Something cool I built for my server

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Last seen: 6 years 12 months ago
Joined: Dec 20 2003 - 10:38
Posts: 455
Something cool I built for my server

I had this ancient 1 gig scsi drive (for a mac) that was sitting in my basement forever. Its from the early 90's I believe. Probably cost a bundle. Anyway i never got rid of it just because it was so neato looking. It was an external drive enclosure for a 5 1/4 inch full height hard drive. Useless by todays standards.

So took it apart and decided to make it an enclosure for a few ultrawide lvd scsi drives. I went to the machine shop and we drilled out the old bracket for the 5 1/4 inch drive. I then found a coulpe of cages from a couple of cases that held three 3 1/2 inch 1/2 height drives. I mounted them onto the plate that orginally held the 5 1/4 inch drive.

I then tossed the powersupply board. It was only 80 watts and I really don't think that is enough. I tore apart an older AT class powersupply (200 watts) and removed the circuit board. It turned out that the power plug and swtich wiring on the external drive enclosure matched up perfectly to the AT powersupply board. I did have to remove 3 out of 4 of the old standaoffs and mount new ones (the new board was bigger).

I spliced in another drive connector by cutting off the old AT motherboard connectiors and taking 2 black/1 yellow/1 red wire and splicing it to a power plug (I needed 5 power plugs for 5 drives). I desoldered all the other AT motherboard connector wires because they weren't needed anymore and i needed as much space as I could get in there.

I managed to cram 5 hard drives into the 2 cages and plugged them in and powered it up. The comptuer recognized all 5 drives, i was pleased.

Now for cooling. Scsi drives run hot and i knew that having 5 of them crammed into a little space with no airflow was going to cause major heat. It did, after running the drives for 2 hours (formatting and stuff) the top of the drive cages were very hot to the touch (i didn't have the cover on at the time).

I took the front 2 plastic faceplates off the front of the cover. (You know, standard 5 1/4 inch bay 1/2 height faceplates). I then mounted a dual muffin fan thingy (came out of an old 1U server case) on the front of the case cover.

I then put it all together and powered it up. It actually runs quite cool when the cover is in place, i guess it forces the airflow though the drives cooling them down enough. Even when i shut it down and took the cover off and felt the cover of one of the drives in the middle, it was still fairly cool.

Also I chucked the old 50pin to 50pin centronics connector, it was not useful anymore. I now just use a really long 7 position LVD/SE scsi cable and it falls out the back of my case and connects to my server.

All that work for a total of 70 gigs. LOL. I'm just a geek at heart. There are 2 20 gig and 3 10 gig drives in there. I really don't care though. Its a fun little project. Here are pics:
IMAGE(http://www.spilky.com/bo/scsi/scsi1.jpg)
IMAGE(http://www.spilky.com/bo/scsi/scsi2.jpg)
IMAGE(http://www.spilky.com/bo/scsi/scsi3.jpg)

Its going to be mainly filestorage for my AD server at home.

moosemanmoo's picture
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Last seen: 9 years 3 months ago
Joined: Aug 17 2004 - 15:24
Posts: 686
Is it loud? I remember the SC

Is it loud? I remember the SCSI hard drive in my Sun sounding like a jet engine, and that was only one.

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Last seen: 6 years 12 months ago
Joined: Dec 20 2003 - 10:38
Posts: 455
Yup, its loud. Sounds like a

Yup, its loud. Sounds like a jet plane when all the drives are powering up (the 5 in the main computer case and the 5 in the little thing I built above). Thats why it spends its time in the basement acting as a server.

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