Slow Progress

I worked a little more on fixing up the 4U rackmount machine. Despite how big this puppy is, I keep running into limitations with space. To accommodate the 256GB Samsung SSD drive, I ended up having to buy a 2.5” to 3.5” adapter which I put into a tray which used to be mounted on the side of the chassis. It turns out the placement of the RAM on the AMD motherboard meant the tray wouldn’t fit, so I’ll have to mount the drive with a 3.5” to 5.25” adapter. It’s adapters all the way down. One big problem though, was that originally I was thinking of just leaving the stack of 9GB Seagate Barracuda drives in the 5.25” bay in there until I could work out some way to get the data off. I’m not even 100% sure what’s on there, other than I use to run some ancient version of VMware ESX back when I used to work for Virtzilla. I guess the one big problem is really two problems. The first is I need to figure out how to get the Ultra SCSI drives working again, and the second is that they’re formatted with VMFS 2. Yay for ancient connectors and ancient file formats. One thing I did get done, was both of the old fans have now been swapped out for much quieter Cooler Master 92mm units. I ended up snipping off the 3pin power connectors and splicing them with the old molex connector from the old fans. Cooler Master was nice enough to include a 3pin to molex adapter, but one of them wouldn’t fit into the Corsair PSU’s molex connector, and the other I had already cut off before realizing there was an included adapter. Oops. The end result though is the machine is now quiet enough to put in my rack without my wife wanting to kill me, so it’s smiles all around.