I’ve been experimenting with having the Argon Eon fan always-on, in order to cool the hard drives - primarily because the temperature monitor only measures the CPU temperatures, which takes a long time to reach the 50°C trigger even under heavy load. An IO-heavy operation will get the drives super-toasty, but the fan won’t trigger - bad news for drive longevity, especially if you’re using two 3.5" drives which end up practically touching.
Enabling the “always on” setting in argon-config wasn’t the solution, as that sets the fan speed to 100 and it sounds like a jet engine. I experimented with setting different speed values, and found that there wasn’t much difference - until you get to a fan speed of 1 - at which point the fan is gently spinning but making almost no noise at all. Great!
…except not, because setting a fan speed of 1 causes the OLED to break. It stops displaying anything. Setting a speed over 1 - even just 2, which seems way louder than 1 - brings it back, but partially broken: the bottom few lines are missing. The only fix is to switch the whole thing off, pull the power, plug it back in, and reboot. And even then, the screen breaks: I’m running always-on at speed 2 right now, and the screen’s gone blank on me.
Is there a trick for getting a fan speed of 1 working without breaking the OLED? Secondly, is there a reason why there’s such a huge jump in fan speed (and thus noise) between 1 and 2?
And finally, has anyone looked into triggering on CPU and HDD temperature? Should be easy enough: the monitor’s a simple Python script, and it could simply call hddtemp to pull the drive temperature. Would there be any interest in a patch for that?
EDIT:
I’m now running at fan speed 10 and seeing partial corruption on the OLED. It seems it doesn’t like any low speed setting. If I set the fan to always-on at speed 100 the OLED works fine; likewise when the fan’s off.
I’ve reseated the cable top and bottom, just in case; no change. Open to suggestions, here!
EDIT EDIT:
Additional experimentation reveals the OLED works fine down to fan speed 14; at 13, it shows minor corruption. As you go down towards 1 the corruption gets worse and worse, until the OLED stops working altogether.