Fried motherboard

[detron]

Just went through most of my boxes of junk to see if I had any esata ports I may have missed, and in the process decided to eliminate 9 old PSUs (most are burnt out/noisy as hell, less than 300w, with 80mm fans) I can't even be bothered to check them, it's pointless. I kept a few newer ones that I have with some parts I want to cannibalize like switches and cable covers and maybe fans (all 120mm). Don't worry it's not going in the garbage but rather an old suitcase I'm getting rid of that we will take to the recycle/green point.

I saw a bunch of small old IDE Hard drives, guess I better sort out that dock ASAP. I'd rather check/format/0 them out before they leave, but it'd be great to reduce that stuff too...

I agree,  or you gan always buy the USB connectors like This one

[Whoey]

I agree,  or you gan always buy the USB connectors like This one

True, except I'm back where I started... I have various usb enclosures that will do the same job and my desktop only has usb 2.0 not 3.0 so no speed gained. I wanted the hub mainly to use esata with SATA disks easily, I could use the enclosure I have, I just need a esata port on the back of my tower (I have 2 unused connectors internally). Also while I had my case open today I noticed that none of my (2) PCI express slots are usable due to the aftermarket heatsink on the video card... I totally forgot about that, and the only PCI slot is probably also useless/right on the edge of the cooler. I may just use the bits I have to run through the drives...

[Whoey]

Ordered a dual ESATA cable off Dealextreme... http://www.dx.com/p/81009 which will be easy enough to split and use one in my machine and one in the wifes...

Also pulled my tower apart and tried to clean a bit more and organize/tidy my cables a bit better to see if better airflow affects my power supply fan going crazy under load... it's a wee bit better but I may still look at rehoming my machine's guts to my old full tower... unfortunately all the built in venting is for 80mm fans... so I cannot move my existing venting fan (90mm) or use any of the 120mm ones I have that work fine right now. It's a good interim solution without spending any money on a new tower (but admittedly new towers have much better airflow overall vs my current setup...)

The upside will be that instead of pulling hot air from the video card heatsink/fan the PSU will have more space, but be next to the CPU... still should be far better airflow than it has at the moment. I'll also lose my front audio as my old case doesn't have any... I have a floppy slot card reader in it which will do the same job as the one on the stock case. My thought is to install my old SB Live! 5.1 with front bay, but that will restrict the airflow on the video card as the aftermarket cooler is so large it takes up both adjacent PCI express slots... 

[Whoey]

19 days later they finally arrived... guess I shouldn't complain considering how cheap it was. Now to figure out where to mount...