Pod 126

Forgot where I wrote about wanting to wait to build another full computer until AM4+ or AM5, but I decided to build something because i3rd has a maximum output of 2 displays and I was really needing a third. I was thinking of doing an AMD mini-STX build (because by then ASRock released an AMD version of the DeskMini) because it's capable of outputting 3 displays, but with knowing how much i3rd cost, it was a tad bit hard to justify (even if I was going to reuse the storage and possibly the RAM). It also would've kinda thrown a wrench in my plan of building the AM4+ or AM5 system and a Threadripper system (at different times) while using a Nier:Automata theme.

So with the launch of Ryzen 3000 series and the X570 chipset, I began to wait for ASUS to release either their X570 mini-ITX board or their X570 mini-DTX board because of the amount of rear USB ports and such. In anticipation, I bought Thermaltake's Core V1 case because I was wanting to use a spare ATX/EPS power supply instead of buying an SFX power supply to keep the case small. I think it was about September when I gave up waiting and went with Gigabyte's X570 mini-ITX board instead and also grabbed a Ryzen 5 3600 since I was planning on doing a CPU upgrade to whatever the last supported high-core count CPU would be. It took me a while to find the motherboard because the local computer store said they had 4 in stock, but I couldn't seem to find it. Why? Because it was on the bottom shelf and practically shoved all the way back (not front-faced). (Captain Picard or Uncle Iroh facepalm here) To make matters worse, no employee was available for help, so it took 10 or so minutes before I found it.

I did a post test at my friend's because he lives much closer, and it posted just fine. At home the following day, I found out the Core V1's standoffs are just bent pieces of the metal tray, so I had to remove the motherboard's backplate. Oh right, I also grabbed 16GB of DDR4 3200 RAM from the computer store since it was the cheaper option than buying online. For the CPU cooler, I went with Noctua's NH-U9S because it was the largest I'd be able to fit in the case and Noctua's site says the cooler would handle the Ryzen 9 3950X (I think they were out and tested by Noctua at that point). Went with a Sapphire Radeon RX570 because it has 5 display outputs (two DisplayPort, two HDMI, one DVI-D) instead of the three that the RX560 has (DisplayPort, HDMI, VGA) because it'd allow a little more flexibility, even though I'd be using adapters.

"Pod 126" came from my deconstruction of the Pod numbers compared to the Yorha units. It took a while to figure out, and I think I had to do it twice because I didn't save the first spreadsheet where I figured it out. 2B's Pod unit is numbered 042 while 9S' Pod unit is numbered 153, and the way I figured it out was that 42 divided by 2 is 21 while 153 divided by 9 is 17. With 6 numbers between 2 and 9, the multipliers would have to be doubled... A table would make this easier...

Yorha Unit Number	Pod Unit Number	Multiplier
2	42	21
3	60	20
4	80	20
5	95	19
6	114	19
7	126	18
8	144	18
9	153	17

I'm not entirely sure what I did to originally figure it out (I only really remember that the original spreadsheet is larger than the one I have now), but this is pretty much what I came up with. I think when I first did the spreadsheet, I was under the impression that the Threadripper build would be the 8th AMD computer I built for myself, but I think when I was figuring it out again, I ended up with it being the 7th (and consequently, I had to get the corresponding Pod number since I originally was under the 8/144 impression).

Anyway, I had also gotten a couple 3.5 inch drives to replace the 2.5 inch drives from i3rd because the Core V1 case was able to accommodate them (technically, it can handle two 3.5 inch drives and two 2.5 inch drives or four 2.5 inch drives). I also took the ThermalTake badge off the front of the case because I wanted it to look a little cleaner, even if it meant having a weird depression in the front where the badge was. The back of the Core V1 has spots for two 80mm fans, which is a weird decision since there's plenty of space for two 92mm fans instead, but I still filled it out to try to help exhaust the air. I also swapped the stock 200mm fan for Noctua's, but with how the case ended up being, I had positive pressure that ended up exhausting air out of the side intake where the GPU is.

Eventually, SilverStone Technology announced the SUGO 14 case and I was quite interested in it because it allowed installation of one 5.25 inch device, had removable filters on the side panels (the Core V1 has non-removable foam in the front bezel and nothing else for filtration), and had normal motherboard standoffs (or at least much closer to normal compared to the Core V1). After really looking around at it from the images and deciding to replace the Core V1, I preordered it and got it on launch day.

I had to go back to 2.5 inch hard drives since I wouldn't be able to mount any 3.5 inch drives with the optical drive (well, the CPU cooler also prevents this), but it wasn't too big of deal since I also ordered a 2.5 inch 2TB drive for the files and used the old 1TB from Bazett/i3rd for micellany. I had to put the 1TB drive on the front while I finished engineering (and waiting for the MJF 3D print to arrive) the adapter bracket to mount it on the removable side frame next to the CPU cooler since there was enough space to do so.

Unfortunately, after transplanting everyting from the Core V1 to the SUGO 14, Pod didn't boot. I tried borrowing Lie-chan's PSU (which was the same model), reseating the RAM, reseating the CPU, trying one stick of RAM in one slot, but I couldn't get Pod to post. My thoughts were the motherboard, CPU, or PSU since I didn't have any extra on hand, and I decided to head to the computer store with Pod without storage for their diagnosis/repair service. Fortunately, the tech did a basic diagnosis with a different set of RAM and different PSU and Pod booted, confirmed that it was the PSU after the tech put my RAM back in and used a PSU tester on Lie-chan's PSU (I didn't feel like putting Pod's PSU back in when doing my bit of diagnosis). After buying a PSU, I went home and everything was fine, but I didn't think about how the case holds the PSU, so Corsair's PSU was not the best choice because of the large chamfers on the edges. I decided to just make some adapter wedges to make it sturdier, and after a second round, it worked (first sets were bad because I didn't get proper measurements). Also had some of the other employees at the computer store ask about my case, which was kinda cool to incidentally show off a brand new case.

With the new PSU, I decided to try CableMod cables out for the ATX connector because I didn't feel like taking Pod offline to see how Corsair wired their cable to make my own. While the CableMod cable was better than the one from Corsair (in terms of excess length), I ended up figuring out the wiring of it (before using it) and the Corsair cable (after the cable swap) and made my own which would be shorter and less annoying than either. I also did a custom PCIe power cable adapter back when using the Core V1, and then made a custom cable for the Corsair PSU. I also made a custom EPS connector for the Corsair PSU. I think it was sometime after I got the custom 2.5 inch HDD bracket when I made the custom SATA power cables for all the drives, including the two bays in the front.

