This might be of interest to someone, adding a custom external disk shelf to an HL15;
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Super cool! Thank you for sharing. I wonder why his back planes needed capacitors. It’s been a while since I looked, but I don’t think the HL15 backplane has any. Something I’ll have to look at more closely if I get a chance.
I don’t know anything about the creator/channel, it’s just something that showed up on my Youtube recommendations. I’d feel better having a thoroughly tested backplane like the 45drives one, but that seems like something that’s not going to happen. Could the capacitors’ function be being handled by the power distribution board on the HL15?
He mentioned 12gbps, so he seemed to understand some challenges of designing even a passive backplane to handle high speed data throughput. And, presumably, to handle SAS not just SATA. Unfortunately for all the testing of the electronics he did in the video, he didn’t show any soak testing of the system showing the backplane isn’t corrupting data.
It seems like a bit of an involved build, but having all the plans available makes it a lot easier than his starting point. I think PCBWay or similar will mount the components for an additional cost, so one doesn’t necessarily need to be able to source and solder components to do that. Although they may want to do testing to confirm correct mounting.
I’m not sure how his backplane design compares to the one that apparently failed for the Backblaze pod upgrade; Modding/Upgrading BackBlaze Storage Pod 2.0 - #83 by theodorehip
I’m just glad there are people out there willing to put in the work for stuff like this. He did nice job pointing out some of the lesser commonly known engineering considerations needed such as ensuring PCB traces are the same length. There’s just not a lot of forgiveness in modern hardware pushing for ever great efficiency.
Power makes the most sense for the capacitors. These are some long runs so it might just be precautionary to avoid any voltage sag.