Around 18 months ago, I got myself a cheap Dell workstation on eBay – a dual Xeon 2.4GHz system, with 8GB RAM and upgraded to 16GB. It does have a lot of hard drives spinning at 15,000 rpm. They spin twice as fast as most desktop hard drives and are enterprise grade.
However, the Dell case, a Precision T5400 case, cannot hold more than four hard drives and I used another case to house the 12 hard drives and a bunch of DVD drives.
This presented another problem – cables were needed to connect the computer to the hard drive case. And these are not ordinary cables. The RAID controller card, an Adaptec 31605 has four unified SAS/SATA ports – each with four lanes – giving a total of 16 lanes – ie, 16 directly attached hard drives (more hard drives can be added than this to the controller by the use of an SAS expander, but that’s a budget I can’t justify). So the data cables have to have these kind of plugs:
The image below shows the data expensive data cables coming out the front to the case below:
Now these ports do not have a normal home style SATA type socket – there are many more variations on the SAS/SATA sockets than what is seen in the home computers – this rules out long SAS/SATA cables that you can get for about 2 quid on eBay. I needed a 2 metre four-lane cable with specialist male external plugs on either end. And four of these.
The price for each of these were 40 quid, so its expensive stuff. Add to that bill are two four female sockets to accept the cable and convert to a 4-lane internal socket.
From there it finally split off into four cables each to the hard drives.
SAS hard drives do have similar power and data connectors as SATA drives – with one annoying caveat – there is no break between the power and data ports on the SAS – it form one long continuous connector – so you can’t use the individual power and data cables like you do on home SATA drives.
The DVD drives were simply connected by 2.5 metre SATA cables straight off the motherboard and out through into the hard drive case.
The hard drive case also need to be powered separately.
This makes for a rather untidy and inelegant setup. So – I’ve long pondered transplanting the Dell motherboard into another, larger case that could accommodate all the hard drives and DVD drives.
1) It would mean all expensive cables are now redundant (although if I use more hard drives in future, then these would come in handy again).
2) Dell computers are famous for their non-propriety parts. I was concerned that while the motherboard looks like an EATX server board standard, the screw mounts may be offset ever so slightly. Their power supplies were famously non-standard – the plug would fit but the wiring were switched, leaving one with a fried motherboard. I’m told this was in the old days but it certainly fills me with confidence.
3) I wanted a case that was not too tall, to fit on the shelf in the cupboard which had a low sloping ceiling. It needed to support two power units as well.
In the end, I went for the Lian Li V2010B. It supports EATX sized boards, two power supply units. I believe Lian Li no longer makes these and there are newer versions perhaps.
It took around 45mins to remove the Dell motherboard completely from the Dell case and install it onto the removable motherboard tray as shown below:
It took another 15 mins to mount it inside the case along with the Dell PSU. I chose not to buy a third-party PSU yet as I’m unsure about the second power connector on the Dell motherboard – I know I’d need to make sure I get a third party PSU that is EATX compatible at least. I’d like to so I don’t have to use two power switches.
Immediately two problems became apparent as I began to add the bits and pieces
- the heatsinks for the CPUs will protrude into the Lian Li CPU cooler fan. Luckily the fan is quite adjustable.
- the PCIe/PCIx slots on the Dell board do not line up precisely to the Lian Li PCI openings. Only two of the lowest slots will fit, but as you go up the slots, it becomes more and more out of alignment – which is annoying as the higher slots are where my graphics card and RAID cards belong and they need to be well supported.
I have sort of bodged it by placing some thumb screws into the PCI brackets below those cards to support the cards. The top level card, which is a PCIe x8 slot wired as x4 and is used the the PCIe x1 wifi card and is completly out of alignment with the Lian Li PCI openings. Fortunately, the wifi card is light enough to be self supporting in its slot as long the external antenna cable isn’t pulled in the wrong direction!
The PSUs I have, both the Dell and the weird no-brand XPOWER PSU from Maplins has screw mounts that do not line up with the Lian Li PSU screw mounts – I could only get two screws in for both. Not ideal for such heavy things.
The 3.5″ hard drives, all are noisy 15,000 rpm SAS drives had to be taken from their 5.12″ to 3.5″ mounting brackets and put on Lian Li screws with rubber grommets. When the drives are slid into the case’s drive bays, it actually use those rubber grommets as the support points, not the screws themselves.
