Scratch Build – In Progress Project Moonbox - Updated 29 July: hardware

To satisfy my ever expending hunger for storage space, I wanted to build a new file server. The problem is that no existing cases fit my requirements (small and still lots of room

for HDDs), so I decided to build one myself.

Here's the design I came up with in sketchup (without the side and front panels):


It will contain the following hardware:
- IEI KINO-9454-R20 motherboard: 4x SATA onboard + PCI-e slot for more; dual gigabit ethernet
- Core 2 Duo, probably a E6300 (which technically is a "Pentium Dual-Core")
- Seasonic SS-300SFD: small form factor SFX power supply
- CF card for OS (I'll be running Linux on this)
- Up to 8 HDDs

I'll start with 2-4 1.5TB WD Green disks and slowly fill up the remaining space as required.

This build is done with the co-operation of Mr.Me (he actually did most of today's work...). So, on to the build itself. I started with a piece of 100x100x1.5 aluminium, which

will be used to make most of the case:


Lines are marked using a small chisel...


...and cut using an angle grinder:


Halfway through the cut, the other side was clamped between two wooden blocks to stop it from "flopping":


The results is these pretty edges:


So on to filing:


The result of a day's work:

These aren't finished yet. Only the two small panels in the middle are the correct size. They're the side panels.

Comments appreciated!

 

You should sell that to Antec or some other manufacturer. It is a brilliant idea

 

Nice start!

 

great start.. cant wait to see the beast unleashed

 

@Picarro: If Antec made a case like this, I'd buy it (even after I made one myself)! I'm a great fan of Antec and I think they make great cases.

Here's this week's update. I spent yesterday scouring the shops to find some materials, si I haven't done a lot. Today, Mr.ME came over again to get me off my lazy ass . Unfortunately, I forgot to get my camera so I only took pics at the end.

The cut panels:


Quick mockup to check the alignment (it's off , will have to do some more filing) and size:


The supervisor checking up on the work:


The reason why measuring twice isn't always enough:

You also have to make sure that what you measure is correct. Fortunately the error was discovered before the panel was cut.


To get a feel of how it's supposed to look when finished, I made some more sketchup models.
Here's the entire case:


And this is how the case is supposed to open:

The front is held on magnetically. The screws fit into holes in the side panels (not yet in model...). The side panels are also screwed on in the back.

Back of the case:

The blue pieces are aluminum angles. The one in the middle will be used to attach the motherboard to the case.


I also redesigned the HDD rack. The HDDs are decoupled from the case by a piece of foam sandwiched between two pieces of aluminum angle.



During the past week, I also ordered some critical parts: the PSU and the motherboard. They're critical because they're smaller than their regular counterparts and therefor quite hard to get a hold of. The motherboard has to be specially ordered from the factory, so it'll be made for me . This unfortunately means a 3-4 week lead time and I had to forfeit the right to cancel my order. For anyone in Europe looking for this kind of smaller stuff, the shop I ordered this from was HRT Informationstechnik GmbH. They have the widest collection of mini-itx motherboard I've seen.

 

looks great cant wait to see more.

 

Well, as I was thinking of a similar project aswell, because I have 3 PCs and a Notebook running in my household I came to the conclusion, that a NAS-solution is the best way to go instead of having big HDDs for each PC itself.

I was thinking of a Atom miniITX-board and 4x SATA HDDs first, as 4 to 6 TB of possible capacity exceeds by far what is needed, even if I rip every DVD I eventually come across, and a 150 Watts picoPSU, that should do aswell.

So I started looking for the parts and looked at the price it would cost me to build it...

... instead of building my own, I just bought a 2TB NAS in the end as it's actually not more expensive, and I've saved alot of time.

