Hi all,
As I mentioned in my Welcome posting, I've got a mini-ITX media server machine. It's run off an Epia TC10000 board, with a Hitachi 120GB for boot and music, 2x 300GB Seagates for TV and a 400GB Seagate for movies (all legal backups of DVDs I own of course).
I looked into pre-made case options for it, but there isn't seemingly anything on the market that suits a mini-ITX board with 4 drives yet is compact. My first thought was to try a Maplin 1U equipment case, but when it got here it turned out to be under 1U height by a few mm so my PSU wouldn't fit. Sent it back and got a refund, and decided to go down the custom build route.
I sourced some aluminium offcuts from a local metal merchant for £10, and here's the result in its current state. I should add that all I did was come up with the design for this and help out where possible, all the credit for construction goes to my dad, who's done an amazing job.
It's not quite finished yet, so all the alu still has its plastic covering on it, but you get the idea. The curve on the top front was a complete nightmare to make, but it seems to have worked out OK.
That vent design was Dad's idea too - all the vents are backed with aluminium mesh (it's actually car body repair mesh, but it works pretty well as a coarse fan filter too!).
Those are a pair of 120mm fans, and you can also see the 200W Shuttle PSU and the backplate of the TC.
The innards with 3 of the drives in - the 400GB is currently on its way back to Seagate for a warranty replacement as one of the inductors underneath disintegrated and a bit of the plastic went in the breather hole
The pair of 300GB drives are in the vertical stack closest to the camera, with the 120GB in the background on the top deck.
Removing the deck gives a view of the motherboard - note the slightly ghetto power feed soldered to the 12V jack input on the board - turned out to be the easiest way to get 12V to the board from the power supply when I realised the 60W onboard power and an external brick really weren't up to running 4 full-size hard drives!
A slightly further back view of the case with the deck out shows how tightly packed it is in there - we reckon we could cut a bit out of the dimensions if we really tried, but it would be a complete pain to work with.
So, what do you think? And what do you reckon I should do regarding painting, polishing or anything else?


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