I hold out the hope that Brexit might be a bit more whimpery than the other thing.

Aye, but will be dependent on who's in charge come the actual day.  :-Y

Anyway, here's a ridiculous thing about my backup PC because I knew you're all hanging on my every word, I got a replacement motherboard (different make) and stuffed it and all the working bits in a new case and plugged it in and - FUCK ME! A few minutes of hesitation, wiggle the video cable and reboot - and it all works perfectly. No OS reinstall, no non-functioning devices, no exclamation marks in device manager*, not even anything odd in event viewer. It's as though the Update Pixie, or Sooty, has sprinkled my new build with oofle-dust and Izzy-Wizzy Lets Get Busy it all just works. Backups are back-upping, Plex is Plexxing. 

*well, one, because of shitty Intel AMT which I hope a BIOS update will lose

 

I think Willy wants to get busy with you.

Have you finished the music thing?
I've lost track.

Well, I wanted to be able to leave it alone again for a few years.

...Oh, and it invalidated the Windows license key and 'deactivated' it. But using an old Windows 7 key worked fine.

Got all the bits now but haven't got round to building it yet.

But the tiny little motherboard and case are very cute.

Here they are next to a medium tower case and my size 9 for scale.

 

Teeny.
What was the reason for STX over a NUC or similar barebones "nettop" type device.
Though I know nettops aren't exactly widespread these days.

There are quite a few mini-PCs around from companies like Beelink and AcePC. They vary in spec from very low-powered Atoms and Celerons up to i7 with 16GB tbh. Most come with Windows 10 or a flavour of Android. That's fine, but I also wanted to have at least 2TB of disk space accessible over ethernet (Gigabit) with a further 2TB to back up the main disk. Almost none of the barebones or built boxes allow for additional drives. I could probably do it using external drives plugged into a mini-PC but there's a huge difference between transferring files over a Gigabit link and over a Gigabit link plus a USB port. Anyway, it was all starting to look a bit cumbersome for something I want to sit in view.

The little Silverstone case has room for a couple of 2.5" drives with proper mounting points. The STX board has 2 SATA headers and comes with matching connectors, plus it has an M.2 slot for a third (PCIe) drive to boot from. So I can put everything into one box and hang a little Cyrus DAC from a USB port at the back. I can control the lot with an eSYNiC mini keyboard and use the telly as a monitor.

Gotcha. Thought it would be storage that was the hold up if you didn't want the storage elsewhere on the network.

It's pretty negligible with USB 3 IME.

Talking of gotcha, just made a start at putting the little PC together. The 2.5" drives sit next to each other on the bottom of the case with pre-drilled screw holes and little 'dimples' for positioning. The mobo has risers at each corner that hold it clear above them. There are little riser pin-sets on the mobo with custom clip-on cables taking power and data. They're just 2 cm too short to actually reach the furthest drive  :'-( 

I'll probably have to bodge something now, maybe with some sticky fixer things to sit the drives at 90 degrees to how they should go.

Really? I find that I get a pretty steady  65 to 90 MB/s disk to disk, depending on what else is using the network, whereas to a USB drive it may start around the same but after a few seconds when the cache has gone it drops to a pretty poor 5 to 10 MB/s usually less. And that's with USB 3.

Desktop or laptop drives?

Gotta agree with Smithy. I've got some large USB 3 drives on my server and they get a consistent 80-90 MB/s over my gigabit network. Obviously slower for smaller files. But the bottleneck is usually the read end (card reader, other drive etc) rather than the USB 3 drive. Can't really tell the difference from them being internal drives. I was pleasantly surprised when I first got a proper USB 3 drive, wasn't expecting that speed.

An old drive? Bad enclosure?

It's not something I do all the time since most of my drives are SATA connected. The times I've seen it are the odd times I've copied files - usually whole backed up folders across the network. In this case the USB connected drives would be exclusively 2.5" But that's interesting, because if what you're both saying is correct (which I'm sure it is) it makes my future project for an ultra-cheap NAS more practical with something like the Nano Pi M4.

I suppose my experience could be something as simple as a bad cable and probably assumptions based on crappy USB 3 thumb drives. Whatever, I don't really want additional external drive cases sitting there if I don't have to.

ISTR the the earlier/original iterations of USB 3 were buggy.

So, put the little beast together. Fast, even with a little i3 7100. Got Windows 10 installed and activated pretty quick (once again a Windows 7 key works just fine). Haven't got the accompanying HiFi set up yet but decided to plug in the Cyrus DAC anyway. That involved picking up the tiny PC.

Ooh err, as characters in the Beano often say. As soon as I moved it, the fan noise changed from near silent to helicopter. Checked HWInfo and the temps were OK and the fan speed was steady(ish). Was there a cable interfering with the fan blades? Pretty sure not (there aren't exactly many cables in there) but powered down and checked. No stray cables and the fan was mounted firmly and square on. Mobo nice and tight too; case likewise. Best guess is that the fan bearing is dodgy. Have tried again loads of times with the same result.

Bought the case, fan and power supply from Scan. Haven't used them for years and their customer service has varied from not bad to dreadful and back. About to find out what it's like now.

That's pretty unusual, but I haven't faced a defective fan out of the box. Usually the bearings die in fits and starts after years of hard service (even the cheap ones). Do you know if it's sleeve or ball bearings?