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I've been trying to avoid buying a 4 bay esata/usb3 enclosure for some time now. Reason being is that i have 4 wd 1tb green drives that i want to move out of my pc case and replace them with an 8gb seagate archive HDD. I just can justify paying over $100 for something that will hold $20 worth of drives, so I was thinking of building my own. How difficult can it be?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

I think the above enclosure represents something that i would want to make. I already have an old slim chassis with a slim 80w PSU that i could use. What I am not sure about is the backplane. i was thinking of just getting a 4 port multiplier/1 esata connector card like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Sata-Multiplier-A ... multiplier

Question is, how would I trigger the PSU to power up the drives and the port multiplier card? And would this even work?

I'm not sure about the project (never tried anything like this), but ATX power supplies will power on when you short one particular pin on the 24-pin connector to a ground pin, if I remember correctly. I think that's what motherboards do as well.

You could mount a spare old PC board just to conveniently power up the drives, with the internal data cables disconnected and the external card/cables hacked in place. The spare system may come in handy for diagnostics or formatting, but then you'd need an OS on bootable USB or one of the drives.

localhostrulez wrote:

I'm not sure about the project (never tried anything like this), but ATX power supplies will power on when you short one particular pin on the 24-pin connector to a ground pin, if I remember correctly. I think that's what motherboards do as well.

This. My EVGA PSU came with a cap for the 24-pin connector that will short the appropriate lead to ground. I use it with my spare PSU for testing fans & such.

Yeah, permanently shorting the black green wire will do it. Sans digital also makes a drive cage that will do it for you. It's basically a cage, fan, and plug for the atx psu connection with a switch, see below, I've seen that for ~$25 on sale sometimes.

http://www.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-HDDR ... B001LF40KE

I've used several of em, and they work great assuming you don't need to switch out drives too much (you screw in standoffs to slide into the cage)

madlemming wrote:

Yeah, permanently shorting the black green wire will do it. Sans digital also makes a drive cage that will do it for you. It's basically a cage, fan, and plug for the atx psu connection with a switch, see below, I've seen that for ~$25 on sale sometimes.

http://www.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-HDDR ... B001LF40KE

I've used several of em, and they work great assuming you don't need to switch out drives too much (you screw in standoffs to slide into the cage)

Cool, I'll have to remember that. Looks like a cheap yet functional solution for adding drive bays to a storage server. Would be nice if it had a bracket to mount the PSU to it somehow though.

trackerben wrote:

You could mount a spare old PC board just to conveniently power up the drives, with the internal data cables disconnected and the external card/cables hacked in place. The spare system may come in handy for diagnostics or formatting, but then you'd need an OS on bootable USB or one of the drives.

unfortunately, there wont be much room for a board since the drives would take up most of the space.

madlemming wrote:

Yeah, permanently shorting the black green wire will do it. Sans digital also makes a drive cage that will do it for you. It's basically a cage, fan, and plug for the atx psu connection with a switch, see below, I've seen that for ~$25 on sale sometimes.

http://www.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-HDDR ... B001LF40KE

I've used several of em, and they work great assuming you don't need to switch out drives too much (you screw in standoffs to slide into the cage)

nice! have never seen a setup like that! i guess you can add your own panels. will try the black green wire. i think i can link it to the wires on the front panel power switch.

albundy wrote:

unfortunately, there wont be much room for a board since the drives would take up most of the space.

Yea if he goes with that drive cage instead of the slim case. But since it still needs an ATX supply it might be neater to just do the job in a mATX or smaller enclosure. Gives the option to install a spare system for other things.

albundy wrote:

What I am not sure about is the backplane. i was thinking of just getting a 4 port multiplier/1 esata connector card like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Sata-Multiplier-A ... multiplier

Neat project.

But I always thought the trick with this was that very few SATA hosts support port multipliers. I remember Intel used to explicitly state that their SATA controllers didn't support multipliers, and I know that the el cheapo hot-garbage Silicon Image chipsets found on most add in cards don't support it either.

Not sure about the other options like Marvell, or whether Intel has changed their stance on this.

Curious to hear what you find, what works, and what doesn't.

divide_by_zero wrote:

albundy wrote:

What I am not sure about is the backplane. i was thinking of just getting a 4 port multiplier/1 esata connector card like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Sata-Multiplier-A ... multiplier

Neat project.

But I always thought the trick with this was that very few SATA hosts support port multipliers. I remember Intel used to explicitly state that their SATA controllers didn't support multipliers, and I know that the el cheapo hot-garbage Silicon Image chipsets found on most add in cards don't support it either.

Not sure about the other options like Marvell, or whether Intel has changed their stance on this.

Curious to hear what you find, what works, and what doesn't.

The SATA ports on my 900-series AMD chipset work with port multipliers, but hot plug support through a multiplier is a little squirrelly. You need to make sure all of the drives on the multiplier are quiescent and unmounted before hot plugging/unplugging any of them or bad things tend to happen.

