Thread: question with setting up a custom harddrive array

Well, I wanted to have some opinions before i'm actually going to buy anythinng.

In the persuit for more harddisk space, (and for a safer solution for the day that any agency would do a raid on my house - okay I am a bit paranoid perhaps) I was thinking about getting 4 extra 1.5 TB hdd's. In total I would have 9 disks and as this is to much to stack in my actual case. I the past I already had to deal with a problem of not enough sata ports on my motherboard - therefore I bought a 4 port-pci sata controller.

I also have an old casette-player, part of my home stereo, that i didn't use anymore. I removed everything inside, but the cover still sugests it is just a regular old casette player. I would like to stack my harddisks inside of this case; but I do not see how I should do this. The metal of the case is rather hard and I would like to make a 3.25" Sata drive-housing system, where i just can shove the disks inside (like a hot-plugable system)

What material should I use (I have no experience in fixing multiple parts of metal together, welding? I fear the metal is not thick enough.. And i don"t have any experience with it). Maybe you know some sata-pile components that are for sale? (low budget, preferable webshops in EU). I have room for about 4 rows of 3 harddrives in total. I also would need power+sata connectors to fix at the end of the individual sockets so i can 'plug' the drive in.


In a later stage I will mount a mini ATX motherboard in another part of the stereo system so I can connect the sata connectors to a system -and to the network..

Do you think this is a good Idea? Any help, reference, suggestion is welcome!
thanx for reading true!

dont know precisely what you trying to do but you could check out this

SHARKOON Technologies GmbH

it might give you some ideas.

and im pretty sure, if you are real handy, you could buy all those parts @ a electronic shop but than you will have to place everything very precisely to make it a removable rack.

To give you an idea of what I am aiming at. So I would like pretty much a concept as this one, but then ofcourse on a much smaller scale. These are made for 45 drives and I found a lot of usefull info at the blog of the people who made this; These cases are prefabricated by another company (welded), but as I already mentoined, this technique is out of my reach; Also, i've been looking for shops offering some of the parts( f.e. a Port Muliplier Backplane ) being used here, but didn't find anything usefull.

lol good luck with that man if you want that from a casette recorder better start welding.

might be easier to buy a case and camouflage the case than the other way around.

Okay, well i'm making progress here. I'm building my custom case for my fileserver, not any more with this initial idea to hide it an electronic device, but more a NAS witch I could hide anywhere in my house.
So basically it will have a complete running system in the case with 12 HDD's.
I'm going to make a cube design similar to the one of this guy. It won't be as big and as fancy as this case looks, but it's his ideas in the way he build the internal structure that i'm going to use for my project.

You can find his whole work log here
Ones my work on the cube is completed, and I guess i will be a long time before i'm done with this., I will start with the software section.
Therefor I need a bit of your ideas guys. I'm more into building things than into programming them.
I will encrypt the HDD's using Truecrypt, and maybe go for a dual layer encryption. I guess using an AES-Twofish encryption algorithm would be enough? For the OS i prefer windows based because I just don't know much about linux/unix. I would like to be able to access this server remotely true my home network, but I would prefer have it be locked off from internet, or the OS should really really need hackproof protection. (i'd prefer having internet access so it wouldn't be a mess having to change the file's location every time seeding is finished, but my main purpose is to remain hidden for any internal en external outsider). I would also like the fileserver to be invisible on the network, only to be able to be accessed true a certain procedure.

Ideas are welcome! If you'd have any questions, be my guest!!

myfm: Well actually i'm getting it done with a rivet shooter (don't know if you say it like that in english) and it does go pretty easy. Most hard part will be cutting bigger plates of aluminium. For cutting I have tried using a jigsaw but it makes the borders not so pretty actually.. Huge work for smoothening the borders afterworth... But I'm patient and I have time for this project :)

LOL, I love how paranoid you are. But hey, go nuts. My critique follows.

Using your old tape deck was the best idea. If cops raid your house, they're going to do a search and they will find this new box that you're building. You can put ultra quite cooling system on the tape deck, and the cops will probably just walk right past it (make sure you use WiFi and not wired ethernet). If you really want to throw them off, have a dummy file server out in the open with some innocent junk on it. After the cops leave, get rid of the naughty file server (because they'll probably come back).

