Modified external 4-drive enclosure (PICS)

jmroberts70

2[H]4U
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Oct 15, 2002
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I recently purchased an external eSATA 4-drive enclosure from Fry's and almost immediately noticed the drives weren't adequately cooled one bit. From these "before" shots (sorry, I didn't take any before I started chopping it up)...

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I'm sure you can see the problems: rear fan has very little intake area to draw fresh, cool air over the drives other than the small perforations at the sides of the case. There's also a plastic cover over the electronics below (including the onboard PSU) so no air flow will ever make through this area (and it was getting quite toasty down there)...

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So, first I removed the inadequate fan from the rear of the case and ran an extender of the onboard fan power to the front of the case to hook up with a 120mm variable speed adjustable fan...

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I left just enough plastic on the front cover to allow remounting with the tabs on the bottom and the thumb screws above. It's almost like they intended to use a fan like this!

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The fit is just perfect!

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Naturally I had to dress up some of the internal wiring while I was there!

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Finally, I added a small black handle to the top of the case and made sure a drive would fit below it with the screws there.

All in all, a great little box (for the price) that I have currently 2 500GB drives running a RAID0 striping array with room for another 2 drives (coming soon). I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. The drives and PSU still warm up a little but not by much. I like the fact that the fan has it's own switch (as it came out of the box) so I can leave the fan off when starting up so I don't tax the PSU too much while spooling up the drives.
 
Thanx! Oh 'yea, FYI, the box I purchased can be found on newegg for about $200. The Venus T4S.

Also, I plan on replacing some of the case sides with perforated sheet metal in the near future when I manage to find my riveter and metal nibbler!
 
Nice mod. I have the IDE version of that enclosure. I actually find the stock fan to have sufficient cooling power for my four drives.
 
Nice mod. I have the IDE version of that enclosure. I actually find the stock fan to have sufficient cooling power for my four drives.

Well maybe the newer 500GB drives get hotter than older IDE drives. I actually ran the system for about 30 min and quickly took the enclosure apart to find not only were the drives pretty hot but also the PSU heatsinks and components beneath.
 
sweet setup, would have done things alittle different but still real nice

Well tell me your ideas because I'm probably going to do another one soon!

BTW, I mounted the fan controller on the side of the case with some hot glue. Much nicer I'd say than having it hanging out!

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well using that case directly i would mod it so the fan was in the back, still cut out the same about as you but use likea mesh similar to modders mesh in the front, one thing you could do is sand her down and give her some color and shine if you like, give it an nice extra touch, if you are wanting to build another sata enclosrue what you could look at is like an old computer case mid tower or full it doesn't matter, outfit the whole thing with sata drives, the website satagear.com has some great stuff, they have a multilane set up where you could stick four drives into a case and only have one sata cable going into the computer verus four cables, thats what ive been looking at a sata build, just my two cents, but what you did so far is great, i say give it a nice new shiny paint job
 
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