Turning a old Case into a SATA sub system

[LostFor]

Hi I got a question
I was just wondering if it is possible to turn an old computer case into a sata enclosure
I know that I can get the multi-line kit from http://www.cooldrives.com
but I have yet to find out what type of power supply it would take?
I am not planing on doing this any time soon but I have a few older cases laying around and I think it would be fun to put them to use.
Mostly I am wondering how you would go about powering the hard drives

thanks again all

 

[The Hunter]

If you have a standard ATX powersupply, you can turn it on without a motherboard by shorting two pins (can't remember which they are ATM, but it's easy enough to google it). It would be easy enough to set up a simple switch to do so, and then your drives should run without any difficulties.

If you don't have a spare PSU already, search for CD/DVD duplicator powersupplies. They're made for the same purpose - standalone drives with no host system. A quick search shows they run fairly cheaply, but I can't vouch for the quality of the units. The one theoretical downside is that they likely wouldn't have the 3.3V line for SATA drives, but pretty much all drives seem to run fine without that anyways, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

After you've done that, it's just a matter of figuring out what kind of controller setup you want to use. Multilane is certainly an option, you could also look into getting a Dell Perc5 controller relatively cheaply on Ebay and then getting some appropriate SAS to eSATA cables. I'm not sure whether that would be cost effective compared with the Multilane setup.