I wasn’t convinced those rubber grommets will do much good in dampening the 15krpm drives’ vibrations and noise. Furthermore, modern hard drives shed their heat by thermal contacts with the case mountings. And 15,000rpm drives do get very hot, probably hotter than those 2TB drives. However when in the case, I was amazed that the noise and vibrations were substantially reduced – those tiny grommets worked wonders. And my drives were cooler in this Lian Li case than in the old hard drive case with traditional mountings. This is in no doubt due to the dedicated 120mm fan blowing cool air over these drives and the resulting hot air sucked out by the PSUs’ fans on the other side. It’s a testament to Lian Li’s superb airflow design.
In fact, the 4 hard drive 2.5″ single 5.12″ backplane by SuperMicro is the nosiest component that can be heard from outside the case no thanks to its screeching tiny fan that runs at full speed irrespective of conditions. This isn’t the manufacturer’s fault as it was never designed for the home environment, it is usually for those noisy server rooms.
Wiring up 8 hard drives, and four DVD drives and a further 4 2.5″ drive backplane required careful planning if you want to keep it neat and tidy. That’s 13 data cables (the backplane uses one 4-channel data cable) and 13 power cables. It is made all the more worse when the 3.5″ SAS drives use a splitter to get its power through Molex sockets – damn inelegant! An example of it below:
In the end, I managed to get it as tidy as this with the help of some braiding to help with the cable management and improve airflow.
And isn’t it one very classy looking Dell Workstation?
And the desktop in the other room…
So to sum up – it was a relatively straight forward physical transplant of the Dell Precision T5400 EATX server board to a third party case with the following caveats:
1) The front panel with two USB sockets, audio sockets and the power on/off/reset switch is Dell’s properiety standard and have not figured out the pin layout except for the power on/off pins. Dell do not publish these and no one on the internet has done any homework yet!
2) The PCIe/PCIx slots may not line up with the PCI brackets on the case
3) The power supply for the board – I have not yet tried a third party PSU and kept to the Dell PSU for now and the screw mounting do not line up with Lian Li’s case screw mounts.
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All the specialist SAS/SATA cables, ports and backplanes were brought from www.span.com – an IT company based in Surbition in South West London, UK – see bottom of page for full list of components and links should any of you are crazy enough to try it out!
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Computer specification:
Dell T5400 Precision workstation
Lian Li V2010B extra large EATX tower chassis case
2.4GHz E5410 Intel Xeon processors (x2)
16GB FB-DIMMS, 666MHz
2GB Palit ATI Radeon 4870 OC hard with non-reference cooler PCIe x16 card
Adaptec 31605 16-port RAID PCIe x8 card with 256MB cache and battery backup
Wifi PCIe x1 card
Storage:
15,000 RPM SAS hard drives, 3.5″ (IBM, HP, Hitachi) (x8)
15,000 RPM SAS hard drives, 2.5″ (HP) (x4) (soon to be x8)
4-hard drive 2.5″ in 5.12″ backplane, SuperMicro x1 (another one to come)
Blu-ray rewriter and HD-DVD reader drive, LG, SATAII
DVD-Writer drives, Dell, x3
PSU:
Dell Precision 850 watts PSU
XPOWER 600 watts PSU
Total: 1450 watts
UPS:
Belkin 1200 kVA unit
Monitor:
Dell 3008WFP 30″ 2500×1600 connected via DisplayPort / alternatively via Dual DVI
OS:
Windows XP 64bit (considering going Windows 7 64bit Professional)
Span.com shopping list:
In final single case:
2x SFF8087 (miniSAS-36) Controller to 4x SFF8482 (SAS) Device, 75cm internal SAS/SATA, Multilane fanout [From RAID card direct to SAS 3.5" drives]
1x SAS/SATA Internal Backplane, CSE-M14TB, 4x 2.5″HD SAS, 1x 5.25″Bay [2.5" SAS backplane]
1x (miniSAS-36) to SFF8484 (SAS-32), 50cm internal SAS/SATA, Multilane [From RAID card to 2.5" SAS backplane]
If having a two-case setup, below is required: (Remember each cable carries four SAS/SATA signals)
1x Standard 300W PSU; uncabled, DA-18, 18-Bay 5.25″ Case [Case is designed for DVD/CD Drives, may require changing 300W PSU for larger wattage if you have lots of power hungry hard drives like me - read hard drive specifications and add plenty of watts on top per drive for headrooms (eg, for spin-ups) and PSU with enough Molex/SATA plugs]
12x 5.25″ to 3.5″ mounting brackets – get them from eBay Search Results in this link
3x miniSAS-26 to miniSAS-26 (SFF8088 to SFF8088), SAS/SATA external cable, 3m, Multilane [From one internal/external backplate to another]
3x SFF8087 (miniSAS-36) to SFF8087 (miniSAS-36), 30cm internal SAS/SATA, Multilane [From internal/external backplate to 3.5" hard drives]
