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 um well it's just
a minor hiccup but I thought it'd be an interesting tip so I need to take this
LSI 9248 I uh raid card and I need to
quickly cop all of the essential data that I'm going to be doing nightly
synchronizations from this array the uh
the 8 by 3 tbte 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 um 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 um 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 1X slot so if you guys
know about PCIe um you'll know that the first pins
here these guys right here that's all your power and whatnot um and then
everything from here on is data so the only thing that makes this a 1x slot and
this a 16x slot is how many pins it has for bandwidth so some motherboard
manufacturers are considered enough to leave these um edges open here so that
you can install 4X or 16x cards in a 1x
slot and they will work however my Intel
board in my Home Server doesn't have the
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 a sec guys so I've had a few promising ideas
sorry guys I got to keep my voice down baby sleeping um but it looks like none
of them are going to be applicable to um the uh 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 heat up 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 PCI e1x interface so I
scrapped that idea next idea was seeing if I could cut through the plastic with
a razor blade and slice it on either
side um the problem with that one was that it required far too much force and
if you slip with a razor blade you're going to cut a bunch of traces and it's
going to be bad all around and idea number three was to to use a Dremel use
a cutting wheel on a Dremel to grind
through the back of it this one looks like it's probably going to work but
unfortunately with the other motherboard which is installed in a case with things
in the way you can see I can't get the dremin straight and I don't have one of
those extension bits so uh I'm stuck for
now but uh thanks for coming along with me for the ride guys so I decided to
pull the board out and we're just going to go for it um I haven't actually
tested it success sucessfully on my test board yet but we're just going to use the Dremel and uh file out that back
piece and see if we can install this PCIe 4X Nick card into the PCIe 1X slot
where right now it's it won't fit so it'll run at 1X speed but PCIe 2.0 1X
and this is a 2.0 card is a 5 GB per second so we should be okay all right 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
dremeling but it looks like it should still make contact so it should still be
able to pass data and it should be okay all this is in theory of course I don't
recommend doing this at Home Folks um 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 of the gunk
into the slot it could throw it out but
uh such is 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 I'm throwing it back in
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 uh there's
the network cables all plugged in so I've got my adaptech RAID card here for
testing my Orica raid card that my actual storage runs off of and then my
four port Nick all installed yay and all
hopefully with enough bandwidth for what I'm using them for don't forget to
subscribe to L Tech tip Zone also don't forget to wear appropriate safety
glasses whenever working with a
Dremel if I could hit the switch I could end this video