My home lab has grown to mini-datacenter levels since I started messing around with networking equipment and turning mini PCs into servers. That introduced quite a lot of additional noise into my office, and while I can turn much of it off, one thing I can't is my rack of network equipment. And that's a problem for me.

Every other part of my office has been optimized for noise levels, whether that's quieter fans with pleasing acoustic signatures, noise-reducing foam, or other tweaks. If the network rack is going to stay in here for easy access while running home lab experiments, the same process needs to happen. And with it being mostly 1U units, that means swapping out fans, because there's not much room in there to add noise-deadening materials while maintaining airflow.

About this content: Noctua and Ubiquiti sent XDA hardware to use for this article. Neither company had any input into the content, nor did they see it before publication.

The things you don't realize about upgrading to a rack

Bringing the datacenter home also raises the noise floor

I'm in the process of moving my home network to Ubiquiti's hardware, from the hodgepodge of different pieces I was using. Thankfully, most of the in-wall wiring was handled by the builders of this home, except that they didn't run wiring to the one cupboard on the first floor that would be perfect for a network rack. But that's a problem for another day.

Today's problem is that I now have 12U of rack space that's mostly filled with network switches, a NAS, a UPS, a router, and a few more things that all need airflow to stay cool. Now, 1U fans are noisy in pitch, if not in airflow, but sometimes in both. And I can't deal with it. The pitch is more of an issue than the actual sound level, especially as a higher pitch is harder for my ANC headphones to filter out.

To be clear, the stock fans are fine and won't be an issue if you don't have the same noise sensitivities I do. They're no different from the fans used by the rest of the industry and are suited to the environment in which they're expected to be installed. Which is in a network cabinet, and not next to my desk. This is entirely an issue of my own making, and maybe this serves more as a how-to for replacing fans if they go bad.

I have a soft spot for beige and brown

So, it's time to open up those shiny rack-mounted devices and replace every single fan with the only brand that hasn't let me down in a decade. That's Noctua, as you've probably noticed by the unmistakable colors of the fans below.

Figuring out which fans were needed was harder than it should have been, but thanks to the active Reddit community around Ubiquiti, I managed to get squared away, and a large stack of miniature fans was soon on the way to me.

• Noctua NF-A8 PWM

  $18 at Amazon $24 at Newegg

• Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM

  $16 at Amazon $16 at Newegg

Replacing the fans wasn't as easy as it seemed

Why is hardware always harder to take apart?

Most networking equipment isn't exactly designed to be user-serviceable, but the Unifi Dream Machine Pro Max was a little easier to disassemble than most. Honestly, I feared the worst when I looked down the hard drive bays and saw the cooling fans buried at the bottom, but they were attached to a plastic vent that came out after four screws were undone, so that was a pleasant surprise.

The worst part was routing the Noctua fan cables back to the headers, as the sleeve around the cables made it a little tricky, so I had to go inside the venting area instead. And the plug needed a little trimming with a knife, as the header isn't the normal type used on PC motherboards. But it worked, and now my networking gear has quieter fans, and that's worth the world to me when I'm sitting next to the rack all day.

Big shout-out to the community

Thanks go out to r/Ubiquiti and the Ubiquiti forums, because this would have been a much, much longer process without them. Pretty much every device Ubiquiti has released has someone who has needed to replace a fan or wanted to do what I was doing and swap them for quieter ones, and there are plenty of nice pictures to help.

I'd love for quieter fans to be an option on any electronics. I will happily pay extra to have silence and not have to open hardware as soon as I get it to swap out fans. Again, it's a me thing. My space needs to be as quiet as possible, or I get very distracted, and I've found that swapping fans is one thing that helps.

My network rack still isn't silent — but it's close enough

I know my rack is never going to be silent; the preponderance of 1U and 2U devices means that only tiny fans can be used, and they have to make up for that by running faster. But I can still reduce the overall acoustic levels while changing the sound signature to a quality my ears can handle. I guess this means I need to wire the cupboard under the stairs faster, so I can wheel it all in there and not have to hear it over the sound of the A/C air handler that's next to it. That's for another day, however, after my knuckles recover from this endeavor.