A few years ago I had to fix my server, as explained in an older post on here. Well recently this new old hardware I bought back then decided it was time to crap the bed as well. So I had to get new new old hardware again, and now it’s up and running with way more RAM and CPU powah!
For anyone interested, basically what happened was that I noticed that I couldn’t connect to my server anymore. When I stopped by to check in on it I noticed that it was turned off. Well that’s an easy fix, I thought, as I pushed the power button. But nothing happened so obviously it was something more serious than that.
I figured that it could be that the PSU had finally bit the dust, since it was pretty old by this point and had been running 24/7 for many years. Luckily I had a spare PSU lying around. One with less wattage but it should be enough. So I unplugged the old PSU and hooked the new one up. Then I pressed the power button and the fans started spinning! For one second… and there was a whining noise coming from the PSU. Like it let out a death scream. Then silence. It wouldn’t turn on again.
So I’m not sure what happened but my theory is that the motherboard had become old and grumpy, and decided to start murdering PSUs because it didn’t want to work in the server industry anymore. Fearing the worst I hooked up the HDDs to another computer to see if they also had fried, but luckily they were fine.
A friend of mine had a couple of spare PCs lying around that he was selling for cheap. I had bought one of them before and they have a few years on their neck, but they’re still pretty decent for the price. So I bought one of them off of him and proceeded to gut the case for its motherboard, CPU, RAM and PSU.
Then I hooked it all up in my server’s case. That’s when I noticed that the PSU was not meant for larger full-tower cases. The SATA power cables didn’t reach the harddrives! Except for one. So I hooked that one up to the system drive and booted the computer. And it booted just fine. So the next day I went to a store and got one of those SATA power cable splitters. And with that, the power cables reached all the drives fine.
So now the server is up and running again. It used to have a 64-bit Athlon X2 CPU and around 2GB of DDR2 RAM. Now it has a second gen Core i5 with 16GB DDR3 RAM. So quite the upgrade there. It’s already quite noticeable when loading more demanding pages. Hopefully it’ll last for a good few years this time.