So There Was This Computer Case on Craigs List......

This could be a title for my spare time! To me, Craigs List is like a flea market or garage sale that never closes. Living on the outskirts of a sprawling metroplex like Dallas makes it both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you can just about find anything, on the other, it can be just about anywhere. In the case (unintended pun), of this case.... it was in the far northwestern reaches of Carrollton! If it wasn't such a phenomenal deal, I would've let it pass. But it was $25 (the guy let me have it for $20 since he gave me bad driving directions), and I was headed up that way to go to IKEA to pick up things for my son's room anyway, so..... after a Saturday morning of daughter soccer, and a funeral, I found myself driving up to Frisco.

Did I forget to mention that it's huge? Oh yeah.... it's really big! There are 4, 5.25" bays, on top of 2 drive cages that hold 4, 3.5" drives each. And if that's not enough, you can actually order another drive cage to replace a fan that sits on the floor behind the bottom one, or move the bottom one back in case you want to put a big water cooling "rad" up front. The possibilities are pretty much endless. As it sits, you can put in 8, 3.5" regular HDDs, plus install one of those 5 in 3 cages in the 5.25" drive spaces, giving a total of 13 hard drives, AND still have room to have an optical drive as well! This case can be configured to hold a extended ATX motherboard, plus up to 3 water coolers of various sizes and just about as big of a PSU as you can possibly imagine. What are my intentions for this monster?

Although I don't have room for this, I've outgrown the little Silverstone PS07 that the "Spectre" file server calls home. As it sits right now, there are 4 hard drives in it. For a FreeNAS machine running ZFS, 4 drives is pretty much a minimum. As I become more serious about building a really secure storage solution, I need to do better than a bare minimum. Although, processing power isn't a "thing" with these sorts of builds, other issues, such as ECC RAM is, plus ZFS likes a lot of it. Although older server RAM is cheap and plentiful, it's expensive to buy in higher density sticks than current spec RAM in the. These higher needs require more motherboard real estate, thus requiring full sized ATX boards vs. mATX style. 

Based on my research so far, it appears that, what I need is something along the lines of this Supermicro X7DCL as depicted above. Although, I don't have a need for the dual CPU sockets, everything else on boards of this type is just about perfect:

• 6 RAM sockets that'll take ECC
• 6 or more SATA connections
• Dual Ethernet adapters
• PCI-e AND PCI expansion slots

The only thing that doesn't fit? The form-factor, of course! There-in lies the use of another big PC case. This time, it's a Fractal Design XL R2. You might have concluded that the "XL" stands for extra large,  and you'd be right. This version is the second revision or "R2" of the original design. This series from Fractal is of the quiet variety with sound deadening foam everywhere and a solid door which is perfect for a constantly running file server. That it was bought for $20 is just icing on the cake! OK, a little more than just icing since the original retail price ran north of $150! The only "fly in the ointment" will be where am I going to put this thing? It's predecessor, the Silverstone PS07 cased server lived inside of my "side-desk/credenza". However the XL R2, is a 22" tall by 22" deep case, so that's kind of a big question. At least, now that I'm not sharing the office, there are more options!

The Good, The Bad ...... and The Ugly

By now, most of you have figured out that I'm given to Clint Eastwood quotes. To me, this image is the one that I'll always have in my head as the quintessential Eastwood look! I'd also like to image that it's the look on my face (minus the little cigar of course) when my latest foray into Craig's List went slightly awry. 

I've been plotting over the course of the last few months (ever since I finished the bedroom HTPC aka "Viking") to shuffle my TV situation. That was the tipping point of dissatisfaction with my various displays. First of all, my main (living room) A/V system TV only did something like 1366 x 768 which, as you can see, isn't up to HD standard, plus the bedroom TV turned out to be somewhat less than that. Something in the 800 x 600 range....which is pretty pathetic by today's standards, and absolutely horrific if you are trying to watch anything HD through the internet. So, after selling off a bunch of stuff, fixing various people's computers and such, I had somewhere between $300 and $400 extra. How, I've been keeping an eye on a 42" Sony at Costco which barely fit in the opening in my cabinet, but it's $500 or so. One evening last weekend, I was scanning the local Craig's List ads when I came across an ad for a six month old 40" Sony LCD about 30 minutes away. They wanted $300. I offered $250. They took it. We met at a neighboring town, made the transaction, and that was that!

No, I did not get held up or anything like that ... in a manner of speaking, anyway! As any Craig's List veteran would do, I agreed to a meet in a public place in broad daylight. The only issue was that since this is a complex electronic device, I couldn't test it ......in the parking lot of a convenience store! So, I figuratively held my breath till I got it home, got the TV out of the bedroom, moved the living room TV to the bedroom, connected it all up, cleaned up all the TVs, put the "new" one in place, connected it......and fired it up .....to be greeted by a ....black screen..... I got the green "power" LED, but no picture! I tried a variety of things, but still "no joy"! 