Yeah, i know it's more fun to build it yourself, but in this case it's maybe better to go with a finished product

http://www.plextor-europe.com/products/px-NAS2X1000L.asp?choice=PX-NAS2x1000L

 

i like the idea. may do something similar in the future when i'll move to a file server

 

Atom only supports 2HDD unless you go for Ion or use a PCI SATA card.

a Pico PSU won't have the startup Amps to provide for all your hard drives, you'll pop it - it'll not have the connectors either I doubt.

On topic! Build one of these cases for me!! Im fiddling with FreeNAS right now

 

I've looked at Atom motherboards before, but the main concern for me was that they'd be underpowered. I'm planning on running some CPU intensive things in it, so a C2D was the minimum for me. I verified that the CPU would be powerful enough by underclocking my main PC (E8400).

One of the reason I chose this particular motherboard is that it has a PCI-E slot, which doesn't form a bottleneck. Regular PCI becomes the limiting factor with more than a single HDD on it. A PCI-E x16 slot has more bandwith than the North-Southbridge interconnect (I'll only be using a x4 card, though). I'm designing this NAS to be able to fill a gigabit connection and more (I have dual gigabit ).

I've looked long and hard at every possible enclosure and none fitted enough HDDs (5 minimum) without some serious modding. I was originally planning a UDAT2 clone, but the effort required didn't really give the results I wanted.

A 150W PSU should be enough to power 4 HDDs. This is possible if you enable staggered spinup on all (or most) HDDs. A WDC Green needs less than 2A on the 12V rail during spinup and a 150W picoPSU is able to deliver up to 10A for a short while. I'm actually only planning for 300W for 8+ HDDs (8 internal + 2 eSATA ports).

I haven't played with FreeNAS yet, but from what I gather, hardware support is less than linux (it's FreeBSD based). You might want to look at http://www.openfiler.com/ for an easy solution. I haven't actually tried that either since I prefer doing things myself from the commandline.

 

Last week, it was so hot outside I hardly do anything. The only thing I did was file the edges of the front and side panels so their height was equal (and even that took me a bucket of sweat).

This weekend, it was fortunately a bit less hot, so I decided to make the front panel.

But first things first, I had to decide the final design of the fan holes and the position of the screws:

(I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one I picked )

This was going to be quite a job because I've never done anything like it (I've never cut a side window, for example). So to help me, I bought a scroll saw which was on sale:


Unfortunately, it's not that easy to make straight cuts with it (probably my lack of skill):


Good thing my father bought this new tool:

I have no idea what it's called. You can put a variety of tool heads on it, but unlike a dremel it doesn't rotate, just oscillates. It works great: even an amateur like me can make clean, straight cuts with it.

You probably noticed I riveted the aluminum to a piece of wood. This wasn't an attempt at making a composite material gone bad, but meant to prevent the workpiece from flexing while cutting. It seems to have worked well, because I had no trouble whatsoever. The scroll saw really flies through the material. I spent most of the time disconnecting the blade to get it through the holes. The only time had to change the blade was when I broke the tiny piece of metal that holds the blade in the support. Though little blade, considering the abuse I must've put them though. The saw itself also broke down a couple of time. Reason: the screws weren't put on properly... After screwing them in myself, no more problems occured.

On to the most dreaded part: filing!

I left the pieces of wood inside untouched to make the metal stiffer. This probably wasn't necessary since the panel is surprisingly non-flimsy (considering the holes I put in it). In the end I had to cut out the inner pieces to be able to file everything.

And here's the end result, with the rivets drilled out, the wood removed and a quick rub with acetone to clean it:


It's full of scratches, but that isn't a problem since I'll probably take the easy way out by applying self-adhesive vinyl instead of painting everything.

 

Update! The weather has been pretty bad lately, which leaves me without a work space. Fortunately I had a long 4-day weekend with some nice sunshine. Lots of progress has been made .

Let's start off with where I left off: the front panel. As said, I'll be applying a self-adhesive foil, but unfortunately, this won't cover everything. The edges are especially troublesome. To fix that, I painted the back.
First the primer:


Then a coat of black:


While that dried, I started on the HDD rack. I've ordered some Samsung F2 ecogreen disks, which supposedly vibrate very little. This means that I won't need the complicated HDD rack, so I reverted to my original idea (stolen from Antec. I'm even using their screws and grommets ).

