Making a Cisco SG300 POE switch tolerable to live with.

I am tired of consumer-grade networking gear.  It never actually works well and you have to tinker all the time.   Coupled with the fact you cannot get any decent 1Gb consumer switches that support fiber means I have to look at Commercial switches and in specifically used ones.

I settled on Cisco old SG300 switches for my home.   I have 1 28 port in the office where all the cat6a cables are terminated to a pair of 12 jack plates and I have a pair of fibers that run the length of the house to the master bedroom closet where I have a Sg300-10 that lives on a shelf next to the alarm panel and lighting panel.

The 10 port is silent and perfect.   the 28 port sounds like it wants to take off and hover.    my solution was a pair of Notuna 40x40x20mm fans. 

I disassembled the switch, installed my fans and repinned the new ones to meet Cisco wiring standards (which do not match anyone else)  by using a small screwdriver to pop the pins out.   I also used the fan speed adapters to make them silent.   The switch even at full load and 80 watts of POE being delivered does not get warm, so slower quieter fans are absolutely acceptable.

Except,  the fan warnings were being sent.   why?  Cisco doesn't use fan speed sensing,  it has a hall sensor fan that simply looks if it's spinning.   easy to defeat that warning by shorting the center pin to ground on the 3 pin Cisco fan header. by doing this on the resistor lead  "silent" adapters that came with my fans it is now silent and still has decent airflow out the back.