3x SFF8087 (miniSAS-36) Controller to 4x SFF8482 (SAS) Device, 75cm internal SAS/SATA, Multilane fanout [From backplate direct to SAS 3.5" drives]
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Other things handy to know:
If you have a separate case for hard drives, DVD/CD drives, and you buy a separate PSU, chances are, it won’t power up because you haven’t plugged in the redundant ATX motherboard connector. So, you can wire up two pins on the ATX plug to a switch or simply join them together. See http://www.directron.com/2powersupplies.html#addatx - but beware of old propriety Dell ATX connectors!!! Also, do not power on without at least one device draining electricity from the PSU or the PSU will burn out if nothing is connected and is powered on. Do this at own risk, do some research and if in doubt, leave it, I am not responsible for you making a mistake.
It is difficult to get hold of internal SATA cables longer than 2m – because SATA is not certified for longer lengths. 2m ones can be found on this eBay search link If you want to go longer than this, then get some cheap SATA to eSATA PCI brackets and you can get long eSATA cables (possible to get 2 ports per brackets). I don’t fancy doing this for data critical SATA hard drives, but DVDs/CDs/Blu-Rays seem fine.
Having more than one PSU is typically better than one very high wattage PSU due to efficiencies. This is because it is difficult to find a very efficient high wattage PSU (this is by limitations of technology and design) while you can get an 80 Plus Certified PSU, look closer and you can see the efficiency is less than 80% at maximum output. For example, 1000w is burned just to give you 750w. And since you are using just one PSU, you’re going to work that PSU harder – ie, need more watts out of it to power everything, potentially close to its maximum ratings where the efficiencies tail off, more heat and more fan noise. Two lower wattage PSUs can share the load, and because the load is shared, they aren’t working at their maximum draw and reach that nice apex in the PSU’s efficiency curve.
It is far easier to manufacture a 500w PSU that can reach as high as 87% efficiency, and probably higher still at slightly less than maximum draw. For example, a 500w PSU could have 90% efficiency at 480w and gives you 432w – two PSUs means 960w being burned to give you 864w instead of one PSU burning 1000w to give you just 750w.
The above is a crude example to illustrate how two PSUs can be better than one if you have high power draws – so it is worth doing your research on how much power you use and what PSUs are available on the market – not for greenie points but simply to make your PSU last longer, less heat to worry about, less noise and gives your backup UPS more battery time when the power goes out!
Comments
Quite a powerful machine just to surf the Internet and type on a word document
Sod all that work – more importantly…what’s the benchmark for Crysis on the machine?
Just wondering – do you also play multiplayer games online too? If you do, let me know – I do it myself – have a Steam account – JGJones obviously(!)
Hmm, how come I didn’t see any comments notifications?
Bloody WordPress!
Fintan, its what I need to type at 120wpm.
Crysis? That benchmark will wait until the 5890 comes down in price
I don’t play online games. I’m scared I’d get addicted.
I’ll run a Crysis benchmark shortly just for you Jones. I don’t think it will be super cos its a 4870 single GPU card trying to push 2560×1900 pixels.
Run #1- DX9 2560×1600 AA=16xQ, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 17.56 MAX 25.14
Run #2- DX9 1920×1080 AA=16xQ, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 25.14 MAX 29.87
Run #3- DX9 1600×1200 AA=16xQ, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 26.39 MAX 34.92
Run #4- DX9 1024×768 AA=16xQ, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 32.58 MAX 50.84
Run #5- DX9 2560×1600 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 21.68 MAX 26.17
Run #6- DX9 2560×1600 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: Medium ~~ Last Average FPS: 40.00 MAX 50.21
Run #7- DX9 2560×1600 AA=8x, 32 bit test, Quality: Medium ~~ Last Average FPS: 40.20 MAX 50.08
Need a better GPU methinks.
that is one impresive machine I have a T7500 quad core xeon 2.27 4gb ddr3 ram with a 3800quadro fx card and 2 sata 1tb drives on mirror but I have a question in the picture with your 30″ dell monitor Jammy person as you are is the laptop a D430-D630 laptop just seems out of place one other thing what do you use your machine for i use mine for business / remote help and its quick but can’t justife the £1000 for the second processor on a riser card.
well impressed with your set up gutted at the monitor as ive just invested in the ST2410 not the best wish i has stuck with my 2 22″ widescreen but you live and learn.
