Cellar servers replacement project thread

[Undertoad]

You know it's a total embarrassment to me that this is taking so long!

Anyway, now that I have some much-needed time off, getting this done will be a priority.

Here are the screws that vex me. It's really the washers that are difficult, because they're meant to grab onto the metal edges of the hard drive brackets:



Through Fastenal and research, I found out that your standard hard drive screw is a #6-32: the #6 indicating the girth of your screw, at .1380 inches. And 32 indicating 32 threads per inch.

Your standard hard drive screw is either .15" or .25" After some research, I found that Dell specifies that the screws above are "6-32X0.225 Philips Headed Screws". (They have specified the depth in decimal fractions of an inch.)

If you Google "6-32X0.225 Philips Headed Screws" you will find that the top results are all Dell-related. Because they are all included on the list of parts you get when you buy a hard drive from Dell.

The stinkin' bastards, creating a solution that's not industry standard, and then getting every ounce of profit they can from their enterprise customers. Oh I'm used to it, this is how they make money etc, but you have to pay twice the amount at Dell buying a hard drive that will be used for these servers.

So here are the Dell hard drive brackets, and you can see where the rubber washer thingie - not really a washer, it's meant to slide into the bracket and hold the drive in place:





And the brackets then fit neatly into the Dell servers. Which we want to be a solution that will last a decade. So we don't want to just put layers of duct tape in there.

I have four of the screws, so maybe the answer is just to buy 6-32 3/8" screws at Fastenal. They don't have to be Zinc Indented Hex Washer-head Phillips Machine Screws, but that would be nice. And then maybe I could carve out the right size of rubber to just sit around the screw and keep it in place.

If anyone has any better ideas... remember when thinking about this, vibration is our enemy. It can lower the life of the hard drive, it can weaken the SATA connector, all kinds of shit can go wrong.