My primary intention was to recover the old Samsung 990 Pro, since it’s a 4 TB model and has spent the year “idle.” Since retirement, Rimuru hasn’t come out of its storage closet expect for cleaning purposes. Any useful data aside the OS, is effectively backed up to my file server already.
I’ve gone an entire year without powering on the machine. So, I think it is safe to say, anything needed was going to waste anyway, and I do not enjoy wasted equipment. I’ve pulled the Thunderbolt card for storage along with the the RTX 4070 Ti. The former because it hung over the M.2 heatsink spanning the case, and the latter because it’s kind a difficult to work inside the case otherwise.
My plan is for the storage drive to go in one of my 10G USB enclosures for misc usage, while the PCI-E cards go into /dev/closet with the associated cabling. Rimuru itself will remain in the spare closet, since it doesn’t really fit in the main technical closet. The main things remaining are the fundamental CPU/cooler/power as those are a pain to remove and unlikely to be reused, plus the lone stick of DDR5, because if I do ever power on / repurpose that machine again, I don’t want to forget which of the 4 memory slots “still work” in case I lose my system notes. It was a major pain to determine which slot still worked and what form of bad the three failed slots did.
I suppose in the end, I’m following through on the “Not another motherboard” factor. By the time Ranga is outmoded, it too will be outmoded, and the upgrade path will likely be a different processor. That machine went through too many of them, that I’m not inclined putz with it any further 😂. I feel a little bad that Rimuru turned out to be a 4 year machine (+1 in the closet), given how long Centauri had lasted… and the fact that I based Rimuru’s design on its “10 year” alternative design. Not exactly a success, nor a failure, but surely not the champion its predecessor proved to be. Centauri was originally envisioned as a 3-5 year machine depending on refits, and lasted me for 8 years. Effectively double what its replacement had!
Well, at least I didn’t drop the case on my foot, or the Big Fucking Graphics Card™️. That would hurt!