Thanks Aaron. It was a D420 (now replaced with an E4300) and that laptop went with me all over the world, it is one sturdy laptop and although I replaced parts, it was for upgrade/cosmetic reasons… the greatest thing was its small size and light weight, great for air travel.
I’m not so keen on the E4300, Dell has taken a backward step with regards to build quality across the entire E-series.
As you probably know, there isn’t much point in the second processor unless you have software that is able take advantage… stuff like seismic processing (which is what I do) and video format conversion. Sometimes I virtual desktops to play around with various OS. Plus I play the odd game such as Call of Duty.
If you do remote desktop a lot, £1000 is probably better spent on a 30″ monitor, or better still, a larger (24/27″) twin monitor setup, than spending money on a second CPU. :]
You got a nice machine… should last you a fair few years.
I just wanna say that’s a nice build and a nice guide. I’m looking at doing the same with a P690 Board. I’m going to put it into a Thermaltake Armor Case.
Also did you ever upgrade to a bigger video card? I’m running a 5970 with dual l5340′s oc’d to 3.0 with 32gb’s or DDR2 667 and I was having power issues with the dell 1000 watt. Right now I have a second 1000 watt laying on top of the tower just running the 5970. I was running into mini freezes where the video and sound would glitch out. Since adding the 2nd 1000 it has stopped.
That’s what I wanted to get the armor case, plan on adding
http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?S=1207&ID=1544.
Also did you ever look into the pin layout for the front panel after writing this?
And you wouldn’t would happen to have some closer pictures would ya, I’d like to see how you mounted that spot cooler and see just how far off you slots were.
Thanks
William
Thanks William. Good luck with your transplanting project, if the case supports it, a removable mobo tray will be a godsend – especially if you need to drill new holes for the mobo screws to go into.
I never did upgrade to a newer card – wasn’t convinced the ATI 5970 would last long and that the 6000-series was just round the corner. In hindsight, I should have gone and got the 5970. Now I’m waiting for the 6990 vs GTX580 or better to decide!
The Xeon boards, CPUs and those FBDIMMs are power hungry components – and you probably power some HDDs and other assorted bits too. It is better to run off two PSUs, but a second 1kW is perhaps overkill but maybe split the loads evenly between the two?
I can get some more photos next month of the slots and side cooler.
I couldn’t find the pin-layouts, I searched and searched. Eventually I gave up and just use trial and error to find the power on/off pins and wired that up to the button and fore-go the USB/audio.
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs252.snc1/9922_183863510188_588670188_4277730_92497_n.jpg
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs267.snc1/9420_177920770188_588670188_4221612_2710747_n.jpg
Kyle what did you happen to use for a back plate being the dell one is molded to the case.
Thanks Bill
Dude when were you in Alaska? I live in Fairbanks……….
Hey Bill,
The back-plate for the ports? I didn’t bother with it – who is going to see that?!
It actually might be a good idea to leave it open, as the FB-DIMMS are near that area, and it will give it a chance to ventilate out the back – I even went as far as putting a PCI slot fan and jam it in between the ports and the case to vent the hot air from the FB-DIMMs right out of the case.
I was in Alaska/Yukon/BC in late August to September, I was in Fairbanks around 7-10th September before riding the train to Anchorage.
I plan to return to Yukon/Alaska later in 2011 again, such a beautiful place, you are one lucky bugger!
I’ll take some more photos end of next week, just absolutely swamped with work right now!
Lol ya I like it here, winters are a little rough but you get used to it.
And I’m typing on the new machine in the new case…… all I have to say is holy crap that was a pain…….(I had to do allot of cutting) I’ll get some pics once I get the custom lid done. Oh and just a little funny info, the dell memory risers from a 690 will work in a 490 with the 1000w psu! DDR2 800 FB dimms also work well. it let me oc the 2.4 ES cpu to 3.0 Stable. If I try it with 667 it BSOD’s on the stress tests.