I only have a 120mm and 140mm fan as the top and rear exhausts so that it's negative pressure, and I was planning on the PSU also be exhaust, but the PSU has a 0RPM mode, so that plan fell through. At least with the airflow being negative pressure instead of positive, the GPU stays cooler now.

I also made a magnetic swivelling cover for the power button that has Pod's name on it because I didn't want to accidentally press it (though I have it set to do nothing in Linux and Windows) and to also be able to have the power on light on because it looks nicer than the power on light on the Core V1.

Without and with magnetic swivelling cover.

Underneath the small hexagon at the top is a 4mm diameter magnet press-fitted into a recess, and another 4mm diameter magnet is double-sided taped (the thin stuff, not the foam stuff) to the inside of the case so it's easy to remove if I decide to remove it for whatever reason.

I also got another NVMe SSD for Windows installation, and GRUB ended up detecting it just fine. One weirdness is that with UEFI/BIOS, I have to have CSM off and not have anything in the boot order because if I choose the Linux SSD, Pod will boot to Windows.

When Ryzen 5000 series was launched, I had the ability to buy the Ryzen 9 5950X that I wanted (since the 5000 series would be the last of the AM4 CPUS), but I didn't and had to wait until mid-February this year before the computer store had enough in stock for me to be able to get one right after work. I was going to run some benchmarks with Phoronix Suite, but I didn't know it needed to download the tests, so I ended up giving up the idea because I wanted the 5950X in ASAP. Though I don't have too much of a comparison, it's still crazy to be able to convert 32 songs at the same time compared to 12. (Song conversion's one of the few things that's multi-threaded that I can use as a loose benchmark.) I was also considering compiling C++abi or something like that for a test comparison (old dependency for FreeFileSync required it before the dependency was changed), but I probably forgot at that point.

I haven't used Pod so much in a way to flex the the CPU that much, besides compiling dependencies when needed, and the "converting my library to OGG" has a bit of a problem. I thought the MP3 gain programme is multi-threaded, but I was sorely wrong when testing it out. The reason for mentioning it is that back in the days where I primarily used Windows, I had used MediaMonkey to apply a permanent volume levelling to all of my songs, and because OGG is gained by adding replay gain info to the tags, I would need to re-gain all the MP3s to "CD loudness" (about 99dB) before converting to OGG. While I don't know how long it would take to do the re-gain of all the MP3s, I do know that the conversion would be quite quick in batches of 32. (I think there's also some weird crashing issue with the gain programme anyway.)

RAM might be the next upgrade later on, but I dunno when that'd be. I could also swap the RX570 for Melty's RX480, but we'll see.

I think that's it, unless I forgot something, to which I'd probably edit this post or something.

Bazett

Not too much to say, so it'll be fairly short.

At some point I decided to have something a little more portable than Triela, and decided on HP's ENVY x360 with the Ryzen 5 2500U (Zen) and 1TB HDD upgrade (256GB M.2 NVMe SSD standard). And while waiting for it to arrive, I was curious on it's performance compared to Melty, and by UserBenchmark's scores, the 2500U was better... Oof. (Since UserBenchmark changed stuff, it seems like the FX-8320 is slightly better? Weird.)

I replaced the 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD (from Lite-On) with a used 512GB Samsung EVO 970, and gave the 256GB NVMe SSD to i3rd for an OS drive. The 1TB HDD was replaced with a 2TB HDD, and the 1TB HDD also went to i3rd for the local copy of my files (the 500GB HDD became a catch-all). I also manually upgraded the ram to 16GB because it was slightly cheaper than what HP was asking for.

For naming, it was a bit tough because there's a "professional" look to the laptop and so I kinda wanted to match that as best as possible. I used AniCDB's search and I think I looked for characters with the suit tag, and then looked through them all. Eventually came upon Bazett Fraga Mcremitz from Fate/hollow ataraxia, and though her appearance was what I was looking for (ignoring additional images), I think there were still results to go through.

Because of Bazett's portability, I used to spend every Friday (or every other Friday, I don't remember now) at a coffee shop to (try to) work on my stories, and then a nearby library later since the coffee shop's internet was really poor.

The ability to fold it is nicer than than I had originally expected (I think I didn't really care), so I can arrange it where the keyboard faces the table to put the screen closer to me (I usually have an external keyboard in this mode) or in either "tent" mode (screen facing in or out) when I have it doing background stuff (such as Windows updates) while on my bed to shed heat a little better. I rarely use the tablet mode since I'm hardly ever in Windows and Linux doesn't disable the keyboard (there's probably ways to make it aware of tablet mode, but meh).

i3rd

At some point ago, something happened to the SD card for the Raspi3, which made the system freeze and it could not properly reboot... I'm guessing something ended up corrupting part of the card. I never remembered to reimage it nor did I really have the motivation to do it, and so it sat as such.

There's been some recent events that have made me kinda wish I had it up, and while I could use Triela (or Shizuma... more on Shizuma later), it's a bit annoying to use a laptop for an extended period of time sometimes... or maybe for me in my room.

I first thought of possibly buying a NUC-like thing from my best friend, but with it's low specs (Atom Z8350 or something and 4GB RAM), I decided it would be worth more to invest in a Chromebox, NUC, or another mini-STX system (I'll get to the first later).

With the lack of options, I decided on the latter and getting something more powerful than the Celery Box (the first mini-STX system). I also put the M.2 NVMe SSD in the PCPartPicker list that I used in the Celery Box, but my other friend pointed out that I wouldn't need it since there's two SATA ports - saves me 80 usd.

I first went with a Pentium G4600, since it seemed to have the best performance per value (at the cost of being able to handle some instruction sets), but toward the end, I changed it to the i3-7100 for those missing instruction sets - it was only 26 USD more (give or take).

Everything else is the same compared with the celery box otherwise - same RAM, heatsink, barebones kit. at least this time if the PSU happens to be missing, I do have a spare.

So with another VESA mount kit and a Logitech MX Ergo, I finalised my order (well orders because I bought the i3 from a different site).

Unlike the Celery Box, it'll run Manjaro, not be a headless system, and have the Wifi/Bluetooth card installed. The MX Ergo will replace the m570 (or whatever the bloody number is), so I'll have one trackball for Mei-chan and i3rd. The Wifi actually will be providing me an 802.11ac hotspot, which will be much faster when I'm trying to grab a song from the file server (or hell, from i3rd itself) than the crappy 802.11g.

