ML110/Microserver questions

[ubermik1967]

This is my first time posting so apologies if its in the wrong place

Firstly I have a minor problem with an ML110G7, I need to put a multi dashboard into the spare drive bay and I discovered that HP for some completely unfathomable reason have non standard USB headers for their front USB ports and no other headers I can find

Is anyone aware of a way (short of cutting plugs off and having to botch them so that you can actually plug in an industry standard USB header plug?

I've looked for PCI-e multi io cards to try and find one that has headers on them but with no luck so far

As you have chosen to use a non standard connector for very industry standard ports did you also make a cable that converts from the spurious wiring in the machine to a standard set of pins which is available anywhere?

Also, for some reason the ML110 and microserver drive cages although similar arent compatible which would have been not only a very useful thing being able to move drives easily between all similarly specced machines but I would imagine it costs more to make several different types rather than just one in much larger quantities, so my question is has anyone ever tried to alter either machine so they are interchangeable and succeeded?

As for the microservers themselves, we bought 5 of them relatively recently only to find that pretty much all of the hardware is pretty much defunct and unsupported across most mainstream operating systems so cheers for that. We have had to replace them all with dell machines and are now currently trying to see if they can do "anything" useful at all even if its just repurposing them as painfully low powered desktops but two run hardware raid so there isnt room for both a new nic and videocard in them

I've got to be totally honest here, maybe its just bad luck that we happened to purchase the only two poorly thought out models in the range, but I really cant say I have been overly impressed with either of these two models so far other than in terms of the excellent build quality, but a "nice box" alone doesnt really cut it when the machine is difficult or impossible to expand with industry standard components or where a machine becomes redundant before desktops that are a decade or more old