i_am_hiding

My first SFF build! I've had this half-decent PC for a few years but never really put it to good use owing to its enormous footprint meaning it was never practical to put on my desk. I wanted to get into PC gaming and wanted something smaller, so I've re-homed some of its guts into a new box!

Specs:

• Gigabyte H170N, i7-6700
• Thermalright AXP-90
• 32GB Hyperex Fury (2x 16)
• Saphire Pulse RX6400
• Seasonic SSP-300SUB
• Goodisory A09

By re-using my existing memory, motherboard and CPU, I'm only about $500AUD into this, mostly sunk into the GPU and PSU. The case was very cheap but I'm impressed with the quality for the price. The same can be said about the low profile CPU cooler.

Assembly was a bit tricky - I had to remove the front I/O, then the Motherboard went in with its memory, front panel audio and power wires already connected, as well as its end of the PSU cables and its rear I/O shield. Once in place the front I/O, PSU and GPU were worked in around it.

It was clear the power supply cables would never fit, but I managed to de-pin all the SATA and MOLEX leads from the loom with some staples, leaving only the 20+4 pin motherboard and 4+4 pin CPU plugs. This means the remaining wires, while still a bit longer than they needed to be, could be bundled up in a corner.

I'd read reviews of the SSP-300SUB before purchasing it and many had complained it was too loud, but I didn't think it would bother me. How wrong I was! After a bit more cable gymnastics I was able to squeeze a 60mm Noctua fan in the front corner to blow cool air over the PSU and keep its fan from having to spin up except under very high load. Before this, something as simple as refreshing a website would cause the PSU fan to spin up to 100% for half a second or so, which was quite annoying.

This setup is capable of 1080p gaming on high settings with framerates between 60-300fps depending on the game, and that's more than good enough for me. I know if I had a PCIE 4.0 motherboard and riser cable I'd be better off, but if it ever becomes a problem at least I know what I have to upgrade next.

Hi All,

I have a 4TB drive that was originally in a PC connected via SATA. I now wish to put it in an external enclosure and connect it via USB, however this is proving more difficult than I expected, and from what I understand it's Windows XP's fault.

On attempting to mount the drive with sudo mount /dev/sdc /mnt, I receive the following error:

mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.

The output of fdisk -l is as follows:

Disk /dev/sdc: 3.64 TiB, 4000787025920 bytes, 976754645 sectors
Disk model: Expansion Desk
Units: sectors of 1 * 4096 = 4096 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device     Boot Start        End    Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1           1 4294967295 4294967295  16T ee GPT

As can be seen, the disk is detected correctly as a 3.64TiB drive, but there is a partition that's read as 16TB. This, AFAIK, is because the sectors are incorrectly read as 4096 bytes long when they should be 512 bytes, and this is a thing that external enclosures do to ensure MBR compatibility with Windows XP.

I tried overcoming this by mounting as follows:

$ sudo mount -o ro,offset=$((1*512)) /dev/sdc1 /mnt

however now I have a new error:

mount: /mnt: failed to setup loop device for /dev/sdc1.

Trying to mount with sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt only yields

mount: /mnt: special device /dev/sdc1 does not exist.

I'm at a loss as to how to mount this drive - at least, without reformatting it. Is it at all possible? Once I've cracked the code, can I configure /etc/fstab to do it automatically for me, or am I stuck in this limbo-land where I have data on my disk that's only readable with a hacky workaround? As a last resort, I think I can plug it back in via SATA, copy all 4TB off, plug it in via USB, reformat it and copy everything back on, but I want to avoid that hassle.

Edit: Output of fdisk -l when connected via SATA. Note the sector size is now 512 and the drive mounts happily.

Disk /dev/sdb: 3.7 TiB, 4000787030016 bytes, 7814037168 sectors
Disk model: HGST HDN724040AL
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 5852E3A7-A2E4-4589-9D93-F8020C2D7E54

Device     Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sdb1   2048 7814035455 7814033408  3.7T Linux filesystem