Okay, so with the name, I was loosely brainstorming with that other friend, and I wanted to kinda do what I did with the Celery Box. it was a bit tougher, but she suggested doing something along the lines of "Armitage iii" (read as "Armitage the third"), and after a bit of mulling, I came up with "i3rd" (perhaps read as "I third"?) as this is literally the third Intel build for myself and it has an i3 cpu - I love it when she gives me those little sparks that light the flame.

It'll utilise a 64GB 2.5" SSD as the boot drive, and a 500GB hard drive for a more local copy of my files.

i3rd will probably spend most of its time refreshing a page (like the raspi3 was doing), but I'll be glad to have a low power, low heat (and stable) system when I need it.

---

I ended up using an unused M.2 NVMe SSD from a laptop (more on it in another post) as the boot drive for i3rd and added another hard drive for extended capacity (if I needed it). Later on I ended up using i3rd for a semi-successful hackintosh (more on that in another post... probably).

Celery Box

With the frustration of not being able to properly keep the Banana Pis updated (since there isn't really an easy way to update the kernel for ARM), I decided to find something to replace Banpi and CFS. While looking at NUCs, I found a barebones kit from ASRock that I eventually picked because it was the best option out of the bunch.

Besides having to be able to house two 2.5" drives (from Banpi and CFS), it also needed something else for me to boot off of, which was the M.2 NVMe slot. Unfortunately the smallest and cheapest NVMe SSD I could find was 128GB for 80 USD, and for a headless server, that's really overkill, but I didn't have any other choice besides taking up some space on the hard drives, which I didn't want to do.

It also comes with a 802.11ac and Bluetooth (4.x) M.2 card, which I didn't need for it, and I was going to upgrade Triela (until I got everything and realised that it was M.2 and not mini PCIe).

It also takes DDR4 SO-DIMM memory, which was somewhat unfortunate since it's somewhat pricey, and I opted for 8GB in dual-channel, as there wasn't any dual-channel kits smaller than 8GB (are tiny headless servers really that niche? XD).

With the cooler, I was thinking I was going to use stock, but then I found a benchmark of a stock cooler and the Noctua NH-L9i, which I saw that Noctua was better in most cases.

I went with the cheapest socket 1151 CPU (after sorting by price on PCPartPicker) which was the Celeron G3930 since I wasn't going to really need anything more for a headless personal server.

I was a bit worried with having to get a previous generation CPU to be able to update the BIOS so that I could use the G3930, but luckily, I didn't have to do that.

As far as the name, I was kinda thinking about it for a while (and kinda chatting with my friend about it), and I jokingly said "celery box", which eventually ended up sticking in my head when I was trying to talk about the system with her (she jokingly suggested "cele box" at some point, in a sort of weird pun to one of my other friends which goes by "Selly"). While it does kinda sound strange and somewhat out there, "celeron" and "celery" share the first five letters, and since I was installing openSUSE on it, it matches celery's (the actual vegetable) green colour in a way.

This build is a lot of firsts for me, it's my first LGA build (the Intel computer doesn't count since it wasn't for me), it's my first Noctua heatsink (since I'm usually with the people that aren't too fond of noctua's iconic colour scheme), and it's also my first build with an M.2 NVMe SSD.

When I got the parts, I was unfortunately met with a missing power supply, and upon contacting the retailer, I contacted the manufacturer as I figured I would have to do. I still ended up doing the initial build in hopes that I would quickly get the power supply and be on my way, but it wasn't all for naught.

Building the system was surprisingly quick, when I was done, it felt like I missed something for a few minutes even though I didn't, since I was used to building larger systems that requires more work.

While I was used to the socket 775 cover being under the CPU retention bracket, the 1151's cover being clipped in the retention bracket from the top didn't phase me much since I had watched a couple or so Linus Tech Tips videos that showed how to install a similar socket CPU.

Installing the heatsink was quite easy as well (although the bend from installing heatsinks on an Intel CPU mobo makes me uneasy), though it was somewhat unnerving while trying to keep the heatsink and mobo steady as I get the retention screws threaded through the mobo holes. I actually just used arctic cooling's MX-4 instead of noctua's supplied NT-H1, as I found that that Noctua strongly recommends reapplying the compound every three years, and I wasn't up for having the Celery Box being down for an hour or something just to reapply the stuff.

I made a mistake and installed the heatsink before the RAM, which gave me little space to put my fingers on the RAM stick closest to the heatsink, and while I was still able to do it, I decided it would be better the other way around if there was a next time.

The M.2 NVMe SSD was interesting to install, I had to keep the card straight and steady in the slot while I installed the retention screw. While I understand the design gives more board space, it made me miss mini PCI and mini PCIe which I felt were a bit easier to install.

While I was waiting on the power supply, I decided to give Triela's power adapter a try, since it should provide just enough power, but the plug didnt fit into the jack, so I let things be.

I decided to buy the barebones kit from a different retailer if it got too close to the end of the return window, which I ended up doing, and when I got the new kit, I used the power supply from it to check the function of the system before beginning to dissassemble the system and repackage it. (This is where I found out a BIOS update for the G3930 was unnecessary.)

After building the system again (with the new kit), I did a quick post before heading to sleep. After work the next day, I think I began installing openSUSE and I think finding that the UEFI version of MemTest86 wasn't in the repository?

Anyway, I got into MemTest86 and started it up before I went to sleep. when I returned to it the next morning, I found that it had finished 15 or so passes after 7 something hours and that it was relatively close to finishing the 16th, and once that was done, I stopped it to begin configuring openSUSE (unless I installed before I did). Since I could just disconnect the display cable or turn the monitor, I decided leaving it to run overnight was the best option seeing how long Shizuma took to run 4 passes, but I was proven wrong, though it's not a bad thing that MemTest86 ran more than I wanted it to.

I also tried to set up a VPN on it, but after a couple hours or so, I decided to just get the server up instead. with everything configured, I took down Banpi and CFS to retrieve the hard drives and removed Celery Box's motherboard to install the hard drive to the tray.

I spent another couple hours or so trying to figure out why I was having problems with the file server, since I was attempting to transfer stuff via FTP, but eventually I decided to just mount the drive with SSHFS instead... something like that anyway... I also had a bit of trouble with the bittorrent server as well, but I ended up figuring that out.

While it's a sort of shame I don't get to really see the actual speed of openSUSE booting, I at least know that the server's back up within a couple minutes (as in that I can mount the drive with SSHFS).

