There's the right way, then there's my way.

Sometimes you just can't do things the "right" way straight off the bat.

This is a great example of that. I've been trying to get Jerry (The NAS server) working so we can share files among our LAN. Unfortunately the RAID card in there doesn't like to play nicely with *BSD so I've gone back to Linux which I know. And has drivers for the card.

Unfortunately I couldn't find an easy way to boot from the USB drive that FreeNAS was using. So I had to use a normal Hard Drive. The only one I had spare with SATA was a little 2.5" laptop drive. That is fine, except I don't have 2.5" caddys for the bays in the front and I can't see any other spots to put this. So I've attached it to the backplane and you can see to do that it couldn't be sitting right on the bottom of the tray. However if I left it like that there could be problems with dust or rodents. So I slipped a normal caddy in, lifting up the front of the drive a little to slide it under.

Hmmm, a bit sketchy, but it let me test this idea without spending money or stupid amounts of time on it.

It's in the bottom tray here, just before I boot to test this. The middle caddy has my big drive and is unplugged to make sure it doesn't cause issues. The top one is just a blanking caddy.

So sometimes you can get away with doing something without having everything perfect. So don't let the fact that it's not the best way to do something don't let it stop you from doing it.

Cheers,
Rex