Dell OEM Refurbished-Feasibility Of Moving Motherboard to a different case. I was thinking if it would be possible to move the motherboard of a 'typical' Dell OEM Refurbished to a different case (one with more 3.5 inch hard drive mounts). I was thinking that putting a PCIe SATA card with multiple SATA connections could turn the newly built PC into a Home Backup Server. Thanks in Advance.
Not sure there is such a thing as a "typical" Dell. Dell (like other big factory brands) frequently uses proprietary parts. They may use an ASUS motherboard, for example, but make proprietary changes to it. When you buy 100s of 1000s of units from a supplier, you can make changes like that. You would have to be 300% certain all the motherboard mounting points aligned properly with the case's motherboard mounting points. I have seen Dells that didn't use standard mounting screws for the motherboard and instead, used tines or fingers punched from the case that were bent over by the assembly robot to secure the motherboard in place. Unbending to remove the board resulted in them breaking, if not then, then when bending back to secure the new board. Not good. There is a chance the power supply is no longer standard, so that would be a concern if planning on using a more powerful supply to support the additional drives. Since back up servers don't need to be speedy, I might just consider using external USB connected drives, or a NAS. Or just replacing the current drives in this Dell with large capacity hard drives.