I've only updated packages once, and I've been meaning to regularly do it, but I've gotten so used to leaving Banpi and CFS as-is that I forget to update - I'll have to create a reminder to update weekly or something.

While using FreeFileSync, it seems like Celery Box is faster than CFS, since it only takes FreeFileSync about a 20 seconds to scan Melty and Celery Box while it took at least a couple minutes for Triela and CFS. Transfer speeds seem faster as well, but without proper testing, it's hard to say if it's the ethernet port speed (the Banana Pi supposedly was half of gigabit even though it was marketed as gigabit), the SATA speed (I don't recall seeing a speed for Banana Pi's SATA port), network placement, and/or some other system spec. (Fun fact: it takes about 30 seconds for FreeFileSync to scan Celery Box and i3rd.)

I ended up sticking Noctua's badge and openSUSE badge on the case, though unnecessary, but it was a good thing since it wouldn't be easy to tell it apart from the i3rd by looking if for some reason they were in the same place and neither had badges.

---

I think I ended up finding the repository for the VPN I use, so after adding the repository and installing the CLI app, I was able to have Celery Box on a VPN like I wanted.

I also ended up setting up a reminder to update Celery Box once a month because I continued to forget to update every so often.

Soldering Station and Protoboard Power 5, Cooler Upgrades 2

While doing a quick thing with the 5.25" to 3.5" bracket (which I'll explain with the soundcard switchboard), I ended up remembering to take a couple pictures of the station itself and such.

The entire station.

The spacer between the board and the fan.

The cables for the dim and bright lights.

So there it is in all it's glory for now.

---

With the cooler upgrades, I remembered something while I was doing stuff with Melty. The Fractal Design fans (both the high flow and high pressure fans) have rubber corners and grip the 6-32 screws that Corsair provides with their Hydro series kits quite well, so there's actually some space left over with their long screws. So while the remaining washers are installed between the head of the screws and the fan, they kinda just float around.

Anyway, I was initially right saying that I used the washers to mount the radiator tighter against the case, and that using the 6-32 x 3/16 screws was another idea I would've implemented had I no other choice. The Corsair screws and threads in the radiator are not the standard/usual 2B tolerance, so utilising 2B tolerance screws (the ones I bought from Fastenal) would open up the threading to where only 2B tolerance 6-32 screws would work.

I think that was all I wanted to cover that I remembered earlier.

Cooler Upgrades

I should've wrote about this first since it happened before the other stuff, but that didn't happen obviously.

Anyway, I decided to upgrade Melty and Mei-chan with all-in-one liquid coolers and utilise Mei-chan's Zalman 9900 Max for Lie-chan, since Lie-chan's "theme" is blue (given it's not very visible).

For Melty, I went with Corsair's Hydro H100i v2, and for Mei-chan, I went with Corsair's Hydro H80i v2. We'll just say that the H80i v2 was interesting without spoiling... Anyway, I also decided on Fractal Design's Ventury high pressure fans in place of Corsair's stock radiator fans. I'll just say that this was a costly upgrade, but it'll eventually be worth it for many reasons.

Anyway, I first thought about what I needed to do, because Lie-chan had Melty-'s stock AM3 bracket, and Lie-chan's stock AM2+ bracket was laying around. So first I would need to remove the Zalman 9700 from Lie-chan and Zalman 9900 Max from Mei-chan before I can even install anything.

After doing so, I installed the AM2 bracket onto Mei-chan's motherboard and reinstalled her into her case (forgot to say that I carried her to the room where Lie-chan is to make it easier to do this all). Installing the H80i v2 in Mei-chan was interesting to say the least... It's something that was definitely possible, but also something that's kinda one of those things where it spawns some "I dunno if that's a great idea..." or something like that I think.

According to Corsair, you're supposed to install the radiator first and then the water block, but that wasn't happening because of Mei-chan's case. Radiator orientation was another thing, since there were only two possible orientations I could install it that would fit within the case. I also redid the cable management in her since I had to rerun the EPS cable since the original route would be obstructed by the cooler.

Redoing the cable management was decently easy since the cables have been "broken in" and I was able to run it kind of how I originally wanted to when I transferred Mei-chan to that case.

I also added a USB 3.0 PCIe card and a 3.5 inch 2-port USB 3.0 front bay panel, and I had to get a bit creative to route the PCIe power to the 6770.

Anyway, I'll shut up for a bit and show some pictures.

Motherboard view.

Hidden portion.

Since I was able to, I took some inside pictures, though I used the closed panel on the open side instead of the fan panel... I'll probably make more sense with pictures, since I'm failing to describe well at the moment.

Taking pictures as I creeped my phone into the crevice.

There was really limited space for the cable for Corsair Link USB cable, but it was pointless to install since there wasn't an "off-brand" Corsair Link program for Linux. Anyway, the northbridge heatsink was the limiting factor on the space, and as much as I wanted to change the colour for the Corsair logo on the water block, I didn't want to hack the Corsair cable to get Triela up in Windows and download and install the software to do a quick change. Eventually I found and remembered that I have some right-angle mini B adapters that I can just connect a regular A to mini B cable to connect to Triela. I'll eventually do it, but that's eventually...

Anyway, I also put one of the Fractal Design's high pressure fans in the front of Mei-chan's case and swapped the NZXT white fan that was on the side for Fractal Design's high flow fan. I ended up adapting the high pressure fan in front since it was a bit noisier at full speed than the NZXT fan that I had originally put there, but I didn't take pictures of it. I left the one on the side alone since the sound profile wasn't as bad as it was before the upgrade.

Anyway, pictures.

Can't see the fins any more since it's black and not white.

(I think I forgot to say that I moved Mei-chan back to her respective location after getting her back together.)

I "peeled" the filter back to try to show the water block and clearance of the radiator.

I think I was hoping to put another high flow fan in the top, but that wasn't going to happen once I saw the clearance. Anyway, I booted Mei-chan to look at the temps and such and to try to take a picture of the white Corsair logo on the water block.

It's fuzzy, but you can barely make out the text... Maybe... (I didn't "peel" the filter back for this shot because I still had Melty to do.)

Satisfied enough with the results, I quickly focused on Melty because I was going to install her "in-place" instead of pulling her out from under the "desk" while there was still enough daylight to do it. I obviously removed the Zalman 9900 from her and noticed that it was much easier than Mei-chan's (I'll rant about this in a bit). And once that was done, I reinstalled her bracket and cleaned the thermal paste (maybe not in that order). I also forgot to reground myself at some point while cleaning her CPU, but got lucky.

