns-230 which I owned previously, I still got annoyed. I figured that the two hdds (WD EARS 2TB) don't produce much heat anyway so I decided turn off the fan. This has worked for me for more than two weeks now, and the stora never gets much warmer than room temperature (even under heavy load).

HOWEVER, I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY WHATSOEVER IF YOUR HARDDISKS GET FRIED OR YOUR HOUSE BURNS DOWN IN THE PROCESS

Here is, how you can control the fan (you must have debian installed on the stora):
  1. log in as root
  2. install ic2-tools:
    root@pico:~# apt-get install i2c-tools
  3. create two scripts to start and stop the fan:
    echo "i2cset -y 0 0x1b 0x04 0x0b" >/usr/bin/fan_off
  4. echo "i2cset -y 0 0x1b 0x04 0x0a" >/usr/bin/fan_on
    chmod +x /usr/bin/fan_off
  5. chmod +x /usr/bin/fan_on
  6. you can now switch on/off the fan using the commando sudo fan_on / sudo fan_off
  7. enjoy the silence :-)

3 comments:

  1. hello, thanks i cannot hear the noise from the fan and stora now totally silent. i also have wd green harddiskdeives. sorry my english. guten tag mein deutch :)

    paul :P

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  2. Hi,

    Would you know how to write a script to
    1) Power up stora when turning on your PC running Win OS 7.
    2) Power down stora when turning off your PC.

    I hope you can?

    Cheers,
    BP
    bpons@tpg.com.au

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi mate,

    sorry, I don't think you can wake up the stora from your pc (WOL is not supported afaik).
    Regarding shutting down, I noticed that while the machine halts on "shutdown -h now", it does not switch off, so you might be out of luck here. I'd recommend just putting your harddisks to sleep (via hdparm) and leaving the machine runnig - it really doesn't draw much power. The main reason for me to buy the stora was to have a cheap debian server that I would not have to switch off.

    Cheers
    Chris

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