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Kenneth Finnegan

Adding a 2.5" hard drive to an HP T620 thin client using the unpopulated mSATA connector and tapping 5V off one of the internal USB ports was just... *chef kiss* my brand of nonsense.

HP T620 thin client with the case cover off. SATA cable soldered onto the motherboard and siliconed down, with a 2.5" laptop hard drive mounted to a custom sheet metal bracket painted bubblegum pink.
Microscope image of the SATA cable soldered onto the unpopulated mSATA connector footprint.
28 Mar 2023 at 16:49 | Open on social.afront.org
11 comments
Que
Kevin Karhan :verified:

@kwf I mean that's one way to do it.

Personally I would've picked a similar approach or just bought a M.2 B+M-Key SSD.

Which I did in the past - twice.

Because I got a 3-pack for under €60 with shipping and I use two as low-power mini servers.

28 Mar 2023 at 16:52 | Open on mstdn.social
Kevin Karhan :verified:

@kwf Another option oud be to use the unpopulated MiniPCIe slot and add a single-port SATA controller to it.

That should also yield 5V power for a 2,5" SSD...

28 Mar 2023 at 16:54 | Open on mstdn.social
Kenneth Finnegan
Kevin Karhan :verified:

@kwf okay, and since you don't want to be stuck on USB 2.0 speeds, you still need to splice 5V DC from USB.

So unless one were to solder - like you did, only a MiniPCIe to SATA-6G adaptor would've been an option.
ebay.de/itm/284350479783

The "thiccer" #hp #t620Plus would've had a #PCIe x4 slot and even more space as well as said mSATA slot populated.

If I had a 3D printer I would've likely made a custom lid with space to house more drives and an HBA:
ebay.de/itm/295105489676

@kwf okay, and since you don't want to be stuck on USB 2.0 speeds, you still need to splice 5V DC from USB.

So unless one were to solder - like you did, only a MiniPCIe to SATA-6G adaptor would've been an option.
ebay.de/itm/284350479783

The "thiccer" #hp #t620Plus would've had a #PCIe x4 slot and even more space as well as said mSATA slot populated.

28 Mar 2023 at 17:08 | Open on mstdn.social
Kenneth Finnegan

@kkarhan The T620 plus has effectively less space in it due to the fan tray for the PCIe slot.

I've got a few of those with 10G SFP+ NICs in the PCIe slot since the 1GbaseT NIC ended up being the gating item for performance.

28 Mar 2023 at 17:14 | Open on social.afront.org
Kenneth Finnegan
Stephen Foskett
ajn142

@kwf but why?

Not to be dismissive, I really want to understand why

28 Mar 2023 at 22:17 | Open on infosec.exchange
Kenneth Finnegan

@ajn142 I'm deploying these as CDN nodes and I wanted to see if it would be viable to get 4TB of storage in each node cheaply.

28 Mar 2023 at 22:22 | Open on social.afront.org
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