I played around with the cooler seeing which way to run the tubes, and I decided to run it at the back of the case. I also swapped the stock rear fan with another Fractal Design high flow fan. Installing the radiator was interesting because the screws were actually too long and I had to snag some of the washers from the fan side to make up for it. After mounting the water block, I kinda did a quick tuck/run of the cable because I was going to eventually pull her out to redo the cable and install the drilled out front panel for the soundcard switchboard.

Anyway, a quick picture I took before doing a "quick" test and to play with Corsair link before dinner.

It's hard to tell from this angle, but the tubes don't touch anything.

I made the logo red, and followed something I read on Corsair's forums or whatever to set it at 254 instead of 255 so that it properly save it to the water block's firmware memory thingy. It's not really red like the Sapphire logo or the LEDs from the Sound Blaster Z card and sort of a pink, but there's probably not much I can do about that and I don't care enough (given my K95 is set to a pink).

After dinner I focused on getting Mei-chan's 9900 Max onto Lie-chan. I found that the screws were better made from the 9900 Max I pulled off of Melty, and then eventually found that the front brackets were also different (the back brackets and nuts were the same though). I don't remember what I did, but I used the screws from Melty's 9900 Max (and probably the front bracket too?) and got Mei-chan's 9900 Max on Lie-chan. Once Lie-chan was back together, I booted her up for a quick test.

I was quite happy, since she was much quieter and much more consistent in fan speed and noise. With the 9700 (which is non-PWM), she would boot quiet, and then after a reboot, she would boot loud (obviously another reboot she would be quiet again). No longer, since the 9900 Max is PWM.

I think I also did some cable management.

I also swapped out the Rosewill rear fan for Mei-chan's Cooler Master rear fan but had to add it to the rail that went to the motherboard's weird "extra PCIe x16" Molex power header. I think I had at least more slack than the Rosewill fan though. I think I was wanting to use one of the fan headers on the motherboard, but it wasn't going to reach with the graphics card and PCI slot fan.

I was wanting to also do a H80i v2 for Lie-chan, but either I would have to make some sort of sturdy adapter or transfer Lie-chan to a mid-tower case, with the latter option probably being the best option. I might in the future, but not now.

I think I was finished about seven in the evening, starting from about seven in the morning, and went to relax for the night before heading to sleep.

I did have another picture of Mei-chan after installing the H800i v2, but I deleted it off of my phone for whatever weird reason...

Before reinstalling the other add-on cards and cable management.

Also forgot to mention that the H80i v2 pulls some of the exhaust heat from the 6770 through the radiator, but without a blower-style GPU, there's not much I can really do.

Anyway, I felt pretty satisfied to have cleaned the cable management on Lie and Mei-chan from what they were and everything is better than it was. Melty's a bit quieter, and it's nice, but it might take a bit of time to get used to... Since I can't hear if she's on or not with the H100i v2 and the new rear fan.

I think I covered everything and I've spent a ton of time typing today. Hopefully I'll post about the soundcard switchboard soon before my probable radio silence until I do more with the Raspberry Pi clock project thing that I hopefully touched on at some point.

Anyway, ciao!

P.S. I think I might've used the 6-32 x 3/16 PPHMS screws I got from Fastenal for mounting the H100i v2, but I can't remember and I'm not at home.

Melty Upgrade and GPU Shuffle

Not sure if I wrote about it, but when news came out about AMD's RX480 GPU, I was pretty excited about it, seeing that it was going to be about 200 USD - which was better than the R9 390X I had in my wishlist. I had been planning on upgrading Melty's video card, and because of the price, I decided to wait.

I had followed somewhat closely on the RX480 news, and almost bought one of the reference cards, but decided not to because I wouldn't had time to do so - sure enough, it was sold out when I got home that day. It was a good thing though, considering that not long after (either next day or the day after), there was a slow flurry of articles about the RX480 drawing more power from the PCIe slot than the allowable amount in the PCIe specifications.

I find it funny that AMD somewhat denied and/or brushed the issues off to the side for about a week before they did something about it, which was to release a new driver that shifted where the power draw came from. I was a bit surprised that they were able to do so with a driver update, considering the fault is based in the hardware - what works, works.

It wasn't long after the reference RX480 release that Sapphire announced their NITRO+ version of the RX480, and was even more excited, seeing that I've never had any problems with Sapphire (knock on wood). I closely followed the news and such about it, and I think it was a couple days after the release date announcement (or something similar), I put in my pre-order for the non-overclocked version of the 8GB card.

As a month slowly passed by, I was researching on when it would be released and about when I would be getting mine. Seemed like a couple people on Reddit had talked to Amazon's customer service and gotten an answer of "beginning of September" and "mid-September". I think it was the 6th when I somewhat lost it, and poked around Newegg, finding that they had stock of all three models, and I quickly ordered the overclocked 8gb version, seeing it was only a few dollars more than what I would be paying on Amazon. Sure enough, it was on its way the next day.

I also ordered some of the peripheral connectors and pins to update the 5 volt source for the soundcard switchbox, and paid extra for expedited shipping so that I would have it before the weekend, since I knew the RX480 would arrive before the weekend as well.

I received the parts on Thursday, and took what I needed with me to work on Friday, since it would be easier than taking the crimper home with me.

The parts before assembly, and after partial assembly.

Close up of the power take-off crimp end. I used some heatshrink tubing to cover the exposed shield "wire", I then used more heatshrink to cover the end of the cable jacket (as well as the remainder of the shield "wire"), and finally, I used more heatshrink tubing after crimping to remove future wire strain from the crimp end of the pin to the insulation and cable jacket.

The finished product. (A bit more on this later.)

Forgot to mention that the mono cable was actually another one I took home for whatever reason, and wasn't the one I spliced together.

Since the RX480 uses a 8-pin PCIe power connector, I was going to have to swap the PSU out for Lie-chan's old 750-watt. Sure I could find connectors and such, but since the 8-pin PCIe power connector on the 750-watt is not removable (like the 24-pin ATX cord), might as well use it than having to dig around for a possible adaptor (or spend almost an hour grabbing one from the "local" computer parts store.

Anyway I started working on Melty the next morning, taking out the HD 6770, the Sound Blaster card, and the 500-watt PSU. After swapping the PSU (and I think installing the RX480), I did a bunch of cable management, considering Melty is nearing her "final form".

Too bad I didn't take a picture before the clean up. I used red ties where it would be visible (or possibly visible) from the window, since I didn't have any black ties. I also realised the weird loop things in the metal were tie-down points. I found that I could swap the EPS extension cable around to make it look much nicer from the window. I ended up wasting two sticky tie-down square things, but no one's going to see that unless the open the panel.