If I'd of had those people there with me; this is what it figuratively would have looked like! Fortunately, I don't have a pistol, or a cool looking zarape' either. For the next several days, I contemplated the problem in silence. I finally even told my wife about it, and she felt so bad for me that she said I should go to Costco and buy the new one. But of course, that's not how Frugal Propellarheads roll. One afternoon, I pulled it out and turned it on and gave it a few strategic whacks on the sides and various places on the bad until I was rewarded with a picture (for a little while), which confirmed my suspicion that the people didn't intend to sell me a bad TV, just one with a loose connector. In the meantime, I had emailed them about the problem and they had even replied, but none after that first one. So, finally on Sunday afternoon, I got out my tools, opened up the back (many, many screws), pulled ALL the connectors and reconnected them. Sure enough, it worked, and has continued to do so ever since.

Is there a moral to this story? Some Frugal Propellerhead lesson to be learned? You bet! You aren't going to win every time. However, if you are prepared and willing to do what's necessary, things mostly come out OK, the vast majority of the time. Do I think those people are "bad" and tried to pawn off a broken product? No, not really. I'd bet that it was in fact working OK for them, but when it came down to it and had a problem, they didn't want to take a hit to stand behind it. After all, it's not their "business", just something they didn't need any more. Once the money was handed over, the risk was mine. If you aren't willing to deal with that, then do your shopping at Best Buy.

Lightning Strikes: The ThinkPad T61

NO, we didn't suffer a lightning strike. We had a bit of a lightning upgrade though. About a month ago, I was trolling the local Craig's List ads and can came across a poorly written ad for a ThinkPad. And of course, this peaked my curiosity, so I fired off an email to the seller to see what it was about. He turned out to be a recently graduated high school kid looking to sell all his various pieces of computing gear so he could by a Mac before heading off to college. The ThinkPad was a machine that he didn't use which had belonged to his uncle who had given it to him when he (the uncle) upgraded. In fact the kid, who was at work wasn't even sure what it was, but thought it was a T410. Therefore, at the listed $80; I jumped at it. Well....after several twists and turns (fairly common for Craig's List), I was finally able to meet him and it turns out that he was waaay wrong! It was a T61. Although, clearly NOT anywhere close to a T410, it was still a very good price for a T61 in nice condition, so I bought it. At which point, it promptly went under my workbench because I didn't have a use for it.

As most of you are aware, computers on a network need names so they can be identified. And given my geeky nature, I use military aircraft names for this. I also try to use groups which have similar names which roughly are associated to their function. They range from fighters for our daily use laptops like the very advance F22 "Raptor" for my X300 to the rather utilitarian C130 "Hercules" for the WHS file server built from old parts. The new T61 has been named the "Lightning II" for the F-35 depicted above. It replaces my wife's Z61m "Eagle". I know the logical progression would have been for this new machine to be the "Raptor" and the X300 to be the "Lightning II", but I didn't think about it then and will just have to live with this little screw-up in logic!

 

I've been VERY busy doing client work for the last month, so it mostly sat there under the bench, but when I did have a few minutes to look, it left me very impressed. It was in such nice condition that the original product "features" sticker was still on the lid. It really looked like a nice high-end corporate machine that just sat on somebody's desk for 3 years then surplused.....and I'm willing to bet, that's exactly the case. I did an image restore and it ran very well afterward, but mostly it just sat. Periodically I thought about what I wanted to do with it. I thought about replacing my Z61m "Tomcat" with it, but that seemed a waste since that machine sits in the closet most of the time given it's status as a "mobile studio" for a photographer that doesn't do much outside work. Plus, I had decided that I wanted to put an SSD in it since older machines of this type are really great candidates for the gains seen from this type of upgrade. Although SSDs have come down greatly in price, bigger ones (larger than 128Gb) are still pricey for someone like me. 

Then, one day I got my "marching orders". This came in the form of the wife walking in to the office and telling me that she needed another machine, so she could take one to school with her. Her new school district doesn't issue laptops and she wanted to have something that she could use there and not be tied down at her desktop. She wanted ot know if I had any ideas, at which point, I pointed under the bench and smiled. So I told her about the T61 which just "needed" an SSD for which I was given the approval to buy, then and there! Of course, this was what the last post was about, when I got lucky and came across the 240Gb Sandisk Extreme for $155 on Amazon's "Deal of the Day". Less than a week later, the Windows 7 running, ThinkPad T61 "Lightning II" was up and running. 

Total spent: $235 for a "Penryn" C2D processored, WSXGA+ (1680 x 1050) paneled, 240Gb SSD, DVD+RW optical drive equipped laptop that I guess originally cost close to 10x what I spent! I'm going to say that I'm pretty happy with the build and believe that lightning did indeed strike on this one. But most importantly, my wife is VERY happy with her "new" and VERY fast machine!