I have no idea if Intel's current consumer chipsets are any better/worse in this regard.

IIRC relatively recent JMicron controllers support port multipliers.

madlemming wrote:

Yeah, permanently shorting the black green wire will do it. Sans digital also makes a drive cage that will do it for you. It's basically a cage, fan, and plug for the atx psu connection with a switch, see below, I've seen that for ~$25 on sale sometimes.

http://www.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-HDDR ... B001LF40KE

I've used several of em, and they work great assuming you don't need to switch out drives too much (you screw in standoffs to slide into the cage)

I've used several of these for modding projects and they are great.

just brew it! wrote:

divide_by_zero wrote:

albundy wrote:

What I am not sure about is the backplane. i was thinking of just getting a 4 port multiplier/1 esata connector card like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Sata-Multiplier-A ... multiplier

Neat project.

But I always thought the trick with this was that very few SATA hosts support port multipliers. I remember Intel used to explicitly state that their SATA controllers didn't support multipliers, and I know that the el cheapo hot-garbage Silicon Image chipsets found on most add in cards don't support it either.

Not sure about the other options like Marvell, or whether Intel has changed their stance on this.

Curious to hear what you find, what works, and what doesn't.

The SATA ports on my 900-series AMD chipset work with port multipliers, but hot plug support through a multiplier is a little squirrelly. You need to make sure all of the drives on the multiplier are quiescent and unmounted before hot plugging/unplugging any of them or bad things tend to happen.

I have no idea if Intel's current consumer chipsets are any better/worse in this regard.

IIRC relatively recent JMicron controllers support port multipliers.

Glad you mentioned this. I have an AMD 870 chipset, which I've figured out does support port multipliers, but never knew that there might be a chance that it wouldn't work or be incompatible. I definitely wont be hot plugging anything, as this is just meant to be external storage to free up some space in my pc for a newer drive.

albundy wrote:

will try the black green wire. i think i can link it to the wires on the front panel power switch.

I think that would only keep the power on while you're holding the power button if it's a standard soft power switch.

Melvar wrote:

albundy wrote:

will try the black green wire. i think i can link it to the wires on the front panel power switch.

I think that would only keep the power on while you're holding the power button if it's a standard soft power switch.

Correct. If I understand it correctly, all those buttons do is close a little 5VDC (?) circuit with the motherboard, which then has to short that black/green/whatever wire on the 24-pin ATX connector, and keep it shorted while the PC is running. Hence they're soft power buttons (unlike the old days, with AT, where the power button had 120VAC behind it and off truly meant off). Though if you can get a pushbutton switch (is that the right term?), sorta AT style, that should work. One of my friends uses ATX power supplies to run random projects, keeps a paperclip stuck in there, and switches them from the back (when he actually turns them off, that is).

Edit: Speaking of AT, remember this? http://cdn5.howtogeek.com/wp-content/up ... ws-953.jpg (Yes, I'm not too young to have completely missed out on this, even if it was a legacy thing even back then.)

Oh, I didn't know you could multiply SATA ports. Makes sense I as the interface is serial so packets would just be interleaved and share bandwidth I guess....

SATA power for mechanical drives is crazy easy. I'm not aware of any consumer drives that require the 3.3V line, so you can just use any cheap AC adapter that provides 5V and 12V lines simultaneously. These used to be cheap and easy to source for Molex 4-pin connectors and you could splice them into a spare SATA cable from a modular PSU. Just be aware that spinup of drives pulls around 1A from the line (even though they'll use less than half of that when under full write load) so powering up all four drives simultaneously would probably use DC1A@12V=~50W. Either get an AC adapter than can handle a peak draw of 4A or do something to ensure that spinup is always staggered. You could also just use two smaller ones (getting 2A adapters is easy) or you could use a 12V-only one which is easier to find with high current ratings and wire up a 12V-to-5V stepper for the 5V lines.

As for enclosure you wouldn't even need a fan if you built an open frame (two pieces of ply/MDF/perspex with the drives themselves acting as cross braces, for the simplest example) but otherwise you probably have half a dozen 12V fans kicking around in your mandatory "old computer stuff" box(es).

albundy wrote:

Glad you mentioned this. I have an AMD 870 chipset, which I've figured out does support port multipliers, but never knew that there might be a chance that it wouldn't work or be incompatible. I definitely wont be hot plugging anything, as this is just meant to be external storage to free up some space in my pc for a newer drive.

Chrispy_ wrote:

Oh, I didn't know you could multiply SATA ports. Makes sense I as the interface is serial so packets would just be interleaved and share bandwidth I guess....

As with anything technological, there are caveats. Aside from the potential hot plug issue I mentioned already, there are also two different standards for how port multipliers can multiplex the streams: command-based and frame-based. Near as I can tell, port multipliers are always one or the other; chipsets can support either, both, or neither (if they are not port multiplier capable at all).