LED Tipped Hard Drive Switches

[Shotglass01]

Hi all. This is my first ever "mod". I wanted to switch on and off my hard drives in my system as I have 4 of them. I didn't want to use drive bays anymore. They seemed too clunky. This is really easy and is working great.

I did not want ot modify or alter in any way the power supply. So I got adapters to go between the switches and supply from PI manufacturing as seen here. You can also see the switch in the upper left. It comes with mounting hardware. It's an NKK model M2122TCFW01. I also wanted to use the SATA power connectors from the power supply.

I soldered in the resistor in line then shrink wrapped it all up. I found, since I don't have a heat gun, that the toaster works really well in shrinking tubing on wires.

The leads here go between the power supply and hard drive.

The switch all connected up using 1/8 inch crimp connectors I found from FrozenCPU. It's a tight fit and it's fussy, but it works.

The cable and switch complete!

Here I have all four switches mounted and connected. (Sorry for the low light).

The switch breaks the +5v and +12v lines as it is a DPDT switch. The grounds go through the entire length of the cable and are continuous. That way I never lose a ground in case something goes awry with the switches.

And the result. You can see drives 2 and 4 are off. SATA 1 is the DVD.

 

[jwalk6]

Doesn't anyone care what an astounding achievement this is!

What's wrong with you people!

It's got toggle switches and SATA for pete's Sake!

I like the little LED's at the end of the toggles..
They're red and green like Xmas or you can practice your binary...
Green=1 Red=0
1010 0110 1110...

But seriously..

Definitely a worthwhile mod for multi-drive setups. I know I get tired of swapping drives in and out
of drive bays and worrying about dropping them in the process. RAID is nice but sometimes it just
doesn't fit your needs and this is a worthwhile mod that I'm going to try out myself.

 

[Dew itt right]

Awesome idea! I personally don't mind using my drive bay docking stations but it'd be nice to not have to. Excellent way to disconnect a backup drive when not in use.

Sorry if I'm missing the obvious but what's the purpose of the resistor?

 

[Shotglass01]

Thanks! The resistor is needed so the LED's on the switches don't get too much power and blow out. They're sharing the 5v line. I think it's a 1/8 watt 330 ohm resistor. What is nice is that once this rig is replaced (hopefully more than 4+ years), I can use them again in another build.