The aluminum was cut before, so I taped the two pieces together and marked where to drill the holes:


The drilling of the pilot holes was done "on location", so I don't have any pics of that. Mr.ME took some pictures with his cellphone, so I'm hoping he'll post those.
The smaller (non-pilot) holes were drilled with a regular 8mm drill bit. The larger holes needed to be at least 13mm, so I used a step drill:

The holes were drilled to 14mm since there was no 13mm. The blue tape is there to mark how far I had to drill.

After all the holes were drilled, I still had some very rough edges that a simple deburring didn't solve. The only way was tofile them down. This made quite a bit of scratch marks, but I don't care about them since this'll be inside the case. If they start bothering me, I can still sand them down. Next to it is the Antec HDD bracket I used as a model:



On to the next part: the button panel. This is the little panel that goes behind the cutout on the frontpanel and will hold all the front buttons and connectors. I started with the cutouts for the eSATA ports and molex connector. I'll be using a PCI-style bracket that came with some motherboard for this. I used the original metal cover as a template. The idea was to spray some paint over it and use that to know where to cut:


That didn't go quite as intended:


So I simply put some tape on it and marked the holes with a pen (turns out this method is much faster too since you don't have to wait for the paint to dry...). Following that, I drilled some holes using my trusty little drill stand (this was also used to drill the pilot holes for the HDD rack):


The remaining excess material was filed away:


More update tomorrow when I get some more time to write things out!

 

It's looking great so far, keep up the good work!

 

these are the missing photos from the hard drive rack

 

Lovely! Nice work!

 

tranc3, BlackWhizz: Thanks, I try my best . I've had quite a bit of help from some people, so the credit goes to them too.

On to the promised update! After making the slot, I started creating a brushed aluminum effect. Adapting from the tutorial on the forum, I put some tape on the back to attach it to my working surface:


I used 160 grit wet/dry sanding paper. This goes quite fast, but the effect is quite subtle:

The top part won't be visible, so I didn't put much effort in that.

Of course, it completely slipped my mind that I needed some more holes (where's the power button indeed...). To protect the finish, I taped up the bottom part.
Turns out I don't have quite enough room for the remaining holes, so I shifted everything up a little. This way the first slots will be down some more. This means that about 5mm will have to be cut off from the bottom.


My father recently purchased a new addition to the tool shop, a big brother for my drill stand:


Time to try it out. It was used to make a nice big hole in the right part (slot for USB connectors). The excess material was then filed away again (I started with a round file first since it removes material more quickly):


Two handles will be attached to the top of the case. To give the front one some more strength, it will also a be attached to the button panel. Using all six holes is probably overkill, but this way I'm sure this won't be a weak point:


To finish off, I countersunk the holes to attach it to the case frame:


I still have to bend the panel, but I'll do that when I have some more experience with my bending brake. Don't want to mess up the work I put into this small part .


The USB connectors came as a simple PCB, so I had to make a bracket to attach it to the button panel:


It was made from a piece of scrap aluminum angle:
http://forums.bit-tech.net/picture.php?albumid=4

To make sure there are no shorts, two layers or tape were put on the bottom. The PCB was then fixed using some screws and nuts. The pins at the bottom don't actually touch the bracket, but you can never be too safe:
[IMG]http://forums.bit-tech.net/picture.php?albumid=400&pictureid=4097

 

this is awesome! Great work.

What thickness are you using for the case? Alu right? Grade?

Cheers!

 

This is a cool ass little box. Looking forward to updates!

 

nice work!
btw, do I spot a Rock Werchter 2009 bracet? I'm from Belgium 2! Wish I could have gone 2!

 

jups that would be mine :d
first time i stayed the whole 4 days and had a great time