As stated in my last post, I spent Saturday remodding my PowerHac. This consisted of a move of the power supply to the top tray, installation of two 140mm intake fans and a 120mm exhaust fan, and mounting of two PMG5 hard drive cages under the optical drive. Enjoy the pictures and semi-worklog.
I started with a complete teardown of the machine. Pulled everything out.
Then I determined a location above the top tray to mount my power supply, and did some rough tracing of its fan location with a permanent marker. I then made nice lines with a ruler on the other side of the tray, and then cut with a jigsaw. In order to affix the PSU to the tray I reused one of my metal straps that held it in place in its previous location, just cut down a bit and redrilled.
Next I made my plexiglass mounting panel for my 2x140mm Prolimatech blue vortex fans. These are near silent fans, spinning at 1000RPM and moving about 65CFM of air each while only producing about 20db of noise. Test fitting the fans:
Next I made a custom wiring harness for my SATA hard drives in the two Apple G5 cages. I made this harness using the original G5 wiring. I used the adapter I made previously to determine wire colors.
Here we have the finished 4-drive HD cage. All wiring with the exception of the SATA to the bottom drives runs between the two cages.
How I attached the two cages:
Wiring on the back:
Here I have mounted the 140mm fans and reinstalled the motherboard tray:
Here I have the motherboard reinstalled and have begun reinstalling components and doing wiring:
And now my video cards have been reinstalled:
Excess power cables are nestled around the optical drive:
And with the back fan installed, we are done and ready to fire 'er up:
And now comes the really, really bad part. I knew I needed to test my SATA wiring harness with a multimeter before connecting drives to it. In my haste to get the thing powered up, I only pulled one drive's SATA power connector before powering the machine on. BIG MISTAKE. As much care as I took labeling the wires to each individual SATA plug, I /mixed up the +12V and +5V lines when putting the Molex end onto the harness/ which sent a nice 12 volts in tot he 5v input of all my drives except my OS backup drive. Of all the drives to pull, I chose the least valuable one with the least valuable data. What an expensive lesson. Now I have to buy a new SSD and two new 1TB drives. I may attempt a PCB replacement on the newer 1TB drive, as it actually has a ROM chip on its PCB that I can transfer to a replacement PCB and get the drive up and running, for good really. Currently researching the viability and expected success rate of such a transfer.
I have learned several valuable lessons through my little snafu yesterday:
1) Being hasty never ends well. As much patience as I have putting the machine together, carefully measuring, etc, to mess something like that up is just uncalled for, especially when I had several opportunities to catch my mistake.
2) I should NEVER keep a main drive and backup drive in the same machine. From my research about overvolted drives, I found out that if I ever had a PSU failure that it could take my drives out as well.
The plan now is to replace both 1TB drives with 1.5TB drives, so that I can move the contents of my Media hard drive inside the computer. I will have a 1.5TB data drive and a 1.5TB media drive inside the computer, and two 1.5TB externals for backup of those drives. OS and OS backup will remain internal, as no vital user data is stored on the OS drive (120GB SSD, home folder is on data drive) and I have copies of all my program installers.
That's all for now,
Chance (cnrtechhead)