Recently I saved four Lenovo M700 Mini’s from recycling as some quick testing showed me nothing was immediately wrong with them. Only major problem being many missing parts.
I didn’t go out of my way to source every missing component I needed for a complete restoration given the cost but I got my hands on everything I knew I’d need for basic functionality.
This fan was manufactured by Delta and I’m impressed by it’s construction using these cute little metal bearings held in place under spring compression and a little circlip holding all the works together. I feel like it’s over-engineered and I love it.
After removing as much dust as I reasonably could I had to remove the motherboard and detatch one of the plastic M.2 standoffs. I believe it’s for M.2 2242.
M700 #2 & #3 were nearly identical restorations with the exception of a few details I’ll go into.
A detail I’m noticing is what looks like these M700’s did not all come from the same work enviroment nor do I believe they have the same milage as indicated by the varying level of dust.
This one’s blower was actually covered in a film of oil. It’s hard to say where it came from but the dust mixed into it and just tacked itself on. It was rather gross.
Getting it taken apart it seems at a time Lenovo changed fan suppliers and either went from AVC → Delta or Delta → AVC. Either way it looks to me like AVC just overbuilt the fan even more by included a brass outer race for the bearings to rest inside. Crazy.
I also decided to modify the plastic retention pins used to secure the M.2 SSD. The plastic…string? I might call it, interfered with 2280 SSD’s once installed in the enclosure so to make things easier I just chopped it out. I better not lose those pins now but I suppose I also now have extras if I do.
I also decided to replace the body (or shell) of the case since getting my hands on two lids actually came with two lower halfs too. I’m not worried about matching S/N’s and the like but given someone tore the stickers almost completely off the bottom I might find some of the generic information helpful in the future.
I’m both amazed and disappointed to find if I had bought three of these (for the other Mini’s) it would have ran me in excess of $100. I don’t know what black magic is inside of them but they are not cheap on eBay.
For now that’ll be it. Currently working on Mini #4 which is slightly different from the others. Good in some ways. Not good in others but dumpster divers can’t be choosers.
Pretty standard rear I/O port on a variety of equipment like servers, old computers, and some laptops but nice little feature to have if I ever want to console into something like a network switch.
Something that should be noted and I’m glad I looked into it prior to buying storage is the M.2 header on the motherboard.
The motherboard uses the B150 Chipset which does provide PCI_e lanes but it’s unclear what they’re being used for as the only PCIe device looks to be the x4 Wi-Fi card.
I haven’t mentioned it but for TIM I’ve been using a generic industrial version of IC Graphites Thermal Pads. It’s a material I found you can buy in sheets and cut to size. Good value. Very effective in my applications.
I still need to test if their new (second hand) internal storage is any good and if they can run off it OK. The plan currently is to install Ubuntu Server 22.04.1 LTS on all of them but certain services will change depending on what I want to task each client with.
If anybody is interested in the software testing & setup of things let me know. Otherwise I hope everyone enjoyed.