I also found that I was able to re-route the cord for the PCIe extension thing so that it wasn't blatantly obvious, and the interior looks much nicer.

Much nicer than it used to be. I might eventually reroute the fan cord to the PSU, but we'll see.

I also had flipped the side fan again, so that it would blow air in instead of out (I decided out would be the best way with how the HD 6770 was), and decided to put a tie-down point on the door so that the wire would be more cooperative.

I used a twist-tie so that I'm not wasting zip-ties when I remove the fan for cleaning.

Oh, right. I also did a bit of deep-cleaning as well before I installed the RX480. Anyway, Melty was now ready for driver installation.

Direct window view and angled window view.

Here's where I really ran into problems. I wasn't able to boot into Manjaro or Windows, for completely separate reasons. I noticed the Sound Blaster card was flashing and thought I might have killed something when I used the vacuum cleaner on it, so I just disconnected the power and was able to get Manjaro to boot... without X.

I was about to install amdgpu-pro (or whatever the package is called), but found that it conflicted with mhwd-gpu, and after a bit of poking around on the internet with my phone, I found the correct way to install the driver I needed. Once I rebooted, I was in business, and excitedly grabbed the spare monitors to test out quad-screening.

"T" configuration (ignore the bottom left and bottom right corners), and "grid" configuration.

It was a bit wonky at first, but eventually it worked with me and I was able to experience the awesomeness of native quad-screening. With that, I rebooted into Windows, which was still giving me problems. I poked around the internet more to try to figure out an easy way to fix the driver issue without having to put the HD 6770 back into Melty.

I forgot when I started shuffling the GPUs around, but I do know after lunch, I decided the best course of action was to use the HD 6450 from Lie-chan (which was going to the Dell) instead of the HD 6770. Once I rebooted, I got mostly to Windows, enabling safe mode before rebooting into the desktop to uninstall the driver. I actually tried to install the driver I needed for the RX480, but I wasn't able to, so I gave up and shut down to re-install the RX480.

I turned Melty on afterwards and she didn't post. I was somewhat stupefied, considering the RX480 was working not long ago. I opened up the door (or maybe it was already open?) and saw that I hadn't plugged in the PCIe power cable. Derp.

After that, I was able to boot fine into Windows (with the crappy resolution). I then installed the driver (which then appeared in the AMD install manager thingy), and then proceeded to test out quad-screening again. I think Windows was also slightly wonky with the settings, but I did get it to work, and then I promptly put the extra monitors away as I transferred Phantasy Star Online 2 files from Triela (since it would be much faster than downloading from the internet). I also remembered about the updated stand-alone character creator and proceeded to download that, since I couldn't find where I had previously downloaded it to.

I'll mention here before I forget again, that GRUB2 looks much nicer, since it's able to output a higher resolution. A bit sad that I've already gotten used to the sharpness now.

Once I was done installing and whatnot, I ran the benchmark within the character creator and got 21000 something as a score on max settings. I realised I should've ran the benchmark with the HD 6770 to get a point of reference, but it was obviously too late. I also updated and logged into Mabinogi to maximise all the graphical effects, but I think I didn't do much else with Windows before I went back to Manjaro.

At some point while in Windows, I set the LED colour to red to match Melty's theme (I used the onboard button to turn it off, since none of the presets matched the theme), and luckily, it stayed when I rebooted.

It was a mixed day. I was happy about the awesomeness of Melty, but was kinda upset with the loss of the soundcard, especially considering all the money/effort I put into the switchbox. (I was also kinda upset that it was kinda dark in Melty's case.

Sometime while winding down, I remembered that I was going to check the voltage going into the switchbox earlier in the day, but I had forgotten completely. I pulled the plug out and measured it to be 12 something volts. There's the reason why the soundcard wasn't working properly, because it was being under-volted. I debated whether I wanted to shower or poke around and fix the problem, and I figured I might as well.

I pulled Melty out again (she's pretty heavy, and the space she's under is awkward, so it's no joke), and poked around with the connectors, grabbing something to compare my custom harness to. Sure enough, I had flopped the pin order on the housing side (the side with the male pins), so instead of 12v - ground - ground - 5v, I had 5v - ground - ground -12v. I double checked the plug side (the ones with the female contacts) to ensure that it was correct, and it was. After swapping the pin order of the housing, I re-connected the harness, re-routed the PCIe extension cable thingy (I removed it since I had thought the soundcard was dead), and then put Melty back.

After I booted her up, the LED was steady and I booted into Windows to reinstall the driver and software thingy. I also checked the voltage with my bad multimeter (something happened to it and it gives a reading of roughly 25% more) and got 6 something volts, which was correct (so 5 something volts). I was quite happy that I didn't kill the soundcard and that the case glows like it used to.

Poor shot of the glow because of the phone's camera.

Oh, right. I was debating on staying up to fix it or not since there was going to be the usual birthday party gathering the next day, which usually means that I relax with my younger niece and nephew playing video games. While it only took about 30 minutes to fix, I would've been able to fix it the next day, since my nephew wasn't over.

The only "damage" was that the relays got over-volted a couple times (according to the datasheet, it can only handle an over-volt of 125% or maybe 150%), but it was only twice for a brief moment, so they still work just fine (if anything, I have extras).

As usual, learned a couple things:

• Check housing/plug orientation on top of pin/wire sequence
• Check hunches immediately, regardless of situation.

I have thought of a soundcard switchboard that would allow me to put it inside Melty, and allow me to utilise much shorter cables. It's slightly upsetting that I've cable managed the power take-off harness I made, but it won't be that big of a deal. I have also purchased a crimper to allow me to crimp the pins/sockets of common computer wire harnesses, so I'm much less restricted on what I can do (more on this later with the PSU power take-off board project).

Melty's HD 6770 went to Lie-chan, Lie-chan's HD 6450 went to the Dell, and the Dell's X1950 Pro (or whatever it was) went to the 820 (which I still need to name and such). Since the Dell is a BTX motherboard, the heatsink of the HD 6450 is facing upward, so I decided to go with the intended passive cooling design (there's also the Wi-Fi card plugged into the PCIe x1 port above it, so I can't put a cooling fan there anyway).

Melty's much quieter now that I don't have to listen to the Vantec fan card thing, and it took me a while to get used to, since if I came back after the screen turned off, I couldn't tell if she was on or not.

