Conclusion
After everything was soldered in place, I basically removed the obsolete Dockstar from
the MacSE case, screwed the T5325 plus network card to a bit of plexiglass and
screwed everything to the chassis of the MacSE. Unfortunately, the network-port
now wasn't in the correct place anymore... but a small extension cable made from a bit
of UTP and an RJ45 jack fixed that.
So, did all the solder, glue, wire and hacking end up working as a server? I'm happy to say it actually does. The speed to the HDs seems to have improved over the old solution which used USB2-to-SATA-converters, my rsyncs won't crash with out-of-memory-errors and while I had to recompile my framebuffer module to the new kernel, even the mac-emulation still runs perfectly fine. I've only run this setup for a few days yet, so I can't say if the contraption will stay functional or if the soldered wires end up bringing the complete system down in the future, but everything seems stable for now.
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18 commentsI do not quite understand one thing: If the flash was connected via the Silicon Motion chip and the chip was removed, how is the flash accessed now ? Was the u-boot in a separate (NAND) flash from the main flash where the crippled Debian was installed ? Where is the OS installed now ? Still in the flash or maybe in a dedicated partition on the drives ?
You're amazing...I love how many times you say "I found them after poking around"...thats where my hacks end.....after hours/days of trying to track traces or solder SMT pads..solder blobs...lifted pads...arrrrggghhh...give up. But your work is an inspiration to try harder!
Never mind... I found them already... *note to self* look better before asking ;)
cool mod! I\'m thinking about adding a SATA port to my t5325 but I\'m not quite sure how I should connect the 4 wire (2xblack, yellow and red) power cable to the main bord. I\'ve only found GND and 3,3v and I also need the 5v line... any tips? ;-) also, when I only want to hook up 1 SATA port, do I have to place the capacitors? I\'m planning to solder my SATA port to the available SATA connector
Jake: Yeah, I had a shitload of luck; I tried getting some more for that proce but couldn\'t find any. $500 is too much tho\': on eBay they are like $150-200, sometimes less. If you ever attempt replacing the PHY I\'d be very interested to hear your results, regardless if you succeeded or failed.
Not TOO too bad; I\'ll do it eventually. I\'m having trouble getting one of these for less than $500 USD though; how\'d you find it for 60EU?
jake: That would involve de-soldering the 100MBit PHY, grabbing a GBit USB-adapter and desoldering the main network chip, looking up the pinouts for both the 100MBit PHY and the 1GBit PHY on the USB-adapter and connecting the wires through accordingly.
Insanely impressive. Only pales in comparison to the original Mac/SE server, probably my favorite hack of all time to date ( I used your plastic-cleaning dishwasher method. epic success.). My question is: I want to repeat this, but unlike you I do not have a framebuffer built into another system. Could you elaborate a bit more on the other solution? I don\'t know much about networking chips :(
very cool! nice work undoing the BGA with a heat gun too. been there man and every time i swear im gonna break something else
ah i forgot about the framebuffer you made ,out of interest , what did you do with the old sata ssd chips you took off the board ?
Hah! When I saw the thin client had onboard GPU I thought you were going to go the easy way.. Needless to say, this is very impressive!
Bas, mancaveman: Thanks! Dan: Not over the DVI output, no, but there\'s an USB framebuffer connected to the device that drives the original Macs CRT. See the original macse/arm article for more info about that.
Very, very impressive indeed!
I did not think this mod could get any more extreme. My hat goes off to you, sir. Very impressive!
So am i right in thinking that there is no video output now ?
Well done! Nice to see I'm not the only one trying to squeeze as much life as possible out of obsolete hardware :)