Hi All,
Has anyone given any thought to adding additional 3.5-inch drives, such as removing the 8-bay SSD cage, and adding 3.5-inch drives in its place, or using printable cages to add additional drives elsewhere in free space?
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I don’t have a Beast, but there would seem to be a number of potential ways to do this, although many of them wouldn’t seem to work very well due to airflow restrictions. It also depends on if you are trying to do this with an EATX motherboard and how many drives you are trying to add. I’ll just consider ATX or smaller motherboards.
- Convince 45HL to sell you a backplane from an HL15, HL8 or HL4 and 3D print your own cage
- Source a second hand server backplane of some sort from eBay and 3D print your own cage
- Purchase a cage, with or without backplane, that is intended to convert 5.25" drive bays to hold 4x or 5x 3.5" HDDs
- Look over other 3D printed 3.5" drive mounting cages and adapt them to the Beast
For #1, I think one or two people have been successful here, but mostly I think 45HL just provides the backplanes as RMA parts.
For #s 2 and 3 the main issue seems to be tht the backplanes and drive cages aren’t really oriented for ideal airflow if you try to mount it with the drives vertical and thin side front-to-back like the main backplane. A lot of 5.25" conversion cages would have the walls blocked off when oriented to match the backplane, and servers would have the drives with the thick width against the airflow, not the thin edge. Also, the cages would tend to have the connectors on the bottom, which would be ok if there is a backplane, but if there isn’t you probably want the connectors on the top for easier wiring and removal
#4 seems most promising, but even in that group many of them just screw the drives into a support structure and so would be harder to remove individual drives to work on (you’d have to un-cable everything, take out the whole cage, unscrew the drive of interest, replace the cage and re-cable everything.
The closest I found so far to an existing 3D print that I think could be modified to work is this one;
It seems to not require any sleds and have potential for good airflow when oriented like the main backplane. You’d put the drives in the opposite way of shown in the photos, with connectors facing out. One of the changes I might see if I could make is to have the ledges for the drives go side-to-side at the front and further back instead or go front-to-back (like the way the drives are separated in the Beast’s main cage) to allow more airflow between the drives. Because of the way air finds the path of least resistance, you might also add holes for a fan mount on one side.
One thing i don’t know, since there hasn’t been much published on the Beast, is how much room and cabling there is under the backplane? Although they would be less accessible, is there any opportunity to stash a few HDDs or SSDs under the main backplane?
Still waiting for mine to arrive, once it does, I will take some photos, see what fits where and share. Looking to see what others have already done while I wait.
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