One of my corporate customers upon switching all databse operations to AIX based risc systems gave me one of the servers being replaced. I took home a quad-processer Xeon PC-sized IBM Server with 8, 73GB SCSI drives and 4 GB of RAM. I just put the initial SUSE Linux load on it, and am transitioning it into my main home PC. The thing is a rocket. Only problem is with twin power supplies, it sounds a little loud.
No kidding! The fan noise is probably from the drive cooling fans--8 hard drives tend to heat things up quickly....;^)