Gadgetory

okay guys so part of my project with the server storage upgrade is that I'm going to be adding a remotely located server however I've run into well it's just a minor hiccup but I thought it'd be an interesting tip so I need to take this LSI 92 48 I raid card and I need to quickly copy all of the essential data that I'm going to be doing nightly synchronizations from this array the the 8 by 3 terabyte array from my Windows Home Server so I don't want to do that first sync over the Internet so what I want to do is I want to install that other raid card in here and then install the other drives in here so that I can do a do a quick copy so the challenge is that this motherboard only has two PCIe 16x slots however based on some quick math PCIe 1x 2.0 is good for 5.0 gigabit per second which is plenty for this PCIe 4x ethernet card so what I really want to do is install the 4x card in that 1 X slot so if you guys know about PCIe you'll know that the first pins here these guys right here that's all your power and whatnot and then everything from here on is data so the only thing that makes this a 1x lot and this a 16x slot is how many pins it has for bandwidth so some other board manufacturers are considered enough to leave these edges open here so that you can install 4x or 16 X cards in a 1x slot and they will work however my Intel Board in my home server doesn't have the ending open like that so to give myself the option of installing higher end cards in there what I have to do is and I'm hold on give me SEC guys so I've had a few promising ideas guys I got to keep my voice down baby sleeping but it looks like none of them are going to be applicable to those say the system that's installed already the motherboard that's in the case so idea number one was melting so I used my torch to keep off the tip of this blade and then slice through the back of it so that it would accommodate a bigger card now the problem with melting is that I had issues with some of the melted material moving this way towards the pins that's going to be a real big problem because you don't want to lose any pins from a PCIe 1x interface so I scrapped that idea next idea was seeing if I could cut through the plastic with a razor blade and slice it either side the problem with that one was that it required far too much force and if you slip with a razor blade you cut a bunch of traces and gonna be bad all around an idea number three was to use a dremel use a cutting wheel on a dremel to grind through the back this one looks like it's probably going to work but unfortunately with the other motherboard which is stalled in a case with things in the way you can see I can't get the Dremel in the street and I don't have one of those extension bits so uh I'm stuck for now but thanks for coming along with me for the ride guys so I decided to pull the board out and we're just gonna go for it um I haven't actually tested it successfully on my test board yet we're just going to use the Dremel and file out that back piece and see if we could install this PCIe 4x NIC card into the PCIe 1x lot more right now it's yeah won't fit so it'll run at 1x speed but pcie 2.0 1x and this is a 2.0 card isn't 5 gave it per second so we should be ok alright so I did one run at it with the Dremel and cleared all the debris out hopefully you guys can see this but it's mostly clear one of the pins that top-right one seems to have broken in half while I was Dremel about it looks like it should still make contact so it should still be able to pass data and it should be ok all this is in theory of course I don't recommend doing this home folks so I do have to take another pass at it because it's not quite clear I wish that my Dremel could run in Reverse because then instead of throwing all the gunk into the slot it could throw it out but such as life so I'm going to take another run at it and I'll see if I can fit the card in actually the card fits in now so let's just find out if it works here we go thrown it back on the server lo and behold it works there's my four gigabit network adapters there's my network adapter installed in the bottom PCIe 1x slot and there's the network cables all plugged in so I've got my Adaptec raid card here for testing my Rika raid card that my actual storage runs off of and then my 4 port NIC all installed yay and all hopefully with enough bandwidth for what I'm using them for don't forget to subscribe - tech tips on also don't forget to wear appropriate safety glasses whenever working with a dremel I could hit the switch I could in this video