Hi there, Greetings from Penang, Malaysia. I was about to say 'sunny' Penang, but it's been raining almost everyday. This is a simple mod that I did to a new PC part that I bought last week. It's a cheap USB H/disk case, selling for RM78, around US $20. It's a simple aluminium casing with a controller board that has the USB circuitry with 2 indicator LEDs. No cooling fans. My first mod is to make a stand so that the case can stand vertically instead of horizontal (to save space). I looked around my house for any plastics that can be made into the stand and I found this It's a non functioning emergency lamp. Only interested in the clear plastic covers. Here is one half of the cover, marked up for the mod. Cutting with my RTX and filing done. I've glued some rubber at the base to make the stand less slippery. Here is the casing on the stand. My next step is to get rid of the big power adapter that comes with the unit. I wanted to power the case directly from the PC's molex connector. The connector that goes into the unit is a 6 pins connector similar to a mouse PS2 connector. A quick trip to the local electronic shop (Penang's equivalent of Maplins?) The pin diagram is stated behind the adapter. A simple soldering job and finished with Vantec cable sleeving And here's the complete picture, above my PC, which is also undergoing some mods (hence the hole at the top). I'm stopping here for now. But in the future, I'm planning to add a small fan from an old CPU cooler to cool the unit. This will involve cutting up the casing, and since I've just got the unit,I'm not going to invalidate the guarantee yet. I'm also going to change the indicator LEDs to extra bright ones. Hope you've enjoyed the simple mod. ARM
Please post again when you add the fan my external gets a little too warm as well. Oh and I think your warrany is already void by essential rewiring the power connecter.
Nice mod. Odd design for an emergency light (pending it is electric, like it looks), but makes for a nice HD stand. As far the warrenty, what they don't know won't hurt them. Since you didn't modify the orginal, they have no idea you used with a 'non-approved' power supply.
