Rehabilitation of Old PCs

I plan to build a FreeNAS box in the near future. I have an old Dell Poweredge server I can repurpose for this but for a number of reasons I can't do this yet. One reason is that I intend to use 2.5" hard drives harvested from other machines but they currently have data on them.

I have a bunch of other drives of varying sizes doing nothing. I intend to build another NAS box with desktop bits and bobs and transfer the contents of the 2.5" to that secondary box. It's only an interim solution.

Bear in mind, these projects are very low budget. They are also about learning. 

Low end machines

I've two old desktops that I don't currently use for anything. They aren't the most modern machines.

Arguably the better of the two is a Novatech machine with 4GB of RAM and an Athlon II X3 425 (actually a quad core chip with one core disabled).  The micro ATX case has two 5.25" drive bays (one occupied by a SATA optical drive) and two 3.5" drive bays. The PSU is only 350w but that is plenty enough.

The less good machine is an Acer Aspire T180. Athlon x2 64 3600+ (which is dual core). The case has two 5.25" drive bays (one occupied by an IDE optical drive) and six 3.5" drive bays. Tool less at that. 250w supply is less good. 

The motherboards are similar in a lot of ways. Same sort of budget Nvidia chipset/integrated graphics, same rear IO (including USB 2 and Gigabit Ethernet), same mix of two PCIe (one x16, one x1) and two PCI slots. But there are some key differences. The Foxconn mobo in the Novatech has an AM2+ socket as opposed to AM2 on the Acer. The Foxconn has four SATA-2 ports as opposed to just two on the Acer. The Acer does have 4 DIMM slots but documentation is unclear as to the maximum amount and speed of RAM it supports. It could be 1Gb, it could be 4Gb. The Foxconn documentation is clear that its max RAM is 4Gb.

The business of max RAM is very confusing. In theory, most 64bit CPUs can address at least 64GB of RAM but whether chipsets/motherboards allow this is another matter. In rare cases, the actual max RAM can be greater than documented but there is no easy way to tell.

Testing

I had intended to use the Novatech case for another project but ended up buying a full ATX motherboard for that project and used a different case instead. I did mess about with the Novatech somewhat and it didn't display anything but at the time did not investigate very much. If it does work, it would make sense to transfer the mobo, psu etc into the Acer case.

Memory is a funny thing. I was convinced that the Novatech beeped last time I tried to use it but was silent during initial testing. It doesn't have a speaker. The Foxconn motherboard predates LED indicators becoming common on motherboards. It powers on, various fans turn, but no display from graphics card.

Rather than procede any further, it seemed better to wait for ordered PC speaker to arrive. Very inexpensive and useful to have. There are POST test cards but either too expensive to justify vs speaker or very long delivery times. Also, they don't always work on new motherboards which don't transmit POST data over PCIe. My understanding that many modern motherboards still have the PC speaker connector.

After much testing including swapping out both CPU and PSU for known good ones, no luck. It is possible that the BIOS is corrupt. For various reasons, it is unlikely there is much that can be done about that. There could be some other motherboard component fault but I lack the skills and equipment to do component level diagnosis/repair. 

It's unknown whether the CPU is good. I don't have another Socket AM2+/AM3 machine to test it in. Not knowing that makes purchasing another AM2+/AM3 motherboard a gamble. Even on the second user market they can be stupidly expensive.

I have to remind myself that the point of the secondary NAS is essentially as a staging area for files whilst I get things in place for initial TrueNAS installation. 

Rebuild

Because of the need to create somewhere to dump files, it seemed sensible to use the Acer Aspire instead however slow it might be. It proved a very difficult rebuild. 

It made sense to transfer the PSU from the Novatech as it is slightly higher rated and it also has more connectors. The Acer Aspire also lacked a case fan so one was transplanted from the Novatech.

As an experiment the 2x2GB DIMMs were installed. Surprisingly, they were recognised and the machine now has 6GB of RAM. There isn't a manual for the specific motherboard used in the Acer and the manual for the T180 shows a different motherboard, which may have had RAM limitations.

The Acer Aspire motherboard only has two SATA ports and an IDE port (supporting two drives) hence a four port RAID card was installed. It has a total of six hard drives (including an IDE one). Installing some of the drives was difficult because of the ATX power cable. Although the case has six 3.5" toolless bays, two of them could not be used. The RAID card and its cabling could just about squeeze in. The IDE drive was put in a 3.5" to 5.25" adapter and put where the optical drive was because it made cabling easier.

The result is a rats nest of cables and it's not possible to cable manage effectively. This is probably going to hurt air flow. None of the components generate a huge amount of heat. Well, the CPU is rated at 65W but the stock AMD cooler does a decent job. More air intake is probably a good idea. I have some new 120mm and various smaller fans scavanged from various even older machines but there is nowhere to easily mount them without performing surgery on the case.

The removable side panel does have perforations. The perforations are slightly too small to accept fan screws but they have been reamed out. The spacing of the perforations isn't perfectly aligned with the fan screw holes in 120mm fan but close enough that with care it did mount securely and it doesn't look too bad. 

The Acer Aspire's motherboard has a spare fan header that would appear to have been for chipset cooling looking at the manual. This iteration of the T180 has a chunky heatsink. It's a three rather than four pin header. Attaching the 120mm to that fan header is impossible due to a short fan cable. The fan does have one of those Molex daisy chain connectors and because of the cable mess much easier to connect that way. That fan being at full speed all the time isn't an issue with a NAS box. It's not a very noisy fan in the way sever fans are.

It should be a sufficient cooling solution.

Deficiencies

Despite ordering various power splitters, it's only possible to power six hard drives. There is I/O support for one more IDE and one more SATA devices. More splitters could be ordered but current storage is probably enough to get started with.

There are going to be major I/O bottlenecks with data transfer speeds given the age of the hardware. That's a given. I have time and as long transfers are reliable, can plan around that.

Lots of software problems though. That's the next post.

No photo etc

It's not worth showing the build of an ugly interim solution on crippled hardware. Next steps are more interesting.