I firmly believe it's a man thing in that we're somehow wired (no pun intended) to accumulate potentially useful things that may well come back into some replacement role in the future, and when that eventuality comes about, we can rush to save the day by proudly holding up the decrepit equipment, shouting 'I told you it'd come in useful'.
I have box full of mobo screws, sata cables, molex connections, HDDs, old motherboards, random cable, chargers and more velcro and cable ties than you can shake a shakey thing at. I don't think I'll ever get rid of them. :J
Yep, never want to have the feeling of "I used to own that but threw it out".
But what also happens is "I definitely have one of those but I can't find it, so I'm going to have to order another".
Well, yes, exactly as I felt the other day. As recently as, ooh, only 3 or 4 years ago, I ditched a couple of old 250W power supplies which would have helped with my recent issue. Come to think of it they wouldn't at all since when I did manage to plug a known supply in the results were totally inconclusive.
But there will definitely be a use for all those case screws, odd shaped devices for mounting odd shaped drives, ISA boards for 14K modems, CD Drives, that Iomega zip drive, those 21 Windows 95 floppies...'Good times, bad times, give me some of that...'
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
Well, I'm hoarding for the apocalypse, then I will either sell/barter this stuff for boots, beans and bullets, or I will build a mofo attack vehicle. Or maybe not... just in case, you know.
“Does the red object left of the green cube have the same shape as the purple matte thing?”
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
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
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.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
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.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead