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Tiny case for a NAS?

Antimatter

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 6, 2003
Messages
342
I'm not sure if this is the proper forum to post this, but I couldn't really find the proper one, but anyway my question is, is it possiable to find or dig up an shuttle sized case that has 3x 5.25 inch bays so i can stick in this bad boy 5 in 3 hotswappable enclosure

To give you guys a idea of what I'm talking about, look at this project Tera-ITX

That's what I want to do. I was hoping to maybe find a decent shuttle motherboard that i could stick on an low powered pentium mobile processor, perhaps the yonah processor, then if needed buy an sata PCI card or something alikin to that, because I'm going to be doing the raid in software, thus it will need hefy cpu to be able to keep up with a gigabyte ethernet and 5-6ish disk RAID 5 or 6 array.

So any recommendations?
 
Short answer: Not really.

You wont find 3 bays unless you go to a Desktop style case and I think not even those have 3 bays. You can mod a case, though.
 
Hmm, I don't really have that much tools here, if it can't really be done with a dremmel and some limited access to tools then i'm SoL on the modding side.

But that mod does look similar to what I wanted, except for replacing the epia with something with more heftier cpu, something that would support a pentium-M preferly with a gigabyte LAN.

Otherwise that mods looks like a exact match for what i want to do, but probably will have to find a shuttle case a bit larger than that.
 
synaps3 said:
The smallest thing you could get would be a mATX tower if you are not willing to do some modding.

Here is the only two I could find on Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811190072
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811190055

Oh I'm willing to do some modding, but I am just limited by what i have avaible here, if it was back at my parent's house, there would be no limitation, but here in my own apartment, i would have to purchase all the hardware and so forth to actually mod stuff, that depends on how much modding I'll need to do.

http://fwdepot.com/thestore/images/firewire-multibay.jpg

I was thinking of something perhaps like the middle cast with 4 bays, i could eat up 3 bays with the 5 in 3 array, then use the 4th bay as a DVD burner or maybe tapedrive bay for backup....
 
cancersticks said:
With some modding you may be able to get this case and than throw in a super sexy P-M or P4 mini ITX board, like this. mmm...four Gb ports.

Goddamn that motherboard looks sexy! That would be perfect for my firewall also! I just hope those Gigabit ports are on seperate pci bus from the actual pci bus, other wise there might be a chokepoint with the RAID card and the gigabit ethernet.

Otherwise that looks like a bloody perfect motherboard for my needs!

But wow the price! $365 bloody dollars, but then again its a hard to beat platform for sticking in a pentium-M into
 
I think this will be doable, but I got one concern, the power supply seems to be in the way because of the enclosure i choiced has a fan on the back end of it to force air to flow over/through the harddrive array, looks like it would hit the back of the shuttle, how hard/fesiable would it be to relocate the PSU to maybe somewhere below/frontish of the case which would give the enclosure more room....

Also much modding would this kind of work require? I'm willing to do some modding, but if it require a full room full of 200 tools I won't be able to do it, but if most of them can be gotten cheaply like dremmel, and some other tools, along with paints then it'll be doable for me :)
 
It's kind of hard to say just going by the pictures, but it doesn't look like you'd really be able to move the PS around too much. I think you'd have room to still mount the 3-5 rack in the front and have some room to spare between that and the PS. If the space is still a concern, for half the price get one of the cases synap3 pointed out. You would get more room and a beefier power supply. (Which is a good thing, as a generic 200w seems like it might be under powered for 5 drives.)

If you stuck with the case i pointed out, you would definitely have to cut into the 3.5 slot below it, to make room for it. (Also might have to find some way to support the bottom better.) You could do it with just a dremel though.
 
cancersticks said:
It's kind of hard to say just going by the pictures, but it doesn't look like you'd really be able to move the PS around too much. I think you'd have room to still mount the 3-5 rack in the front and have some room to spare between that and the PS. If the space is still a concern, for half the price get one of the cases synap3 pointed out. You would get more room and a beefier power supply. (Which is a good thing, as a generic 200w seems like it might be under powered for 5 drives.)

If you stuck with the case i pointed out, you would definitely have to cut into the 3.5 slot below it, to make room for it. (Also might have to find some way to support the bottom better.) You could do it with just a dremel though.

My main problem is, I'm not scared of modding, I did ton of modding on my lian-li computer four years ago to rebuild it into a suitable platform for watercooling, including replaceing almost the entire top part of the tower with my own custom farabliced aluminium mounting plates and other things. But the problem is, that was done with my father's very well equiped farm shop, so I had access to his technical knowledge and alots of tools. Here I don't have that much tools, most of them would need to be purchased unfortunally.

However, I'm not scared of modding. Anyway my number one problem is, I want to cramp that 5 drive cage into the smallest case possiable, because, it needs to be portable, my main problem with my lian-li rig is that it is just too massive to be easly moved around, and I need to fit everything I own into a small old car so the smaller the NAS is, the better! I'll need to do some more measuring to see if those towers posted earlier is small enough, but the smaller it is the better.
 
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