Interesting that you had to do a lot of cutting, I didn’t do any cutting at all. Biggest pain for me was the pin-layouts for the front panel!
Well I had to cut the motherboard tray down, the P690, T7400 and T7500 have a larger motherboard. They have one extra slot and come in @ like 13 1/2 x 13 1/2 and they are on trays that are like 3 inches longer in the dell cases. I had to cut the tray down to fit the case then beat the armor case flat, laid the dell tray in it and spray painted from behind to mark all the hole locations and then mounted the dell tray right on the case. Then I was able to bolt the motherboard straight in and all the slots are dead even. I also had to enlarge the I/O plate (added about an inch to the top of it. The other cutting was just blowing out the factory fan hole grills to improve air flow and reduce noise. Right now I have the factory on/off switch laying in the bottom of the case, I was able to turn it on with the pins but for some reason it wouldn’t shut it off with the pins. I might mount the whole thing to the back of the case anyways..
On another note I notice you are running 5100 xeons, why didn’t you go with the 5200′s?
And another thing I noticed is putting the memory in risers with the 120mm behind it dropped the temps from 80′s down to 50-60′s
Happy New Year Bill!
Didn’t realise the top end models had slightly larger motherboards, I just thought it was just a bigger case for an extra drive bay really! However, very interesting you got your PCIe slots lined up perfectly, that’s just weird when some of mine is offset. I wonder if it’s the different motherboard or case quality issues.
The T5400 was fully populated from eBay at such a low price, to get one new at the time would be treble the cost.
Plus it was to come from Dell direct as it was a mis-order by a consultancy computer company, so it wasn’t even second-hand goods. So I couldn’t really quibble with that.
I’m quite happy with the performance, the Xeons are actually the coolest running components and the memory modules are running at about 60c/140f.
Btw, I have 5410s, not 5140s. Sorry, that was a typo!
Happy new year to you as well.
Well like I said I had to cut that IO plate to get the board to even fit, doing that gave me the ability to line the slots up perfect.
And that typo really sucks…… I was going off your cpu for my next motherboard. I have all the gear to put my 490 motherboard back in the case and have another running machine. And since I thought the 5100/5300 worked in a t5400/t7400 board I was going to get a t7400 board over the 690 board.
The T7400 has better pci-e slots and will run ddr2 800, but now I’m not to sure if it’ll run it. I know 490/690′s won’t run 5200/5400′s but I don’t know if the t5400/t7400 will let me downgrade to the 5340′s.
I’ve searched for info on it, you know of anyone trying a 5000/5100/5300 in a T5400/T7400?
Sorry about the typo :/ No I don’t I know anyone else with those earlier generation Xeons on the newer boards. A quick google search imply that the 5100s and 5300s should work on 490/690 boards but as you probably found out, no mention of those CPUs on the T5400/7400s.
Ya I’m not finding anything, most people don’t mod these sort of machines
But if people knew what you could get out of them and for a good price if you shop around we might see more of them.
I think I’ll wait, I really don’t want to drop another 110 on a board and hope it works. 110 bucks with 2 heat sinks is a good deal to.
Well I finished it, thought you might like to see some of the pics. Let me know what ya think.
http://s36.photobucket.com/albums/e40/DrThanatos/Xeon%20Build/
That looks good. I’m still pretty damned busy at the moment, I haven’t forgotton to take the extra photos.
It’s interesting that you had to mod different bits to what I did and I never brought the dremel out! But that was probably due to my case being quite large.
Rear end, PCIe slots
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/_96rxabN6hHc/TUiGj1B0RfI/AAAAAAAAANM/MR4TINJ3Djk/s1152/P1160087.JPG
Rear end, Mobo sockets/ports
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_96rxabN6hHc/TUiGkFcmlAI/AAAAAAAAANQ/6qY8dSEy8FU/s1152/P1160088.JPG
Internal PCIe slots – can’t easily see that it is slightly out of alignment… you can see I’m unable to even bend the edge of the PCI plate into the screw holes…
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_96rxabN6hHc/TUiGlXp7q1I/AAAAAAAAANY/chTk7v3oEGc/s1152/P1160090.JPG
PSUs – the standard PSU didn’t fit, but the Dell one did!
