RESTORATION

Scannerman said:

These fans run so cool you can keep a glass of milk chilled overnight with them. I actually tested this!

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I prefer to keep it in the 'fridge, how do you keep it chilled in a 75F room with a fan?

Put down my milk, ate my cookies, got lazy and laid the fans on their side pointed to the milk, and went to bed. The following morning I picked up the glass and it was cold. Not just slightly cool, but cold. I drank the milk and like a good boy went back upstairs and put it in the sink.

Scannerman said:

Put down my milk, ate my cookies, got lazy and laid the fans on their side pointed to the milk, and went to bed. The following morning I picked up the glass and it was cold. Not just slightly cool, but cold. I drank the milk and like a good boy went back upstairs and put it in the sink.

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I'll bet the light goes on in that room when you open the door too!

I think you mistakenly put your computer in the 'fridge and just don't realize it!

Well, there was no frost accumulating on the glass but I suppose having the computer room in the basement helps. These are excellent fans. High RPM. Perhaps not the quietest fans but certainly not as loud as industrial server fans. I mean, a fella can experiment right? Missus wouldn't like it if I put the computer in the fridge. I have been relegated to the basement.

In case you suggest that I use the basement fridge. The missus already has dibs on that too. She's a yarn fiend.

Okay, so enough of this tom foolery. The next step is getting this array (for a lack of a better word), cluster? back into the case.


It doesn't look like much but it does what it's supposed to do: Hold all my spinners in place. These are enterprise drives, built to last, with the possible exception of the two Toshiba NAS drives which are also built to last.

The drives need to be pulled and cleaned off because they're full of dust. As you can see, the cage has mounting holes for a wire mesh but I get better air flow without it. I already have a fan installed inside the case (in addition to the intake fan in the front) that blows air directly across these drives through the slots where the runners go. The cluster is powered through a Molex/SATA cable that runs directly to a 1000 WATT Platinum certified power supply.




From left to right we have two helium filled Toshiba 3TB drives, two Toshiba N300 4TB NAS drives, and one helium filled 12TB Seagate EXOS. This amounts to a hefty little chunk of metal once all the drives are in place. It fits in my case like a glove. In addition to this I have external hard drives and of course, NVMe. So that puts me at around roughly 30 or so drives. And yes, this system board can handle it.

And so it is back in the case. Time to check to see if all the drives show. First things first, the original drives. . .


Hmm.. looks like my daughter's old monitor could use a cleaning. The drives on the HBA cards are showing just fine. Drives 0, 1, 2 have not been connected yet because I robbed the card for my X299 build. All in due time.


Yes, they all appear to be in working order. EXCEPT for my Seagate EXOS. Time to go check that one.

Anyway, here's the cage, tucked away nice and neatly in the case. I'm thinking I accidentally connected the SATA data cable for the E-SATA to the EXOS drive. No damage done there as there wouldn't be any load on the cable. I'm also considering removing the USB expansion sitting in front of the PSU as I don't use it anyway and it would likely have better use in the X299 build.

Silly me. It wasn't that the drive was disconnected or wrongly connected. Intel IRST won't see that drive because it is on the second stage which is strictly AHCI. That is how I wanted it because it's my backup for all my archives. Hence it being 12 TB. Old men tend to forget things. For example, I was wondering where my two 10TB Helium filled drives went. Well, they're in the first stage, in the sleds. Duh-huh. Once you start going over two dozen drives it gets challenging to keep track. lol


And here they are. . . My 10TB Heliums (among others).


and the 12TB shown here as Disk 10.

Anyway, here's the cage, all tucked away nicely in the case. looking like it belongs there like it should. There's still SATA left to hook up as evidenced by the cables on top the cage. I removed the USB expansion as I have ample enough of it already. Behind that black cabling with the electrician tape there is room for yet another fan to help cool the spinners BUT . . . There is this huge 200mm fan on the door that will be blowing directly onto all this so I think another fan would be overkill. Pretty much all of this is covered by the door so no elaborate cable management is required. Stay tuned. This is coming soon. :)

Regardless of what may or may not look okay to me, the lowly user, what the PC is seeing can often be another matter. The CPU has a base clock speed of 3.2GHz. I have it back to 4.1GHz on 128GB of Memory. I have no idea why the PC needs to use 9GB of RAM while sitting idle but I'm not too worried about it as I do run a fair share of programs and it only amounts to roughly 7% of the memory.

gunrunnerjohn said:

Just curious, what's the purpose of all the mechanical drives?

