Ionization option on our A/C turned on or off in a server room?

Our server room is a converted closet, and we have a pair of wall-mounted air conditioning units to cool the room. These are both pointed towards the front of the server racks, and there are a couple small vents for hot air. We definitely don't have an ideal environment, but it's what I'm working with.

My question is related to an ionization feature of the A/C units. I know that this feature will basically spit out negative ions that attach to dust and other particles, and make them heavy enough to drop to the ground. With this basic understanding, I am trying to figure out if it is better for a server room to have this turned on or off.

I would imagine turning it on would mean purer air, which would mean the intake of air to the servers would have less dust (ie, good to turn it on).

However, I could also imagine that the ionized air would contain bigger, heavier dust particles that would normally drop to the ground, but could get sucked up into the servers because of the air flow. This would lead to bigger dust particles in the servers, which would be more likely to cause issues (ie, good to turn it off).

I haven't found much looking around online, so I'm hoping that someone out there might have done some deeper research into this already. Or, hopefully someone can factually show me that I'm considering something that is so minor it won't make a difference.

Solution 1:

The ionization option is a mixed bag: It will lead to "cleaner air" but there are definitely drawbacks:

First one that comes to mind is that your server room is a largely-contained environment, so any ozone generated by the ionizer will stay in the room. Being a largely-contained environment (with filters in the AC units) also means the air will be somewhat cleaner by nature.

The second is that ionizing the particles in the air will get them to stick to anything with an opposite charge. This includes the ionizer's collector plate, and hopefully the AC filters, but may also include your servers, heat sinks, etc -- Anything that has a slight positive potential will attract the particles. I've no practical experience with ionizers in datacenter AC units (not even sure they have 'em?) , but I would be concerned about the cooling ports of servers getting obstructed over (a long) time.