Eating Crow

Or “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

The short of this is that I’ve been building PCs for years. They are LEGO blocks. You make sure the parts will fit together, and it all just works.

As an example, I “knew” that LGA sockets were for Intel CPUs. Last night I learned that LGA just means the motherboard socket has the pins. PGA means the CPU holds the pins.

How did I learn this? I was researching AMD CPU sockets and learned that the AM4 socket was of the PGA style, while the AM5 socket is of the LGA type.

I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

We run a local data center. It is still a work in progress. We have enough disk space, but not enough redundancy. We have some compute servers, but not enough.

We try to do some upgrade every month, trying to improve things. The last improvement was another node in the Ceph Cluster.

After spending weeks researching, I found a 4 bay NAS enclosure that took Mini-ITX motherboards. This felt just about perfect.

It uses a flex style power supply, which is balanced for the actual load of 4 HDD and a motherboard. 350 Watts is what I went with. Thus, it draws less power than older machines.

Finding a Mini-ITX board was another research hell. What I wanted was MB with 4 SATA 3.0 ports, 1 or more SFP+ ports, one gigabit Ethernet port, at least 16 GB of memory and NVMe support for 512 GB of storage.

I couldn’t find one. I haven’t given up, but I haven’t found one yet.

After searching, I found a Mini-ITX MB with an LGA 1155 socket, 4 SATA2.0 ports, a 10/100 Ethernet Port, 2 DDR3 slots (16 GB), and a PCIe slot.

This might seem low end, but it meets our needs. HDDs only require 3 GB/s to keep up. We would need 3.0 if we were using SSDs.

The 10/100 is useless for moving data, but meets our needs for a management port. All in all, a good choice.

When all the parts arrived, I couldn’t get the MB installed. The fan was too tall. I got a better cooler that was a low profile style. When that came in, I installed the board. It was painfully tight getting everything in. Took me over an hour to get all the cables hooked up just right.

Everything went well until I went to put the cover back on. At that point, I found the cover didn’t fit “because the case had the motherboard too close to the edge.”

I fixed that in the machine shop. Grinders and cut off wheels to the rescue.

Everything goes together.

After everything is configured and running, I slap a drive into the case and it works. Wonderful. Final step? Install the SFP+ network card.

It doesn’t line up. The damn thing doesn’t line up with the slot in the back.

After mulling it over for way to long, I made the cut-out in the back wider and moved the standoffs. Machine shop to the rescue.

Except I had a bad network card. Easily fixed via a replacement. No big deal.

After over a month of fighting this thing, making massive changes to the case. Taking it entirely apart to get the motherboard in, the machine is now in production.

Yesterday the motherboard for an upgrade arrived. The case I bought to hold it had the PCI slot moved over. This looks like it will all just work.

Except that when I go to install the MB, I can’t get it to fit into the case. No big deal, I’ll take this case apart too.

But the board doesn’t line up. It doesn’t line up with the standoffs. It doesn’t line up with the back slot. It doesn’t even line up with the onboard I/O baffle.

At that point, I measured my Mini-ITX board. It should be 170mmx170mm. This board is not. It is 0.8 inches to wide. It isn’t a Micro-ITX nor is it a Mini-ITX. It is some none standard PoS.

I’m spitting mad at this point. I’ll put everything back in boxes until the new MB arrives. When it does arrive, I’ll be able to retire an older box that has been holding this data center back.

Everything now fits.

It wasn’t the case that was the issue with the last build. It was the motherboard. Time to update the reviews I wrote.