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benjojo posted 01 Dec 2025 12:04 +0000

Something I miss about the days where Intel were building server cases and motherboards is that they generally didn't skimp out on the things that made the operators lives a lot easier.

A great example is the drive caddies, take a look at the thickness of this thing! makes it so much easier to insert the drive when you're not trying to screw it into what is basically razor blades

Drive caddies seem to be very aggressively "designed for manufacturing" even though when doing so often makes the lives of the people's who have to do the replacements a lot worse

A drive caddy on the floor with a drive in, the tickness of the metal edges are about the thickness of one quarter my finger

Tenzer@s.waq.dk replied 01 Dec 2025 12:27 +0000
in reply to: https://benjojo.co.uk/u/benjojo/h/4J73x721QkV19n7vLj

@benjojo The same was the case with Sun servers. They were nice to work with, with the screws/tabs you needed to handle being clearly marked in bright green colours: https://dogemicrosystems.ca/pub/Sun/System_Handbook/Sun_syshbk_V3.4/Systems/SE_T5440/component.top.html.

The lid of the servers was also split in two, so you could replace the fans without having to take the entire lid off, so the server could stay running.

benjojo replied 01 Dec 2025 12:32 +0000
in reply to: https://s.waq.dk/users/Tenzer/statuses/115644306417127731

@Tenzer yeah, A few vendors seem to really care/cared about this stuff. I was surprised to see how nice Fujitsu servers were (even though they are persona non grata these days) in many ways like this

(Don't think I've ever had a fan fail in any machine I've operated so far thinking about it, might just be luck)

992jo@chaos.social replied 01 Dec 2025 16:12 +0000
in reply to: https://benjojo.co.uk/u/benjojo/h/4J73x721QkV19n7vLj

@benjojo I think one point might also be airflow: once you stuff 4 3.5" or 5 2.5" drives on the 19" server frontplate there is not much space left for airflow through that. so shaving a millimeter of each end of a drive caddie might give you some additional space for airflow. But that's just an idea that I have, it might not be that effective.

But yes, the old intel drive caddies were solid stuff.

benjojo replied 01 Dec 2025 17:59 +0000
in reply to: https://chaos.social/users/992jo/statuses/115645189990441721

@992jo from recent experience it seems that all of the really high power (15w+ u.3 nvme) drives that actually need airflow going over them at all times are finned to give them more surface area to work with so I don't entirely think that losing a couple of millimeters on the edges is going to really hurt that much for a SATA drive of a few watts