Athena Backplane 3-year Update

[MVC]

I'm finally getting around to upgrading the storage in my server and I've got to post this pic :) The storage in this machine has been in service for just over 3 years without any changes (I did swap out the motherboard, CPU, and GPU last year). And, the pic shows what 3 years of inattention leads to. All the drives in this machine work fine, amazingly. When I pulled the first one I couldn't believe I hadn't been having problems, but the 8 drive array I set up in February of 2006 was still going strong--I'd just ran out of storage space.

Anyway, if anyone was thinking about buying a backplane, I can definitely attest to the durability of the Athena units. You can abuse them (or ignore them) and they'll keep right on working. (Note: after 3 years I'm also going to swap out the fans in the Athena units along with the case fans, but once this thing is back together I'll probably ignore it for another couple years.) And, if anyone is interested, the original thread is here (http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=441534).

[henzo]

Crusty man, I need to get a hotswap RAID supported sata backplane for sure now lol. Let the inattention BEGIN!

[MVC]

yeah, I almost couldn't believe how bad it was once I got it torn apart. But, I'd had other machines to play with over the past 3 years and since this one kept right on working....

Anyway, I've got the new fans in, and the machine boots. One of the new Noiseblocker fans is making a running water sound, but at less than half the noise level of the Sanyo Denki fans I pulled so I'm going to ignore it for the moment. A clean install of the current Ubuntu and I'll be ready to set up a new 4-drive array with 1TB drives and move the data back. I'm only using one backplane this time, reserving the other for an upgrade path later on. That was my biggest mistake the first time--I used all the bays and there was no clean way to upgrade short of taking the whole machine apart. And, if you looked at the original thread, this box is packed, there's very little room to do anything without literally taking the whole thing apart.