@zetasyanthis that sounds hard and aaaa.

honestly though just mention doing anything networky or softwarey and it sounds hard to me

@Felthry Well, if it's more in your comfort zone, I dug through our e-waste bin grabbing server motherboards and managed to snag a few reels of mosfets, caps, and inductors. XD

@Felthry (I'm an Electrical and Computer Engineering who does a bit of everything.)

@zetasyanthis we're officially ECE but functionally EE because C is hard

@Felthry That's fair. The E is actually the hard part for me. Mostly CE. :P

And the FETs are little SOT23 ones. Some of inductors are pretty hefty though. 1uH, 55A rated.

@zetasyanthis I'm sure it's not 1μH at 55A though, you need some really expensive fancy stuff if you want constant inductance over wide bias ranges.

@zetasyanthis actually been working on design for inductors that can have a pretty constant 16μH up to 100A and it's Expensive and the cores are six-and-a-half-inch-diameter toroids that cost $222 each

@Felthry

@zetasyanthis oh! I thought you meant you desoldered stuff, not that you found cut tape rolls

@Felthry Oh no, I was digging server motherboards out of a couple piles of e-waste and found some reels. :D

@Felthry Managed to score one of each of these as well. :D https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X10DRL-CT.cfm

https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Server-Motherboard/MD80-TM0-rev-10#ov

@zetasyanthis that's a lot of sata ports and also a SAS port? is SAS still used?

@Felthry Absolutely. You may not realize, but SATA2 and above drives can speak a subset of SAS. It's pretty common to use SAS expanders and SATA drives for bulk storage these days.

@Felthry Plus, LSI/Adaptec controllers are way more reliable than the junk you'll find on little 2 and 4 port cards with Asmedia and Marvell chips.

@zetasyanthis these are brandsd I don't recognise at all!

@zetasyanthis I thought SCSI was completely dead, honestly!

@Felthry Well, SAS3 goes up to 12 Gbit/s per lane, and you get 4 of them off each of those connectors, so not quite. That's still a lot of bandwidth for rotational disks.

@zetasyanthis can any spinning rust even saturate SATA 3 though?

@Felthry Not really, aside from the cache on the HDD. The trick is that for instance, the two mini-SAS HD ports on those boards each have 4 lanes, so you get up to 8 drives connected.

@Felthry Plus you can go to external JBODs with SAS switches and hook up like 240 drives for cold storage to one server if you want.

@zetasyanthis ah yes, for when you need a few petabytes of storage

@zetasyanthis fun stuff! Delicious ferrite. *gnaws on it*

@Felthry Found the picture! Was actually full reels that were just partially used!

@zetasyanthis oh nice!

@zetasyanthis yeah that's more in my area of expertise! Get any good ones? Careful with the FETs, that gate oxide is fragile.