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They make my PC look big and bad and scary.

So I disconnected drive #7 because I want to replace it with an Iron Wolf. I have it on order and it will give me an extra 4TB to play around with. I'm leaving in the other two 1TB Seagates (the CC41s) as hybrid drives tend to be finicky and they work fine in this build. Th CC27 is where I keep back ups. That might change. Both logical volumes are in RAID 10. They never give me trouble so I don't mess with them. I wish Velociraptors were still a thing.



After two hours of fighting with my RAM I finally got all 8 banks to show. No idea why it wasn't registering. CPU temp is a bit high but it will come down once I get the door back on the case. Once the door is on I'll be able to direct the airflow upwards toward the CPU and graphics card. 37℃ isn't horrible but 32℃ looks better. System board temp is high because I didn't have the RAM fans on yet.

looking good
i also use Tosh HDD's as backup drives
but i am switching to NVMe .. slowly ..

best of luck Steve..

XxXxX said:

looking good
i also use Tosh HDD's as backup drives
but i am switching to NVMe .. slowly ..

best of luck Steve..

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I'm slowly going in that direction also. Ironically, just last night I was reminded of why it was good to have copies of my data that was originally on a 4TB SSD. The drive wasn't even two years old and it simply cratered. No good reason. That's one thing about silicon : it either works or it doesn't. Nothing to repair. Speed is convenient, sure, but once those cells are spent the drive is done.

It's a bit hard to fit the whole PC into my lens in a crowded computer room but I thought I'd take a snapshot for a bit of a progress report. I would have put the back panel back on if it weren't for the fact that I need to replace an SSD that sits inside it. Perhaps I'll just skip the SSD for now. 4TB SSD's are expensive to replace. Another irony is that two days ago I ordered a 4TB Iron Wolf CMR drive. My guess is that it will last twice as long as the SSD did at half the cost.


You can get an idea of how large this case is by comparing it to the full sized Dell Studio XPS 435T (which was deemed a full sized tower in its day) beside it, on the right. The SATA data cable and power cable on top the metal enclosure (next to the power supply) are where my Iron Wolf will be graciously sitting. It won't need a sled. The flat cable running to the GFX card will act as a safety strap to hold the drive in place. I know this works because I've done it before. Once this 80 lbs of data processing is back in its nest it isn't moving anywhere any time soon.

The metal enclosure with the five drives absorbs heat quickly and a fan (hidden on the right of it) blows directly into it. In addition to this a 200mm directional intake fan hangs on the hinged door, bringing in huge amounts of cool air where it is forced upward through yet another 200mm fan at the top of the case.

Thought I would take an angle shot of the fan that keeps the 5 spinners in the enclosure cool. Sill debating installing a pull fan on the other side knowing that a huge intake fan will be blowing right up against those spinners anyway.


Thought I would test my idea with a Barracuda 2TB XT drive. These drives were developed for servers and commercial use. I haven't been able to get much clarity on whether they're CMR or SMR and there is conflicting information concerning these drives online. I'm guessing the older ones are indeed CMR, having a 64MB cache and more specifically deigned for servers although they are not Enterprise drives. IF anyone happens to know for a fact whether they are CMR or SMR please let me know. At any rate I hope to be replacing the XT with an Iron Wolf at some point.



I own two of these Barracuda XT drives, barely used and I'm considering using them in a RAID configuration in the X299 build. They are faster than the Iron Wolf I ordered but the 4TB Iron Wolf will not be in a RAID array. For me, it will be an experimental drive. At least it will be CMR for sure.



This is an example of my internal cable management. I realize it looks pretty sloppy but there is a madness to this method. I can access everything quite easily when the door is open when the door is closed only the RAM fans and the cooler with all the nifty blue lighting show. This affords me the benefits of both practicality and esthetics regardless of what it may appear to be once the door is open. Hiding these cables will only make the job that much more difficult when I need to access them. This is not a typical build. There are over two dozen drives in this PC.



