OK so I have received and fitted the latching switch for the HDD PSU. And inside. I was going to put that here. Then realised it was metal. Chromed metal, and I don't have a 12mm drill bit. I don't think I would risk that either, risking the chrome finish and most certainly the plastics inside. PSUs socket is fitted. So the back is basically finished now. The last piece of modding (well, apart from mounting the board) is just cutting this thing down after modding it and deleting the USB3. Because that is going to the rear PCI bracket on the case. I will also need to connect my power LED (apple one on front IO of case) to this to get it to light up. I may delete the USB2.0 header too, and just have the LEDs etc but we will see. Doubt I will ever need the front audio either, but I will decide once I have it apart again.
Drilling chopping and etc is over. Thank god. Closes up nice. Just need two PCI slot covers. Next up, soldering.
Thankfully the noise, mess and blood loss seems to have ended now the mods are all done. Thank god. I started on the wiring, and bashed it all out. The GT 640 is just there to hold the socket down whilst the epoxy sets. However I can pretty much put whatever I like in there now. FP is all back in and correct as to how it was when I pulled it apart. Still soldering to do, then I can cloth tape down everything and get it out of the way. I fitted the Dell case fan. Mostly to stop it whining at boot. It was very quiet, and I probably won't need it with that hurricane machine in there but yeah, if it whines at POST I won't be able to see it (it will be headless once the software is all on and it runs from BOOT into a NAS). Those are fitted too. Obviously they are too long, not stripped and not soldered but I would rather get the iron out the once. Managed to recycle the Apple angled cover. I ordered those.
Wasn't in the mood for soldering tonight. I am exhausted tbh. Fastest full case mod I have ever done. Any way, before I made it all permanent I decided to test the hardware. I connected up the board etc PSU, all works perfectly. That was a relief. Fired up the HDD PSU and again no problems. Phew. Not only that but when I tested the board it did not even notice I did not have that great plastic lump plugged in at all (which I thought it would, hence why it still exists) so I think I am just going to de-pin all of the crap I don't want and just wire up the LED board and bridge off to the PLED on the case (the original white Apple one). As a complete bonus I found something really cool out about the fan. I can not believe I never noticed it before tbh. It has a speed selector switch on it FFS. 1200 RPM,900 RPM and 600 RPM. At 1200 it was still far too noisy, but once switched to 600 it became virtually silent (you will never hear it from a foot away) and yet still wafted lots of cold air into the case. That is a total result. It saves me jimmy rigging wires for 7v (which it would still be too noisy at, IMO and would mess up the LED button). However, the LEDs do switch off and they have a memory on them, so you don't need to do it each time you disconnect the power and power it back up (I tested that also). So I literally don't need to do anything at all now. I don't need any more fans either, meaning the mess is pretty much 0. Very happy. It's about time it finally stopped fighting me and gave me some positive vibes I will highly likely bash out the soldering tomorrow, go home Monday for a week and then return with the SSD. Wait for a sunny day, have "one day of suck" wet sanding out the panels and buffing them, then sit back and relax and set up FreeNAS. It also gives me a chance to pull one of the 1tb drives out of the Xbox 1x that never got used. The last 1tb will come from the other NAS once it has been transferred across. Srsly, what a total spaz. How could I have not noticed that?!?!?!
I figured I would do some wet sanding and buffing today. The front and top panels are not gloss so they just need a bath. The side panels were in bad shape, however, and needed the works. I figured cool, I will take out the anger by sanding and buffing loads. And it went very well. I was very proud of myself, given that side had a huge great gouge in it. Took forever to sand out, but hey it came out. I started with 1200 wet, then to 2000 wet and then I usually go to 3000 wet. However, I didn't have any 3000 so I did two runs with Tcut metallic (note metallic, NEVER EVER use Tcut on plastic panels) and then PlastX. PlastX is the secret weapon here. Nothing else I have ever tried is fine enough to make plastic shine without any haze. So I thought cool I will put the panel back on !. Then the crap started. It won't stay closed because I forgot to fit the U hoops back to the solid metal panel. And, you can't just remove the panel again easily oh no, you have to take the motherboard out because there is a clip under it. So I took it out (the mobo) removed the clip, fitted the U hoops and then put it back together. Only I didn't realise the handle also needs to be bolted into the metal panel so I had to remove the board AGAIN and do it all again. The mesh bits came. So it is literally one more "Session of suck" and then I can do the soldering and get to work with the software.
Session of suck, part two. Sadly for me there is going to be a part 3. The sodding handles. They too need the same treatment, but are much much smaller (thank the lord). I won't bother much with the bottom feet because they will be on carpet so will turn grey any way, but I will do the top ones.
*furiously scribbles down notes* It's tempting to mod my G4 Quicksilver into a modern Hackintosh powerhouse... But I really want to keep it stock! The whole point of buying that machine was to test MorphOS on it, but so far I'm having very little luck... If the innards of your MDD here don't help then I might just bite the bullet and get a conversion kit for the Quicksilver! I can always get a Mac Mini G4 to try out MorphOS This is good info though! My case is in pretty much spot-on condition, but if it's a simple job to give the plastics a cleanup then I might just do that. When you say 'never use T-Cut on plastic panels', I assume you mean 'never use standard T-Cut and use T-Cut metallic instead'?
Part of me wants to get one and then shoehorn this into it: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B02/intro.html Still technically PPC... though feck knows what i'd do with a Power9-based system.
