Today, I received a number of servers from our vendor. Normally, they would order all the parts, assemble and test the server, then ship it to us. Unfortunately, someone made a mistake and the PO got lost.

So, they did a drop-ship from HP directly to us (it’s faster that way). 3 days later… I was in possession of half a dozen beautiful new DL320 G3 SATA servers.

Since it was drop-shipped, they didn’t install the CD, hard drive, floppy, or ram… but hey… I can do that.

Or can I?

It seems that they forgot one small part… the SATA backplane (and it’s supporting cables). For those of you who are fortunate enough to not have made the computer industry, I’ll explain. It’s a board that the hard drives plug directly into that supplies power for the drives and hooks the drives to the motherboard.

So… unless I can figure a way to get data two and from the drives without power or cables… I’m gonna have to wait until tuesday at the earliest to set these up (that’s when they’re going to send me the backplanes).

So, Mr. HP man…. in the future… when someone orders a server with SATA support AND also orders SATA hard drives to go in it… please provide the part the drive actually plugs into. To make your life easier, I’ve colored the parts you forgot (please print and hang in your cubicle, mktks!).

Green = SATA Backplane, Red = Cables (in case you can’t figure it out)