[Discuss] D-I-Y NAS enclosures

[tmetro-blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

Benjamin Carr wrote:
> I am personally enamored of the HP Proliant Microserver... It has
> a 64bit AMD Athlon II Neo processor, two DIMM slots (supports ECC), one
> gigabit NIC, a four drive cage (not hot-swap)...

Nice packaging. All that in a 10" x 10" x 8" cube. Given the 4-drive
cage, it seems to be aimed at NAS builders.


> It is $330 from NewEgg with a "throw away" 250GB drive and 1GB of Ram. I
> wish they would sell it "bare" for $50 less but the don't.

Agreed.

I wish there were better options for D-I-Y NAS enclosures. The few that
are available, like:
http://www.e-itx.com/cfi-a7879.html
 or
http://www.mypccase.com/chmiitxcawi4.html

are ridiculously expensive (they want $180 for the first; that's just
for the case, power supply, and drive cage; you can buy 4-bay SATA
enclosure, which includes all of that plus port multiplier electronics
for around $100; the later can be found for $120, but gets poor reviews
for its power supply).

I'm not sure why China hasn't stepped up with some offerings here.
What's needed is:

-cube style enclosure with space for a mini-ITX motherboard;
-150 ~ 200W power supply;
-5-bay drive cage (to accommodate two RAID1 pairs, plus a hot spare):
  -importantly the cage *must* be trayless; SATA drives are designed to
  handle this and there is no excuse for using trays these days;
  -optionally include a SATA port multiplier on the drive backplane, so
  a cheaper mini-ITX board with fewer SATA ports can be used;
-bonus: include an internal 2.5" bay for an SSD or SATA-to-CF card
adapter to hold the OS.

About the closest you can get to this is to cobble together a
combination using a "CD duplicator" type enclosure:
http://www.ocie.com/xcase-pro-duplicator-case-5-bay-64247-prd1.htm

along with a hot-swap, trayless 5-drive cage:
http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SKUSearch_v3.asp?scriteria=BA25917

and you end up with something that looks like:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215093&cm_re=sata_port_multiplier-_-16-215-093-_-Product

and yet with the cage costing $100 alone, the total price isn't much
better than the purpose-made commercial solution. Clearly economies of
scale haven't hit items like these drive cages, given that you can get
an entire computer enclosure with power supply for half their price.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/