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