Udat · Mashie Design

It is time for a new little project again. This time I need a small footprint file server with a big internal space. Right now the files are distributed all over the the network forcing a couple of computers to constantly be on wasting power and causing noise.

Project Udat will try to fill the following requirements:

Small form factor. Silent. Low power usage. RAID 5 for redundancy. Plenty of storage.

Part 2

Here we have the canvas, a Morex Venus CP668 Mini-ITX case. It has enough internal volume to hold a device three 5.25" bays tall and a 200W PSU.

And that tall device is this 5-bay hot-swap mobile S-ATA HDD rack. Just lift a handle and the drive will come out nicely.

On the rear it has 5 normal Molex plugs so no need for S-ATA power converters. Underneath that you can see the five S-ATA connectors.

First mod victim for this project, an Epia M-10000 board that had a slightly to tall audio connector. It had to meet a violent death but the motherboard survived the plier attack.

With the audio connector gone it was easy to fit a Raidcore 4852 8-port S-ATA RAID controller in a PCI riser. The controller is a 133MHz PCI-X device that luckily is backwards compatible to 32bit PCI.

All rivets were drilled out, then the side and front pieces were cut to a suitable size and shape to allow the mobile rack to fit. With the rivets back in place this is how it turned out.

Part 3

Next step was to see how it looked like with the shell on.

The acrylic beezel didn’t suit to be modded so it got scrapped. Instead the inner plastic piece of the beezel got cut to shape and a new front was cut out of 1mm aluminium sheet.

One last test fit before the aluminium and plastic was glued together with epoxy.

Front beezel filled, sanded, primed and ready to be painted. Holes for start key and HDD activity LEDs has been added as well.

While painting the internals were assembled. The power to the drives is provided by five 90 degree Molex plugs added to the PSU. It was just about space enough to use normal S-ATA cables.

From the side you can see the limited space to use for the RAID controller. The PSU cables are left as they are since they might be needed in the future when the Epia board will be upgraded to an Epia DP with gigabit ethernet.

Part 4

Project Udat is done.

The big wire bundle goes from the RAID controller to the front five ultrabright yellow LEDs for HDD activity light. Satin black was chosen for the outside to keep it stylish for many years to come.

All in all the internals has quite unrestricted airflow from the front of the mobile rack and back to the PSU and the two 40mm fans. To make sure all air is forced over the harddrives the side vents are covered on the inside by painted plywood.

So here it is, 5 x 200GB (740GB usable after RAID 5 and format) in exactly half a cubic foot of space. To prevent accidental power off the power is controlled by a key.

All design goals set up has been reached.

Until next time, have fun.