February 8, 201313 yr I am not sure if I am posting this in the right forum, but wanted to make sure people saw this. I purchased a Norco 4224 for a new build, with a supermicro motherboard. Hooked everything up, and tried powering it on, and the fan would spin for a couple of seconds and shut off, and a few seconds later would turn back on for a few seconds and shut off again, would continue until the power cord was pulled. Went through all the test procedures, just the motherboard and cpu hooked up, out of the case, on a piece of cardboard, same thing. Figured bad motherboard... Got the new motherboard, hooked just it up, out side the case, worked perfectly. So I figure I will take each step at a time, in turn, powering it on to make sure everything is powering on correctly. Put it back in the case, powers on. Start putting in SATA pci cards, still works. Now, I start hooking up the power to the backplane, get to the third one from the bottom, and boom, no dice. Same problem as before. So i pull everything back out, put the motherboard back on a piece of cardboard, and yep, same problem - motherboards fried. I start just going through every single thing, every nook and cranny to see what I can find - now mind you, I already had the power splitters hooked up to the backplanes before I hooked anything up. I couldn't believe what I found, one of the power plugs on the backplane was soldered in upside down. I was so dang mad! I was mad at Norco, mad at myself, that I didn't notice that one power plug went in upside down. Just mad.... Norco is sending me a new backplane, but now I am stuck waiting for another motherboard. Luckily I had no harddrives plugged in, as I am sure this would have fried them. I am thourghly confused as to why it was frying the motherboard, I would have thought it would fry the power supply. Maybe someone with some hardware knowledge could chime in here and tell me why this did this. I just posted so that everyone would know this, and not make the same mistake I made, and to double check the power plugs on the backplane to make sure they are orientated correctly! Hope I can help someone not make the same mistake! See Attached Picture!
February 9, 201313 yr OUCH! That is not good... Looking at the picture I see it was possibly not all a Norco problem. Yes, a full QA/QC inspection could have revealed the problem. BUT, the part was not installed incorrectly, but the one connector is the WRONG part! Sad to say I have been the recipient of similar connectors, purchased from a vendor as loose parts. What I received surprised me, while they were all supposed to be the same item, I had some that were also a reversed pin-out, DIFFERENT parts from what I had ordered. This may be what also happened to Norco, and your back-plane. I have not verified it, but the Norco documentation says the two power connectors on the back-plane PCBs is designed for redundant power supply connections, which I take to mean is intended for ONE connector to be used at a time for a single power supply, and the other to be connected to a second power supply, if one is present. If you had only ONE of the power connectors hooked up to the power supply, and sata cables connected to your mother board, it likely fed 12 volts back through 5 volt components on the mother board.
February 9, 201313 yr Author Good point, I had never thought that it actually was a totally different part. Cause if it was the right part, it would be impossible to solder upside down. Well, glad I caught it before I had it loaded up with 10 3tb drives, as it surely would have fried them all, because of sending the wrong voltages back through the lines....
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