OP here. Bought a 1U OVHcloud clearance special, swapped fans for Noctuas, added acoustic foam, suspended the drives. 42dB at 1m. Partner says it sounds like a small vacuum cleaner in the closet. Goal is bedroom-friendly. Budget: whatever saves my marriage. Current specs: Xeon E-2388G, 64GB DDR4, 4x NVMe. Running Proxmox with 8 VMs (pihole, jellyfin, home assistant, some dev stuff). Load average 0.3, temps 45C idle. Fans at 800 RPM. Tried rubber mounts, tried undervolting fans, tried closing the closet door (heat death). 42dB is somehow worse than 50dB because it's this constant whoosh without character. What am I missing? Is true silence possible without water? Has anyone actually measured <30dB in a real home setup? Grabs popcorn for the inevitable "just put it in the garage" comments
Actually not my circus, not my monkeys but I had similar problem XD
You can't have no noise with 1U, it's not possible no matter what fans you put there, the case is too small and you can't fit nothing big inside, not my circus but I seen people try
Maybe you should not buy 1U if you don't want noise, actually that's the only way, no double negative here just truth
