Propellerhead Gear: Cascade of Parts

When the "Blackbird" went in for refitting (at least that's what they call it in the Navy), it cut loose a stream of parts. For us poor working stiffs, we don't just put them out in a warehouse, or the deserts of Arizona. No, we look at good stuff laying around and decide how they will be of greatest value to us. As for the Core 2 Quad Q9550 "Yorkfield", it's going on the auction block....literally. Apparently, they still fetch somewhere around $100 on eBay so that's where it's going to go to knock down the cost of the upgrade even further! The other stuff, not as much. Although, I've found that the price of RAM is now pretty darned good, it's worth more to me to keep the 8Gb (4 x 2Gb) that was in that machine for use, than to sell it at the somewhere between $40 and $60 that it sells for, although, they do free me up to sell the 2 sticks of 4Gb that they free up (explanation a little later). 

As for the graphics card, it's my intention to whip up a little something in the oven! It was on-and-off glitchy, giving artifacts and sometimes would completely freeze up the computer. This usually means that the processor onboard is having some issue, and given that it's an ATI Radeon HD 6770 vs. an nVidia; that probably means a problem with the BGA solder joints vs. something internal. So, I'm going to take the plastics off of it and bake it in the oven to see if I can get that fixed. 

What about the motherboard? Some of you might remember that I have another Cooler Master Centurion case. In this case, it's the "5", not the newer "590" that's home to the Blackbird. You might even remember me at some point talking about it being a XP box, so that I'll have something to look at when one of my clients who still uses that OS calls with some issue. Also, it houses my wife's sewing machine software which is only XP compatible. The other night, while the new Blackbird load was doing updates, I moved her software over to my "loaner" laptop which runs XP for the same reason. This eliminated the need to have an XP desktop, since I could just pull the ThinkPad Z60t out as needed. Of course, this left me with a perfectly good case with nothing to do....... what to do? Co-incidentally, I also have a stack of good PATA drives (3, 160Gb, and 1, 500Gb). I know, it just makes 980Gb, but hey, a terabyte here, a terabyte there..... 

ACTUALLY, what I've decided to do with all that is to try out  FreeNAS! TA-DA! 

And so is born the Spartan, named after the C27J that originated as a possible replacement for the C130 Hercules. Remember my old file server.....the Hercules? It's been promoted to the Spectre these days, but see the connection? Anyway, it's my intention to take those drives stuff them into the Centurion 5 case.

......combine all that with the old board out of the Blackbird, and see if I can learn a thing or two about FreeNAS. Despite the lack of onboard video which would have been optimal, it does have 2 Ethernet ports which make it a good candidate for server duty. On top of which, the 8Gb of RAM give it the resources necessary to run ZFS if I decide to go that direction. I'll also reuse the one good Patriot PS-100 SSD out of the WHS 2011 server as it's boot disk. So, another "cascaded" part meets here to become part of my file server testbed.