Fan replacement made easy...not

<RANT>

&%*%^*%^*&

I had to swap fans in a Enterprise SPARC 250 power supply yesterday.
It's cleverly designed to make a simple task as hard as possible.

The module is ~14 long, ~3" deep and ~5" wide. The 80mm fan is at the
end. It's screwed down to 4 studs coming through the end.

Now, if they were normal screws; changing it out would be trivial, but oh
no, that would be too simple. The studs are solidly swedged into the case
end.

You can't unbolt the fan and slide it away from the end, the main board
interferes. So you remove the 6 screws holding it down; but getting to
#6 means first pulling the line filter. Then you lift the board part way
out and slide the fan off the studs.

I wanted to replace the 80mm/1" thick fan with a 1.25" one. There's
spaceI for it but I needed longer bolts. I finally managed to press out
the top two swedged studs and used 1.5" long 6/32 machine screws.

It's all back together, but grrrr...


</RANT>
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David Lesher <> wrote:

> I had to swap fans in a Enterprise SPARC 250 power supply yesterday.
> It's cleverly designed to make a simple task as hard as possible.

Heh, try that in a V20Z then you will learn the power of cursing, and
the strong desire for supplies of Band-Aid.

In comp.sys.sun.hardware Steve Firth <%steve%@malloc.co.uk> wrote:
> David Lesher <> wrote:
>
>> I had to swap fans in a Enterprise SPARC 250 power supply yesterday.
>> It's cleverly designed to make a simple task as hard as possible.
>
> Heh, try that in a V20Z then you will learn the power of cursing, and
> the strong desire for supplies of Band-Aid.

Well, at least they have improved on recent models. For an x4200 I just
pop open the lid, lift out the problem fan and put in the replacement. All
this happens while the machine is still running. No tools required.

Okay, so those are the chassis fans not the PSU ones, but really, much
imporved over previous machines.

--
Dr Tristram J. Scott
Energy Consultant

On 2009-06-01, Tristram Scott <> wrote:
> In comp.sys.sun.hardware Steve Firth <%steve%@malloc.co.uk> wrote:
>> David Lesher <> wrote:
>>
>>> I had to swap fans in a Enterprise SPARC 250 power supply yesterday.
>>> It's cleverly designed to make a simple task as hard as possible.
>>
>> Heh, try that in a V20Z then you will learn the power of cursing, and
>> the strong desire for supplies of Band-Aid.
>
> Well, at least they have improved on recent models. For an x4200 I just
> pop open the lid, lift out the problem fan and put in the replacement. All
> this happens while the machine is still running. No tools required.

Hmm ... I should be able to do the same with a Sun Fire 280R, as
the fan tray plugs in, and the wires which go past it either pass
through notches on the bottom or are held by spring clips on the sides.
I learned how they removed when I discovered that to move up to Cu CPUs,
I would have to upgrade the fan tray -- and I had a spare chassis which
had the right fan tay. (FWIW, the difference is that the middle fan for
the later one is 14W instead of 7W, but the fans are three-wire ones so
the system can monitor the status of the fans, so it is easier to simply
get the right fan tray if you can.

And I did not need to swap it under power, because it was not in
service yet -- just an experimental machine -- on which I learned that
the last Solaris 10 which I downloaded last year would install on a
zfs filesystem, which was then easy to expand to a mirrored drive. (I
did not see a way to specify to make it mirrored when I was building it
however.)

> Okay, so those are the chassis fans not the PSU ones, but really, much
> imporved over previous machines.

Well ... the PSUs for the 280R are hot swappable, so you can
pull one out and replace the fan while operating off the other, even if
you don't have any spare PSUs around. (I do -- now. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

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