OK. Apologies for the radio silence, it's been a bit of a crap week.
I got home and lugged everything I needed up the stairs. Sucked tbh. Started building it that night, and immediately noticed an issue. Whilst everything fits how I planned it to I did not realise the USB 3.0 header would be covered so tightly. I thought it was up the side of the board like 99% of the boards I have used in the past so didn't pay it much thought. That was a mistake. It doesn't fit no way no how. There may be a way around this, and I will try, but as of now no front USB.
I also realised very quickly that I should not have stopped after shortening the 24 and 8 pin. Space is a premium in this old chassis, so that bit me.
That was after an over two hour fight with the PSU. Let me cover that also. Firstly the mesh grille was rubbing the fan. So I had to use the old frame as a spacer. Not a deal breaker. However, I soon realised the connector in the PSU for the fan made no sense. I figured it out eventually, and got a lovely electric shock for the convenience ffs. I also found out that yes it's a 140mm fan but Enermax used 120 mount holes. Meaning I had to drill the fan and mess around with it for ages. UGH. Then I found out it's just a hair too thick so had to mod that too ffs. I got that done, and then the next day I shortened the PCIE power cable.
It's not finished (needs final cable ties etc) but lesson learned from the past don't tie everything down until you are sure it all works.
I already had Ubuntu installed but it was giving some AMD error at launch. I got around that by connecting it to the network and installing a couple of updates via terminal. The rest? has been slow going, but that is what you get when you are in an alien OS that you have never really dug deeply into before.
It took me the best part of a day just to install the video driver. I downloaded them from Nvidia but they came packaged as a .run file. I then became blinkered by this, and it cost me a few hours. Firstly when I tried to launch it it was telling me I needed to be logged in as root. However, when I did that I could not see the DIR structure. I then found a way to make myself root, and launched it. Then it told me it was unhappy about something else. Many hours had passed now and I was peed off with it so I started having a look around Ubuntu and happened across the software update part that also has "other devices" listed. Sure enough, there it was.
However, I then noticed another problem. See if you can spot it.
I will come back to that shortly. The next step was figuring out how the heck you combine volumes in Ubuntu. Back to school I went. Found out that it was all done by terminal unless you used a GUI. Cool, so I set about finding one. I eventually found the respository for KDE partition manager. However, when I watched a guide on the internet it was making no sense and didn't even look like the one I was using. I then looked at the help guide, but again the GUI was completely different.
It seems it has been updated (the GUI/app) but the documentation hasn't. Eventually after a few hours I figured it out. And created my spanned volumes.
Which all worked beautifully. However, you will note something is missing. Look closer...
Yup, no Revodrive X3. Now if you cast your mind back to the first picture of Ubuntu you can see it is there. However, it is there in four parts. That is how the drive works. Four 250gb Sandforce SATA SSDs all hiding behind a Marvell controller. Now when I first saw this I figured "Hmm, no RAID but I can span the volumes to make the drive back up into one piece". Only you can't. It only allows you access to the first 250gb. The rest? can not be partitioned or formatted in any shape or form. So basically? that will have to come out. There was a hacked together user driver created in 2011, but I can't find it.
The good news is that you can see, we have the rest of the SSDs all picking up, detected and spanned into volumes.
So basically the rig is now ready to be set up for Nextcloud. That is literally the final step, now that I have all of the hardware up and running how it should be.