The Dell's a lot more quiet as well, mostly at boot, where it would spin all fans at 100% momentarily before the actual boot (or for a minute if the PSU needed to "catch up"... I really should replace the PSU at some point...).

Beside the soundcard switchboard, Melty will have one final upgrade. Well, not entirely an upgrade, more of a downgrade. Anyway, Melty will probably get a RX460 whenever I build something to replace her, since I'm not going to buy another RX480 for the new build.

The AM4 Zen-series FX CPUs are very tempting for numerous reasons (DDR4, PCIe 3.0 support, 14nm manufacture processes), but I'm not ready to spend the needed money, considering Melty does all that I need her to do. I'm thinking the soonest I might replace Melty is AM4+, but we'll have to see.

Whenever that does happen, Melty will stay in her case, considering the modifications I did to mount the PCIe extension thingy. That's it for now, since I'm up past my bedtime...

Updates (To-Write List) / "Pentium D 820"

Seems like I haven't wrote about the Raspberry Pi 3 and the unused motherboard that I picked up from work. Well, I knew I haven't written about the latter, but definitely didn't know about the former.

The Raspberry Pi 3 (which I'll probably call "Pi3") will be replacing the Pi2 in the 2(DrivePi), but I haven't done all the testing that I need to do... I've only done a bit of light testing before I set it aside and kind of forgot about it. (I was reminded of it again with an article that there's better Bluetooth drivers in an updated Raspbian, but I still forgot soon after that.)

I found a couple unused boards at work and after moving building, I was able to take a better look at them, one of them being an ATX (before the +12, and 24-pin ATX connector) AMD board, and the other being an LGA 775 board. I left the AMD board, since two pre-64 bit machines (Ziggy and the Vaio) is more than enough, and procured the LGA 775 board.

I kinda played around with it, but I don't really remember doing much besides trying to figure out if a graphics card worked or not... Which made things a bit screwy, causing me to set it all aside until recently.

My work computer died (also LGA 775 btw), and so I salvaged parts from it, since it seemed like replacing the bad power supply with a 3rd party wasn't doable. With the tinkering I did yesterday, I eventually tried the Pentium 4 530 and it was just dead, so whatever killed the power supply also killed the CPU.

I found out that the CPU that came with the board is a Pentium D 820 (and that I didn't kill it with trying that video card), and left it in there. While I can upgrade the motherboard with the last of the Pentium D line (965), it probably wouldn't be worth the money. I might grab another Pentium D 945 for it, but I think it's already bad enough that I've a Pentium 4 630 floating around. I will more than likely upgrade the ram from the 2 GB that I had in the Dell before the upgrade to the maximum of 4GB.

I also procured an unused case, which isn't really well built, but it will do for the motherboard and some spare components for now.

The other thing I did yesterday was upgrade the BIOS for that motherboard, since it had a custom splash screen (not sure if the BIOS options were any different), and that the reason for the updated BIOS was a problem that I was having. While the BIOS has it's own upgrade utility, it required a floppy drive, and while I did have one free from my work computer that died, it was really more of a matter of formatting a floppy disk properly and transferring the files onto it.

I did a lot of stuff and eventually gave into just using the Intel that I built for my parents to do what I needed to do, finding the floppy I was trying to use was bad. I was successful with another floppy disk (there's a lot...) and didn't have any problems updating the BIOS, though every time the writing progress paused for a second, my heart also stopped for a second.

So now the mobo has the latest BIOS without that custom splash screen. I'm not sure what I'm going to call it, but for now I'll just refer to it as "Pentium D 820". I'll eventually write it to the machine reference page, but probably not until I give it a name of some sort. I'll also get it a better heatsink/fan unit, but that'll be later as well.

2(DrivePi)

With how long it's been with these projects and everything happening else between then and now, it's really difficult to remember all the details - please bear with me. (A quick notation to those that haven't noticed by now.)

Early February of last year, I wrote a couple posts that I was considering a Raspberry Pi 2, and the fact that it was six times faster than the B+ made it more appealing.

At some point I ended up finding a dual-core ARM board that was released as competition to the Raspberry Pi called the Banana Pi, which has gigabit ethernet and a SATA port. I was quite interested in it for using it for my bittorrent server, considering I can properly hook up a hard drive and be able to pull files off of said hard drive over the LAN much quicker.

I believe it was around early May that I began thinking of how to mount everything - the Raspberry Pi 2, the Banana Pi and the 2.5" hard drive. I drew quite a few designs and my friend at work gave me the suggestion for a 3D-printed case, which I didn't feel was going to be worth it. I originally wanted the case to have separate layers for each item and have the airflow in a certain way where it would effectively cool each item (there would be a fan that pushes the air out). I eventually realised that it would be space efficient to have a case that mounts to the back of a monitor, so it takes up less table space, and I took quite a bit of time to pick out a good box before drawing up anything else.

I then spent quite a bit of time figuring out how I wanted to arrange the parts inside the box, since I wanted to try to have a good airflow so the parts stay relatively cool. I think I went through a few ideas with the fan on the side wall (in relation to the box itself) before realising the fan hole would be fairly difficult to cut.

Eventually I found a couple of unused blower fans back from when I was trying to keep Ziggy cool, one of which didn't have wires because they broke off. I soldered a pair of wires to it and tested it, finding that it worked just fine, so I decided to use that instead of the regular case fan.

Since I was going to have another hard drive to keep my music files local for the Raspberry Pi 2, I had to keep the arrangement simple enough, and using an adaptor for mounting two 2.5" hard drives in a 3.5" bay was the way to go. I eventually decided to have the hard drive stack sit in the middle of the box, toward the side (again, in reference to the box), have one of the single-board computers (SBC) to one side of the stack, and the other to the other side (upside-down), with both SBC toward the opposite side (in sort of parabolic curve); the fan would be attached to the lid and blow out of the side.

Luckily, I waited long enough and a new version of the Banana Pi came out which had a bit of improvements, and so I bought it along with most of what I needed. I carefully drilled the hole patterns for the hard drive, the Raspberry Pi 2, the Banana pi, and VESA mounting before doing a bit of prototyping with the boards and box.

I used some of the stand-offs that I bought to mount that PCI-E adaptor thingy that I put in Melty to stand off the SBCs, and eventually found that I was going to need more than just one to properly run all the cables. I ended up using four for the Raspberry Pi 2 and six for the Banana Pi. Since using a bunch of the stand-offs wasn't exactly straight, I decided to look for something similar in height for both. For the Raspberry Pi 2, I used a 30mm stand-off (which accepts screws on both sides, lowering the height from the prototyped 32mm), and 50mm for the Banana Pi (accepts a screw on one side, raising the height from the prototyped 48mm). Luckily, the two millimetre difference of both stand-offs were really negligible when I prototyped it again.

