Working on a new PC case

So back when I did up a PC case for Ikea Kallax shelving, that I use for.my media center machine.

Now I’m looking at revamping my NAS box.


So first off are the drive cages. I found a SATA backplane on Ali Express for some Chinese drive box, and it seems to have simple power requirements, and is for hot swap drive bays, so I ordered a bunch.

Next, I drew up a cage for the drives, and printed some. This holds the backplane, and four 3.5" SATA drives will just slide in and mate to the backplane.

Next is the case itself. I plan on it holding 8 of these modules for up to 32 hard drives spinning. I have a 16 port SATA controller, and another 16 port controller coming.

Currently, I have 25 drives split between 3 machines, many in eSATA portable enclosures, and power management is … nuts. When finished, this should hold 32 drives, with porential to re-use up to 6 of the eSATA enclosures, and it ought to all run off of a single ATX power supply. I plan to fit it into a standard 2 post 19" rack, probably 6U size

I was starting the main case design, but until the backplanes arrived from China, it was all guessing for dimensions of the drive bays, now that they’re here, I can plan to get the LR dirty again.

Edit: Printables link: Printables

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Got a bit of CAD done…



Provision is for a micro ATX board, but a full sized one isn’t that big an edit (And if you don’t need more than the first 4 slots, no edit at all is necessary.)

I put a provision for the 23030 fans that I already own into the top (Could also be bottom, since the top and bottom panels are the same profile) and a 120mm fan in the back (If you don’t edit for ful size ATX board)

It ended up being 8U. I was also kind of thinking that I’d accommodate 32 drives, but it seems that 24 is all there’s really space for, unless I abandon the idea of a 19" rack mount chassis. That’s still kind of on the table, since I’d like to just cram all the drives in there, maybe duplicate the ATX PSU mount and go with a dual PSU adapter.

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Okay, got the LR3 all squared up and cut some 12mm plywood. The other parts are all 1/4" (or 6mm, I guess, but I left room for an actual quarter inch)

The motherboard sypport is actual 1/4" melamine coated MDF, bit the tip, bottom.and back will be plywood. My calipers call it at 5.6mm. Seems like an odd number to me.

I discovered while measuring that my X/Y was out of square by 2.1mm over the 4’ span. I know that the belt blocks are square, so not sure what happened there, but it was easy enough to adjust with the REF independant motor comtrol, once I determined the amount to adjust by.

I’m thinking I need to re-do my torsion box for the actual machine size, the wings I added aren’t as good as I could hope for. If only I had a machine thst could make some reasonable precision parts for me… :rofl:

Meantime, the side panels are so close to square I can’t measure a difference in diagonals.

Time to get cutting my so-called quarter inch plywood.


Well, good news is this piece is about perfect. Bad news is that I forgot to re-zero my work coordinates and it cut out of the middle of my piece of plywood, and now I don’t have room for the other panels, and it’s 23:00 local so I’m done for tonight. I could do the front bit at the bottom I suppose, but I wanted to leave that for last. I guess I’ll screw in the PSU to the back plate. I can set it on the floor and test at least

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Wow replying to see finished product


Back and bottom attached, this keeps it all together

Top on with 200mm fan installed. Still needs a 120mm fan in the back.

Front view. I still need to install the power button. Maybe a LED, or maybe I’ll use an illuminated button. I also need to print off 2 more drive cages, thosr things take a long time…

This is not the project that I intended to use the LR3 for, but it definitely proves that the machine is capable of the work and precision I want for most projects.

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