I'm in the process of designing out a scratch-built computer case, locating products to use in the design. I'm planning on using 8-10 SATA hard drives and initially designed in a Koolance hard drive cooler, one for each pair of drives. While this works, it quickly gets expensive. Less expensive and more modular, would be to house a set of drives in a SATA swappable enclosure, then cool the enclosure. I realize that I won't get the same thermal conductivity that I would with a direct plate, but cooling the drives isn't a critical element. Can anyone point me in the direction for what I'm looking for? I'm seeking a hard drive backplane, which would accept at least 3, at most 5 drives, with the trays providing aluminum contact directly to the drive and also an aluminum housing for the enclosure itself. That's the biggest thing. The waterblocks, I can have built. (It would also be good if the enclosures didn't cost me more than $100 US per unit)
These are external but I think a creative soul could figure out how to incorporate in workings http://www.cooldrives.com/sata-enclosure.html Heard good things about the company so I had a bookmark John
Are you looking for external or internal enclosures? Would something like the Icy Dock MB455SPF fit the bill? Newegg has them for $114 each.
I'm looking for internal enclosures. Yeah, the Icy Dock is probably the most compact design I've seen yet and looks like they have 3s, 4s and 5s. The other one I'm looking at, one I found last night is the Kingwin sata rack. http://kingwin.com/product_pages/kf4000-bk.asp That one is nice in that it uses bare drives, not needing trays for each one. Open the door, slide the drive in and close it up. I'll end up using one of those two enclosures. Now I need to modify my case design to make a pair of them fit.
That Kingwin is rather nice. I was going to also suggest a look at the Startech systems, but it looks like the Kingwin will get better heat transfer to the casing. Just to throw out a crazy idea since you are doing a scratch build, you could use some of these to make your own drive system
Hmm. After seeing that one, I thought it might be nice to see something like that, supplying drive connectors on one side and connectors for cables on the other, set up in such a way that the block can be bolted to a panel, similarly to the way that motherboard-included USB headers connect to expansion brackets. I got to looking around and the cheapest I've found so far is $22 each on ebay. More than I want to spend. $176 for eight drives is entirely too much.
This might do it. http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/item/12211 If I could find bare connectors for sale, I'd be happy, but these little things might be cheap enough to save me the "hack & solder". Plus, looks like it would enable me to have an LED for each drive.
Hey, I am curently in the process of building myself a new 2TB+ Fileserver also, and came across this little beauty whilst trawling for caddies... Unfortunately it doesnt fit in my case because I dont have enough 5 1/4" bays free for it, but it might be useful for you... gonna be hard to top that Kingwin though, that thing is NICE! Anyways, here it is
Drive array I was looking at that cage initially, but in the end, it took up too much space. I changed my drive layout and am going with the picture shown. So, of the little $5.00 drive adapters, I'll have to order twelve.
I do have a worklog of an unnamed SATA enclosure. That turned into this. I'm currently taking measurements and putting together a list of materials. This thing will actually enclose four micro-atx motherboards.