That doesn't mean I can't enjoy my own version of RGB as illustrated here. You've already seen the blue. Here's the red and green. On my work station that AA means "all systems go" everything checks. Provided that I leave the shroud off the door fan I can actually read the Q code logger without even opening the door simply by reading it through the blades of the fan, which is remarkably easy to do. I haven't yet decided on whether I want to make use of that extra USB 2.0 header. This PC has an incredible amount of USB connectivity, which is a good thing for a work station.

It is a shame that I cannot use Thunderbolt in this build as the optimum placing for my graphics card completely covers PCIe slot where Thunderbolt has to be. The system will not see the card unless it is in Slot #2 which is completely blocked by the graphics card. I can move the graphics card but then this will compromise the performance of the card so no matter what I do with it there is a trade off. The X299 has a similar problem but I can place the graphics card in different slots on that board without penalty. A riser cable will result in compromised performance and plus it just looks ugly. I'd rather take my chances with the X299 build.

So the Iron Wolf came in yesterday and I can't help feeling like maybe I got jilted. I really expected it to be a lot more chunky for a 4TB CMR drive but maybe that's how they're made these days. I knew right away when I picked up the box that something didn't feel right. It felt too light for a full size (3.5") hard drive and the only drives this size I recall being so light were the horrendous Seagate slimline SMR drives that Seagate was infamous for. Sure enough, I pulled it out of the box and it looked almost exactly like a slim job. I'll be doing more research on this drive just to make sure it is what it says it is. If I got duped well, that's what I get for buying from New Egg. Not my first rodeo ride with them. This drive is so light I can hardly believe it still uses the old Conventional Magnetic Recording.



Just for good measure I thought I'd toss in one of these Gen4 sticks of NVMe. I won't be able to enjoy the benefits of Gen4 speeds on an old X99 system board, but it was cheaper than any of the Gen3 sticks in the store and old guys like me need to be willing to try out new things now and then. It would be interesting to see if this NVMe lasts five years.



So now the beast is literally fully loaded. It still has a couple of open SATA ports and plugs to match but I need room for my external drives to register in Disk management so I'll leave well enough alone for the time being.



The Iron Wolf looks good where it sits and I had a moment of inspiration on making a clip to hold it in place that acted like a bail but it really isn't necessary as this thing weighs around 80lbs fully loaded so it won't really be going anywhere. I'm not worried about jiggling the drive much. I just realized I forgot my work lamp inside this mess. Can you spot it?




The retainer plate for the PCIe is back on and as near as I can tell it's time to put the door back on this unit. In a couple of years I'll give it another going over if I'm still alive and kicking but I'm really starting to look forward to my next project and that one is going to take a while.




I hope some of you are enjoying this. If anyone has any questions related to PC building, PC restoration, or hardware dating from 1999 to 2020 I'll try my best to answer based on my personal experience and knowledge.

According to Seagate official specs, your new 4TB drive weights a little under 500g (1.08lb), but it is indeed CMR. Hopefully they cannot lie at an official document, can they?

spapakons said:

According to Seagate official specs, your new 4TB drive weights a little under 500g (1.08lb), but it is indeed CMR. Hopefully they cannot lie at an official document, can they?

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/ironwolf-18tb-DS1904-20-2111US-en_US.pdf

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That was my thought as well and I'm quite sure Seagate isn't pulling any stunts here, but then there are the middle men. It was just that the drive seemed incredibly light compared to all the CMR drives I've handled in the past. Perhaps this is a feature of Iron Wolf. I've never owned one or even handled one before. Come to think of it, I've never even repaired a PC sporting an Iron Wolf hard drive. I'm trying out new things.

Probably older drives needed more platters to achieve the same capacity and they were considerably heavier. Newer drives require less platters.

spapakons said:

Probably older drives needed more platters to achieve the same capacity and they were considerably heavier. Newer drives require less platters.

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Very likely so. I've heard about this before and I have seen this with other hard drives for years. I'm just not accustomed to seeing such a difference in the weight and stature of a hard drive that is supposed to be CMR. I have many CMR hard drives, even 4TB CMR drives, some of them only a couple of years old and they're all much heavier than this drive. They also tend to be much thicker than this Iron Wolf drive.