20 Posts
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21048
WD19TB, fan speed unnecessarily high for long periods
With its quirks, there probably should be a board dedicated to all the variants of the WD19 dock. Mine is connected to an XPS 13 9300 and so I'll burden this community with my tale of woe.
Oftentimes, with what appears to be little stress, the fan on my WD19TB kicks into high. This fan is pretty loud, sitting on my desk. And the air being vented is never very warm. It's connected via DisplayPort to two HD monitors. It's not like I'm pumping 4K resolution through the dock.
Sometimes I close up my laptop's lid (the XPS is set to hibernate with lid closed). An hour or 90 minutes later, I'll walk by the office door and find the monitors are off, the XPS is hibernated, but the dock's fan is still cranking away at its highest speed.
If I unplug the dock's AC power, then plug it back in again, the dock comes back up and the fan remains either entirely quiet or briefly comes up at its slowest speed, then settles back to quiet.
The dock has had its firmware update, from earlier this summer. And the BIOS on the XPS had a recent update, too.
Have others experienced this fan behavior in their WD19TB? If so, did you find a way to tame the fan?
MarkMessinger
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September 28th, 2020 09:00
To close out this thread, Dell Support replied the fan is meant to cool the device. I pointed out the device blows cool air, when it runs, none of its vents are blocked, it is operating in a clean interior room that rarely exceeds 71F degrees. Nonetheless, Dell Support reports the device is operating as normal and suggests I return it if I don't like it.
I have purchased a CalDigit USB-C Pro Dock. It's fanless and has all the ports I require. Also, it has not dropped its Ethernet connection, so far. And I don't get an erroneous message, whenever I boot my XPS 13 9300, telling me the dock's fan is malfunctioning (this was another issue I took up with Dell Support and which they could not resolve). So far I'm very happy to uninstall the Dell WD19TB dock.
DELL-Cares
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September 20th, 2020 10:00
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DELL-Cares
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September 21st, 2020 06:00
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