Hey all,

I currently have a PowerEdge 2950 in my home office that is a great machine.. fast, expandable, not too hard on the electricity.. there's just one problem - the noise of it! I'm not talking about the "jet taking off" noise as it powers up.. I mean more the constant noise of the fans working away to keep it at around 23 degrees. It's not ridiculously loud, but enough to be annoying when I'm in the room for any length of time.

Reading online, it seems a fairly common complaint with this model and was partially addressed by BIOS/BMC updates (which I have at the latest levels) but I've been thinking about buying a 2900 (or maybe a 1900) tower machine, swapping the "good stuff" (like the RAM, DRAC card, hard drives, maybe the processors) into the new machine and then reselling the 2950.

So...

- A 1900/2900 SHOULD be significantly quieter right? (bigger fans/slower RPM?). Anyone have both a 2900 and 2950 that could verify this?

- The 1900 seems a fair bit cheaper and given that I only really use the machine for testing and file storage over my home LAN, it'd be more than enough I'd say.. especially if I transplanted the bits I mentioned above.. which it should take right? They came out around the same time and seem to be fairly comparable in most ways

-  Or is there another model I should consider? (MUST support Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V as well as at least 4 SATA drives and HW RAID)

Cheers for any advice guys