When prototyping the first time, I realised that the adaptor brackets blocked the lower holes for the VESA mount, so I originally came up with that I would mount the lower hard drive to the box, mount the box to the monitor, then mount the bracket-attached upper hard drive to the lower one in a really awkward way. Eventually I had a "kickself" moment and grabbed some scrap aluminium sheets from work and made my own mounting plates, so that the lower screws wouldn't be blocked off (and also saves the adaptor bracket for its intended use).

With that, I carefully drilled the intake hole horizontally centre between the holes to the hard drive mounting a bit toward the bottom of the box (in relation to it's mounted configuration), cut the hole for the blower fan, and drilled the holes for mounting the blower fan. I think I also cut the holes for the cables at this time as well. The holes that I cut were awkward to do, since I was using a jeweller's saw, and if I had the right bits for the high-speed drill, I probably would have used it.

Inside, backside, and inside bottom of the box.

Since the only button-head screws I had were metric (there's a very small selection of small button-head screws at work), they ended up being much longer than I needed, and I prototyped a bit to figure out how much I'd have to cut off, which definitely easier said than done. I used button-heads because of the low profile, and I wanted to keep air resistance to a minimum since the heads were to reside inside the fan.

I made the mistake that I wouldn't be able to tighten the nylon locknuts or properly assemble the fan while doing this, and so I had to drill a couple more holes in the fan's case, so that I could access the screws. I obviously covered the holes with electrical tape and cut off the angled part of the metal bracket (which can partially be seen in the top view picture).

Inside, outside, and top of lid with fan attached.

Though it wasn't really needed, I kept the silicone seal piece in the lid (I had to actually remove it to cut the hole because it was annoying). I then cut a square of the mesh stuff that I bought as a filter for the side panel for Mei-chan and taped it on the outside of the box over the hole. I tried not to cover the holes, but I found I hadn't much choice and cleaned the holes with an X-acto knife.

Inside and outside of the box with the mesh (I propped the box up for the inside view because the mesh blended into the carpet).

With the mounting plates, I taped the two pieces together, so that I could drill two holes at once, and it was somewhat awkward to mark the holes from the adaptor bracket, but the holes came out just fine. It was a bit tough to position the holes right, because I wanted to where it directed the airflow some, keep the drives apart enough, so that it wouldn't interfere too much with each other (because I had it planned where the tops of the hard drives would face each other), and not have the holes too close to the edge of the metal.

Adaptation bracket, and the two mounting plates.

Sometime during testing, the Raspberry Pi 2 wasn't able to power the hard drive I wanted to use, so I was forced to buy an SSD for it (the Raspberry Pi 2 literally puts out no more than 500mA, and the hard drive I was trying to use needed another 50mA :T).

I just remembered that I wanted to space the hard drive apart from the SSD so that the SSD has a less likely chance to absorb heat from the hard drive (in retrospect, just something that really wouldn't matter). Anyway, after assembling the hard drive unit together, I realised that I could've lowered the mounting plates a bit more to really direct the airflow. Que sera sera.

Top 3/4 view and "bottom" view of the unit.

Since the stand-offs are screwed into the bottom mounting holes of the hard drive, I had to use some washers to reduce the length of the screws to the mounting plate. The threaded portion of the stand-offs were too long for the bottom mounting holes of the hard drive, so I used the included nut to reduce the length. I believe I used thread-locking compound for (at least) the bottom mounting screws to the mounting plates, so that the vibration doesn't loosen the screws.

3/4 view of the washers, and bottom view of the unit.

After assembling the hard drive unit, I mounted it into the box.

Inside and outside with the hard drive unit mounted.

Then I mounted the SBCs (after plugging the fan into the Banana Pi, since it's "upside-down") and mounted it to the monitor. I used a washer between the screw-head and the box since the plastic was a bit soft (I don't remember if it's ABS, poly-carbonite, or a mixture of both). I used a spacer between the box and the monitor, so the intake wasn't clogged, along with keeping the screws and nuts from pressing into the monitor (or worse, warping that side of the box). As I positioned the lid, I routed the cable to the fan, so that it wouldn't get sandwiched on any of the seams. It turned out quite well, minus the hand-cut screws protruding from the nylon locknuts.

Finished inside, outside, and top.

I had the Raspberry Pi 2 hooked up to the DVI port and the Banana Pi to the VGA port, and use the monitor's menu to switch between them (when needed).

Later, I got the button-head screws in the right length, so that it would be flush with the "top" of the nylon locknut to look nicer.

Colour is slightly off because of the flash.

Later I did some experimentation with the command-line interface of transmission and found it wasn't all that bad, so I decided to redo the Banana Pi a bit, so that I wouldn't need the monitor (or Bluetooth adapter). While I thought it'd be simple, it was a bit different than I was expecting (the folder was a bit different because the folder the CLI uses is transmission-daemon and not transmission. Once that was figured out, it was up and running in openSUSE Tumbleweed instead of the Banana Pi openSUSE image.

The Raspberry Pi 2 is better than the original Raspberry Pi (generation one), but still don't see the 1080p playback (again, with XFCE and VLC)... Whatever.

With the announcement/release (I don't remember off the top of my head at the moment) of the Raspberry Pi 3, it will be replacing the Raspberry Pi 2 after some testing. I might run Debian testing on the Raspberry Pi 3, but we'll have to see. The reason why I want to do this is because the Raspberry Pi 3 has built in Bluetooth (and also WiFi, which will be turned off), which saves me a USB port. It also has a bit of a performance increase, but I'm not expecting much. There's also the ARM64 architecture, but I'm doubting it'll have any visible impact either.

As far as the name goes, I took a few days to think about it, eventually turning "double drive-by" to "double drive-pi" because there was two "pi's" and two hard drives. I quickly put the "official" name in mathematical notation - 2(DrivePi) - where "DrivePi" is each Pi and hard drive combination, and the 2 in front of the parenthesis multiples the parenthesis' contents by two (in other words, doubling). I kinda want to have it on the lid, and use the screw/nylon locknut protrusion for the dots of each "i", but it wasn't going to be doable. Well, I had thought about it again, and I could very well put the two at the end, though it technically would be read "drive-pi doubled" instead. I'll worry about it when I actually care.

That's all on the 2(DrivePi) for now. It's not 100% complete, but at least it's well over 90%.