I sent my Dell 7820 server off to a friend’s office (it’s currently running proxmox and will be hosting some services like vaultwarden) and since my NAS used to be hosted there, I needed a way to bring it up online so I can use it again.
I had an unused m720q 8700T lying around and I thought I could probably jig something up with that.
I removed the top cover and instead used the Rambo DVD plus vesa mount cage. This gave me enough clearance to route the sata cables. I don’t have a front panel anymore, but the unit is gonna be 24/7 and headless anyway so there’s really no need for that.
I just used a 4 port sata card I purchased a few years ago, as well as a 5-bay drive chassis. I supplied power to the chassis using an sff power supply I got some years back; I was initially using a segotep power supply but it doesn’t seem to provide enough power to the two 12tb drives that I have.
The power supply is switched on by an ATX power supply distributor I bought from cytron (it uses an ATX psu to export the 12v 5v and 3.3v lines into usable suitable for electronics) and mounted on the chassis via strong magnets.
The setup is a bit sus but it does work. I am able to access my services through tailscale, and there doesn’t seem to be any drive errors reported.
The real test would be when unRAID does it’s parity check tomorrow. I don’t foresee any issues though.
The wonky setup needs to be properly fixed though. I still have that 8-bay NAS chassis that only accepts micro ATX boards. But the qd4 I bought is so unreliable I don’t want to trust my data with it.
I guess I can use back my 2600 mini itx but I’d be lacking memory and the performance won’t be as good. I guess I can just wait until I find a nice micro ATX NAS Mobo for that chassis.
