The Xeon Hack is Dead, Long Live the Xeon Hack!

Whilst investigating a problem with the Socket 775 to 771 Xeon hack machine I found it would no longer boot, it then would no longer post, and finally would no longer even accept power (indicated on the 3v rail LED)... This was a disaster, I've been sorting out the network at home for the last few weekends, and yesterday morning was meant to be a delve in & fix session (at 830am on a Sunday, this is a feat).

Unfortunately it immediately escalated, the motherboard showed distinct signs of corrosion, which is really strange as it's been in a dry airy room, there looked like (and tasted) like salt condensed on the board... I do wonder if this board had had a life near the coast in former days (it was second hand), and the salt just slowly precipitated out of the fibre glass?

Whatever the reason, there was salt all over the board, I cleaned it all with isopropyl alcohol to no avail, it would not post.

So I stripped it out and went to my junk pile, two other motherboards were already dead, the third... Well I know it works, after a fashion, it's an EVGA nForce 680i SLI board, my previous main workstation board actually... But I retired it for my Core i7, and it had been off with a friend of mine, it has at least one faulty RAM slot too...

Inserting my test Celeron D it came on, and I could run a memory test until it overheated and thermal shutdown occurred... So, I pulled out the Xeon from the hack board and got it into the nForce... Nothing... Dead... But, a BIOS patch later (with a floppy disk!) and everything was working...

So the Xeon went into the EVGA nForce 680i no problem!  4GB of RAM installed in the two working slots, and with new thermal paste I left it soak testing... Everything seems fine...

And this is equivalent (if not better) than the previous board, because I know its history, it's got six SATA headers dual gigabyte LAN... It's actually the perfect little server board, except for the lack of the working memory slots.

A new one of these boards is still like £50, so that was out of the question, I did order a new one from ebay a Gigabyte branded on, which can take up to 16Gb of RAM but only has a single LAN connection, it will have to do.

Until then though, the server is getting re-installed on the EVGA nForce 680i, and I'm going to keep my eyes on ebay for another of these boards to replace the already dead set from my junk pile.

On the topic of drives, I wanted to set up a series of physical mirrors with ZFS, however, I don't have matching drives, so I'm wondering what's the best order to set up the disks...

I feel a little confused as to the best way...