So a couple rackmount cases I ordered came in yesterday (Supermicro SC811‘s, 1 IDE, 1 SCSI). They’re pretty fucking awesome, despite me not having a rack for them. The only real complaint I have is that they didn’t come with the user’s manual (minor pain), and that the blower fan on the IDE case is louder than a fucking vacuum cleaner. The exact same model fan in the SCSI chassis is a lot quieter; I’m assuming it’s something random like old ball bearings.

I guess the other random problem is that I had to take one of the CPU fans off because it got in the way of the crossbar. Not too big of a deal really, since the chassis has those fucking massive blower fans, and the now fanless heatsinks were my nice copper ones anyway.

Today the drives I ordered came in. They were marked as SCSI-FC, and I thought they used a SCU-80 connector (so I could slide them into the shiny SCSI backplane on one of those cases), but apparently FC is something completely different. The drives themselves are old Seagate Cheetahs with (FC-AD connectors), and I probably won’t be able to get any use out of them for a long while. Hell, I still don’t completely understand how the FC infrastructure works, and how little of it I can get away with and still have it working. From the looks of it though, it’ll cost me at least $100 to get the necessary components, and for that price, I might as well just buy some more PATA/SATA drives.

Peh.