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/_96rxabN6hHc/TUiGkuKFSeI/AAAAAAAAANU/cuYLXTx3ylM/s1440/P1160085.JPG
Can’t believe the amount of dust collected over the years in what is essentially a closed-off room!
Hey Kyle,
So I’m back @ it, I’m going to upgrade to a T7400 board and Dual X5460′s. Are you running your 5410′s stock or did you Bsel them? My 5340′s @ 3ghz are bottle necking my 5970 and since I’m building a eyefinity setup I need all the video power I can get.
Hi William,
I’m running them as stock, I didn’t know it was possible to OC them on Dell mobos and haven’t had a need to OC them yet.
I am looking at graphics upgrades now – have you had any Crossfire setups on your Precision?
Long term, I might be replacing all 8 of the 2.5″ 15,000 rpm drives with SSD Vertex 2s.
Cheers,
Kyle
Hey Kyle,
Ya I’m still getting all the parts together for my new setup, hoping to have it all by Nov. I’m going full liquid cooled and a pair of 5470′s oc’d to around 4.2ghz.
As for crossfire I’ll let you know how it goes when I get the T7400 board, I’ll test tri-fire with a 5970 and a 5850 just to see if the board can do it.
And for over clocking yours it’s cake, pull the cpu and tape 1 pin on each cpu and it’ll turn your fsb from 1333 to 1600 and you won’t get much for extra heat since you don’t have to over volt yours. I’m going to have to pin mod mine for extra voltage.
And 8 ssd’s will be pretty epic, I’m running 4 older kingstons in a raid 1 and they screem, I also picked up a copy of supercache which will cache part of the drives into ram. I get around 1500 read/write with super cache on. If you want to raid them though you either want a intel raid card or wait till your raid card gets updated. Right now only intel raid cards can pass trim to a raid set.
Later
Bill
I can confirm corssfire works, I have a 5970 and a 5850 running in tri-fire, I also tried the hacked sli drivers but couldn’t get it to work. So crossfire is the way to go. I also picked up a new case so I’m moving it into it. This thing is a beast! 32 5.25 bays, 4 psu’s and holds 2 motherboards! I’m painting it right now.
hey, I buy my t5400 ( with 2 xeon 5460 , 16Go, HD5850, creative X-Fi) and a cooler master HAF 932 (Extended ATX) but i can t find information to use the power control on the mobo! can you tell me where did you find it ? thanks
Are you talking about the bit that contains the USB/Audio in/out and Power button? If so, I have searched high and low for the last three years to no avail. Dell has not been forthcoming either.
If you’re talking about the power supply header on the mobo, I have not looked into that, perhaps William (see his comments abovE) might have done something there because he mentioned about having four PSUs – I kept the default Dell PSU for the mobo and use the secondary to power the drives and gfx card.
Have upgraded to an ATI 6970 gfx card, couldn’t justify the the 6990 prices and it still powers my new three-monitor set-up quite nicely now (Dell 20″ + Dell 30″ + Dell 20″).
Thinking about not bothering with 8 SSDs, do not think my Adaptec raid card is good enough even though it had a firmware update to cope with SSDs. So my thoughts turned to the RevoDrive 3 X2. 1500 MB/sec out of the box without messing around with the raid cards.
Long term, I still like to get rid of the 2.5″ 15krpm drives, as the noise drive me nuts, somehow they seem noisier than the 3.5″ 15krpm ones.
thanks, but I deal with power pins
“Dell’s properiety standard and have not figured out the pin layout except for the power on/off pins”
how does he do to switch on his T5400 ??
I soldered the on/off switch from the case to the pcb board that has the dell on/off switch and mounted it to the inside of my case. I’ll try and get a picture of it when I get home later.
I swapped mine out allot since my last post, I’m now running a pair of 5970′s in xfire with a pair of 5470′s oc’d to 3.8 (bsel wouldn’t boot on them)
Also what kind of performance are you getting out of your 3.5 sas’s?
I was looking at picking up 8 15k 3.5′s since you can pick them up for cheap now.
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e40/DrThanatos/Untitled-1.jpg
On the right hand side you can see the pcb with the ribbon cable going to it.
http://forums.2cpu.com/showpost.php?p=794252&postcount=1139
New pics of my new case with the specs. I’m thinking about pulling those 120mm fans out of the front and putting in 2 more hard drive racks and running the 8 Sas’s in there.
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