Okay, so you really don't know but you think you do. That's dangerous.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Sheetrock-UltraLight-1-2-in-x-4-ft-x-8-ft-Gypsum-Board-14113411708/202530243This is not fire rated sheet rock. It is for sale today at home depot. Generally, if it's 1/2" it's not fire rated, if it's 5/8" it is. That's because they add the fiber layer which is fire rated that is 1/8" thick.
CPUs burn more power as temperature rises. Not a little more power but a significant amount. Enough for me to pay for mechanical cooling systems and the power required to run them. Oh, don't forget, all the fans have to speed up. So the warmer the intake air is, the more air you must move over the heatsink to cool the processors. If you double fan speed, fan power is cubed. Check the affinity laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_lawsVery few enterprise class data centers are actually using outside air cooling but yes a few are. I have at least met every large enterprise class colo developer in the US. Even when Washington state tried to force everyone to use direct outside air cooling, I presented how my design was more energy efficient and therefore meets the spirit of the law. That design is currently being built. I have won that argument in Washington now 3 times, because I can show the proof.
I can also argue that all direct outside air cooling systems are vulnerable to attack. All someone has to do is shoot enough poison into the air intake to kill everyone inside. Even a smoke bomb will cause a clean agent dump and ventilation closures. That a solid $250k recovery problem.
How do you cool your data center if there's too much chaff in the air at harvest time? The filters will all clog really quickly. Then you are spending more money of filters than you would have spent on a standard cooling system. That even happened to a colleague in Dallas. I wouldn't have expected there'd be much harvest in Dallas, but then I read his data. They installed a giant system that is less cost efficient than a standard cooling system. Tragic.
PUE is a flawed method of measuring efficiency. I can improve the PUE of any data center by simply increasing the temperature. The rub is that I have proven that this method does not improve the efficiency of the data center, in fact it's slightly worse. You don't have believe me, it's what I get paid to do. Headlines are designed to grab attention, not to tell the whole truth.
Yes, I've been on the recovery effort after a colleague suffered thermal runaway on a large VRLA battery. I've spoken with a few other colleagues who had thermal runaway destruction on large Lithium-ion batteries. One actually destroyed their power room. I don't think that's the context you were using. I've had several cooling system failures, usually a control or power failure. The room will get hot. I've never had server failure because of it. My data center in Puerto Rico just survived the recent hurricane despite utility power failure for 6 weeks. Some of my competitors did fail, so I helped them get going again, as hopefully anyone would do in during a tragedy. Fair competition does not include kicking them when they're down.
Ironically, I use outside air to cool my miners. LOL. That's really because my miner rooms started really small. Now I'm looking to build larger rooms so I'm now more serious about the design, efficiency and cost. I am working through an analysis that looks promising. I think I can get the ROI reduced by 40% with my new design. I'm beginning small scale experiments now.
That particular type of sheetrock is UNAVAILABLE in my area.
Like I said, it might be a "local codes" type of thing that the only sheetrock I've ever seen was the fire-rated stuff.
I wasn't talking thermal runaway on batteries (though that's actually MORE dangerous) but on semiconductor gear.
I can't speak to chaff out of current experience - there isn't much of that around here and I'm upwind from the only close sources, and I didn't have it at all in my previous "in the edge of a city" location - but the SMOKE levels last year were bad.
I was having to change the filters every week or two at MOST as a result - there are reasons I have always been a strong proponent of "positive pressure with filtered intake air".
I'd have had to be doing that to some degree anyway even without the miners.
Chaff shouldn't even be getting TO the filters themselves - there should be insect screening getting clogged by that stuff instead, just make a point of daily inspection during harvest season and cleanout as needed.
You also pretty much have to be directly downwind and usually adjacent to a farm field that is being harvested for it to be a noticeable issue (based on when I was growing up in a place surrounded by farms), and that's normally going to be a week OR LESS out of the year.
The "poison" argument is serious strawman.
Fan power draw isn't the cube of fan speed, but it's not linear.
Falls somewhere inbetween, based on the fan curves I've seen from manufacturers.
Academic point though in the servers I've used as the case fans weren't set up for PWM at all and ran at 100% all the time anyway.
I do grant they were "low end" server designs.
As it happens, in the place I'm in right now, I CAN'T get enough "massive airflow" to do most of the cooling, except in mid-winter - the evap units I have are doing most of the work, and are certainly more efficient than any mechanical A/C unit ever dreamed of being to date.
Don't believe the "change every 3 months" claims about the media - if you demineralize the water, they can easily go a year and I had one set still working fairly well after almost 2 years of near-continuous usage (I just replaced them last week in a unit I bought in May of 2016) even on aspen media.