Yes. I was taught this lesson many years ago. Alienwares are painted. The black one is not, it is just clear coated but the others (including my green one) were all painted, then clear coated. Mine was refurb and had some scratches on and I foolishly used Tcut. Bad idea, it hazed really bad and I was certain I had ruined it. then a mate of mine said use Tcut metallic, as it is finer. it's not fine enough to buff perspex though or anything clear, but that is where PlastX comes in. It's for refinishing headlights on cars really, but obviously something so important requires it to be very fine. It also has a petroleum product in it that basically eats off the top layer and removes dirt etc. You can use plastx on acrylic too, so if you ever use plastic weld and you spill it it will get rid of that too. Which was a miracle, as I was sure I had wrecked the acrylic. This thing was battered. I was really annoyed too, because it was obvious he had taken the picture to hide it all. I hate it when people do that. Still, I suppose after wet sanding and buffing out entire cars a computer case is small fry really. Note 1. The QS is ATX format. You can buy a kit from Laserhive. Trust me to get the MDD though which is BTX. However, I am glad I did this as I have never seen a successful conversion into anything but a mac. Note 2. It is finished. I did the soldering earlier, wired everything up, went to fit the drives and cock up number one was apparent. The drive wires (SATA and power) hit the fan and neither would work. So I had to rotate one 90', drill it again and that is now fitted with the boot SSD and the first 2tb. I will do the other one tomorrow or something. Right now I have assembled it all and it is formatting the 2tb via the Adaptec card. I suspect that may take a while. In the meantime I've created a FreeNAS USB stick.
Had a bonus today. I had to take two parcels to the PO for drop off. They wouldn't fit in any bags so I used mum's granny trolley. When I dug through it I found a rucksack I bought for holiday (but never used) and in there was my fly screen stuff. So I can make a filter for £0. Instead of the £15 or so for a Demiflex. Won't be as good, but don't really care tbh. I will do that later, and get pics of the finished article. I put FreeNAS on last night, thinking I could set it up without it being connected to the network. I couldn't. Might try that later also.
Done. I installed FreeNAS last night. I had to remove the RAID card for now because you can't boot from it in JBOD so it was freezing at the drive detection bit. FreeNAS is on, but it wants a network cable plugged in to continue and that's a problem right now. Might try and cobble something together later, but the hard bit is done.
WIFI probably wasn't the best way of doing this, but sadly it's the only way. Good thing I am here until tomorrow now. FreeNAS fought me a bit. Every time I set up a home share it was being a pilchard, so I went full share and just logged in as root. So I know what to do now.
Final notes. If you are considering this please read. 1. The GPU will not close in the system. This is because I put the wrong PSU in the wrong place. It is literally the bubbled top of the Delta that stops it going in. Doesn't matter to me because a GPU would be the last thing I need in there. You could easily cut the bubbled bit off though. 2. It would probably be easier to use one better, higher power PSU. However I still love my idea because it was the cheapest (£8.99). 3. FreeNAS was a pain. I tried it as a home share, but nothing I did would make the share show up. In the end I deleted it and replaced it with a proper share. You need to create a pool using a hard drive, then create a Windows share. I didn't bother pissing with users I just stuck to root and my password. No one else will be using it any way. 4. DO NOT cut up the enormous FP header on the Dell. It's bitten me on the ass, because I ripped out the USB and so on wires and now it says "FP header error" even with it plugged in (just the LED and headphone socket). Something I removed somewhere has now forced me to use this connected to my TV FFS. So headless is gawn. One day I might grab a cheap MATX board and throw that in. I will see. Also, don't be sadistic like me and want to do another one.
Yeah for a load of old junk it came out nice. The saga continues however..... I was told that you need an LSI card (forget the model) for FreeNAS. However, I was also told that you could use other controllers, you just need to set the discs up as JBOD. OK, so I got that and followed along. Connect up my Adaptec 5805, set up a test (old lappy drive) as JBOD and exit and boot into FreeNAS. No drive. After lots of searching around it appears that even though they will work and FreeNAS won't whine about ZFS not being present they won't show in the web UI. Meaning, theoretically to me at least (who doesn't know FreeBSD like the back of his hand) I am screwed and limited to two drives (because of the SATA ports on my board, and needing an SSD in one at least). So, given UnRAID is free for 30 days and WILL enjoy all of my hardware I am going to give that a go now. If I wanted a 2 bay NAS I could have bought one for the same price. So it continues for now at least.
I'm using OpenMediaVault on mine. Web UI is a little basic - not as pretty as the FreeNAS UI that's for sure - but functional and it supports the ancient crusty hardware I'm throwing at it. Has a great plugin system and can also run Docker containers (which is far more useful than the plugins IMO).
TBH I don't care what the UI looks like mate really. That looks about a million times better than my old NAS, that's for sure. I tried booting UnRAID but it won't boot. Crashes as soon as it picks up the Adaptec. All I want it to do is see my drives and let me share them. That really is it. Edit. Right I have had a think about it and I think I am just going to leave it as it is. I have removed the Adaptec card and thrown a test drive onto the spare SATA for now (just some old lappy drive) and ran through the pool/share again and it worked first time. Right now my old NAS is running a 1tb (not even close to full) for movies (which I hardly ever even watch) and 240gb for music. If I add a 4tb to this (and the 2tb that's in there) then tbh that is more than I will ever need. £12. Annoyed at myself, but I can take that.