On the unit itself, I would scavenge an old case. You need a motherboard pan, and a hard drive cage. You should also be able to find some stock strips of steal from one of those large chain hardware stores. The strips should be an inch or a little bit more wide. You'll need a drill, a steel cutting saw, a vise, and a hammer. Plan it out ahead of time, but basically you're going to cut out the mother board pan and the hard drive cage. Then you're going to want to use the steal strips to connect everything together. Just cut the strips down to size, and use the vise and the hammer to bash them to roughly the right angles and twists, drill holes and mount everything together. If you've planned it out well, it'll fit inside your tape deck case. Then mount the contraption you've just built to the bottom of the tape deck. I hope that made sense. The key is making custom brackets out of those steal strips. No wielding required.

Anyway, if you do make this thing, please post pictures.

Just a note if you want to encrypt your drives ....I suggest this.....
CipherChain from Addonics
its hardware based with a key ... you pull the key out ...no access......

as far as the case......
list what powertools you have available to you...a total budget (even if its small), and exact space requirements....and I could come up with something for you.

As far as cutting sheet metal use a grinder...4.5 inch or 6 inch doesnt really matter DeWalt D28110 Heavy Duty 4-1/2 Inch Small Angle Grinder (115mm)
and if your using a rivet system to join surfaces.....start in the center working your way out to keep any play from building up that could compromise your rig there in the future...

if you own your home.....insulate a box and via ducts and airmovers actively evac hot air out of the box containing your rig.....and put that and the box itself in the attic mounted on vibration isolaters such as urethane mounts or something more elaborate if you like.....this will take care of cooling line of sight ..and all you must do is hardwire a cat5/cat6/cat7 cable from your modem/router to the attic.
use rj-45 wallplates....and use a dummy plate in another room to explain why your router runs a wire into the wall....but instead of going to say a bedroom it actually goes to the attic .
From my experience..in a video serving environment the server should be hardwired if possible...as it doesn't matter as much if a client is wireless...but to serve multiple stations from a wireless central server has never worked good for me.

Keep in mind these are just suggestions in case you havent thought of them...if you want, gimme a general quote in inches or cm of the size constraints and ill get something useful to you.

If not ......... GOOD LUCK ---- I LOVE PROJECTS

Just a note if you want to encrypt your drives ....I suggest this.....
CipherChain from Addonics
its hardware based with a key ... you pull the key out ...no access......

I like this idea but then I would need one hardware unit for each HDD, and that would just be ugly :)
I was thinking doing them with truecrypt with auto dismount on, so when someone would take the machine away (so power would have to be interupted) the encrypted disks aren't still password mounted.

as far as the case......
list what powertools you have available to you...a total budget (even if its small), and exact space requirements....and I could come up with something for you.

Well, in tools I have almost everything I need I think. I'll list some tools to give you an idea;
Jigsaw, a normal sander, a circular saw, a drill, a belt sander, a dremel (a rotary multitool) tools to make screw-holes (don't have the experience dhow) , ...

As far as cutting sheet metal use a grinder...4.5 inch or 6 inch doesnt really matter DeWalt D28110 Heavy Duty 4-1/2 Inch Small Angle Grinder (115mm)
and if your using a rivet system to join surfaces.....start in the center working your way out to keep any play from building up that could compromise your rig there in the future...

Okay, thanks for the hint! I was actualy thinking using the screwholes-maker-tool (dutch: draadtap) so I could, if necessary, replace parts that are screwd together. For the construction parts that stay in one unit I have used the rivet shooter..

f you own your home....

I do but that's the part for in the end :). I'm not going to make new holes in my wall before the project is finished.

Keep in mind these are just suggestions in case you havent thought of them...if you want, gimme a general quote in inches or cm of the size constraints and ill get something useful to you.

Well tell you what.. I will start to get the basic material for what i'm working on right now. During the process, and if i'm not to embarrassed of the result, I will post some pics with a bit of information on what i'm willing to do next, and how I should do it. It would be great to have some feedback from you!

As for now, I have still one big exam to finish so it will take a bit before you'd see any result here.