So I’m not fully set on exactly what I’m doing. I have these:
https://www.amazon.com/Darkside-4-Way-4-Pin-Y-Cable-Splitter/dp/B0747VS3KG
And I was able to fit everything in on the one test board I did but I have a feeling I’ll snip off the molex ends of the highpoint cables and combine each of the 4 molex leads from a single fanout into just one. But I plan on taking assembly one row at a time.
A wild pile of sas cables appear.
I’ve been constantly refining the bracket. Heres some failures from the pile.
Finally landed on the final iteration that meets my needs.
I ended up settling on the 15+6mm stand offs. Anything taller was not a option for closing the lid. Anything shorter made it felt uncomfortable to squish the cables under.
The plate’s overall thickness is 3.25mm which I primarily needed make it rigid and it helped me meet my gap requirements with the stand offs(6mm). Closed the channels for installing the cables, inserting them into the opening at a angle is not a problem. Added in the middle row screw holes. All those things contributed to reaching the rigidity I was trying to achieve with the material I’m using.
Added a channel to reclaim some space for cable management on the side and some slits to run velcro ties through. It looks pretty clean already with the sas cables running through it (hiding the slack under the cable squish). Next step is to clean up the power. I think I’ll go 2 to 1. Wanted to try and do 4 to 1 but I don’t think I can fit that many wires into a molex crimp.
Some bonus photos.
Testing with a previous version of the bracket. The spacing is bang on for the sas cables. The drives inserted without having to aim the drives. All the credit goes to @yingste for the original drawing and figuring out all the measurements.
Yes the lid closes, I think its about 3-4mm clearance.
Planning my runs…
@yingste Have you thought about what to do with the last 3 sas cables off the last run? Shame we can’t find the single 1 run 45drives used.
Also, I stumbled upon this old assembly guide for the old pods. It has helped me in figuring out my chassis and how the old retrofit kit was put together. https://knowledgebase.45drives.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Assembly_instructions_for_the_Storinator_4.0_pods.pdf
Awesome job. Even with the new .8mm baseplate I have and the stock standoffs I still don’t have anywhere near as much space above the drives. As an update on that I can say that .8mm 304 stainless steel was rigid enough once bolted down. I also went ahead and tried snipping off the molex ends and terminating all 5 drives in a set into a single connector. It works well enough but was very time consuming so I only was able to get a single row done so far.
For affixing the cables to the board I’ve settled on the following blind rivets. They don’t appear to pull everything in super tight but they also don’t end up cracking the ends like the earlier rivets I tried that were much stronger and has a much shorter profile than some bolt combos I tried. I wanted to stay with non-conductive material because I noticed that at least on my drives there are exposed pins right above one of the bolts and I want to avoid shorting those out
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BWTH5Y7G?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
It also looks like I’ll have to get rid of the original power supply that came in my unit with the right angle molex ends. The current design just doesn’t have room for that connection. Luckily I should be fine with a single power supply and that should end up reclaiming some space I can use for cable managing the sas cable ends. Its a shame they only came in 1m length because that is too long for even the rear most runs.
And for the spare sas end on each row I was trying to save it. If by some chance I have a cable die in the coming years the hope was I could just swap in one of the 3 spares.
I’ll run just one row for the next little bit to make sure I don’t have any issues. If nothing comes up within the next week I’ll start on the other two rows. Hopefully it is a little less time consuming since I have a plan for how I’m dealing with the molex ends now. Here’s a picture with everything mounted. I haven’t done any real cable managing at this point though but I plan on doing that in the sections where @blitz has his molex leads tied up.
Edit: I’m also running 4 sas fanouts per row so I have one spare connector per row instead of 3 at the very end. Not sure if it will matter but the hope was it will help with serviceability
Not completely done but everything has been assembled. Every slot has been power tested to work. Haven’t tried data on every port yet but I have spot checked each bank. As expected cable routing was the biggest difficulty. I wish the Highpoint cables came in different lengths. I still need to determine where the sas expanders will get mounted permanently but for now system is powered up and has a number of drives in it.
Congrats on reaching the final stretch! Looks good. Yea I agree. The biggest challenge in all this is the cable management.
I’m still waiting on molex/eps parts from aliexpress so I can make my custom power cables. Looks like it’ll be 2-3 more weeks until I can resume.
I also have the tough decision of picking cpu/mobo etc.
One of the parcels came in earlier than expected. I was able to make progress on my custom cables.
I also picked out fans for my build. Went with the ultimate 120mm fans. Phanteks T30s. (added something special to the front of them, will reveal in future post)
Also the fan cable management bracket from the HL15 fits the spacing on my many many years old storage pod. I had no doubts, but its nice to note that the early engineering that they put into the design is still seen from past to present.
Edit
Totally off topic, my rgb controller came in. +10 to cooling performance
Edit
Slow work day, I’m still waiting on a delivery from aliexpress so I can crimp some power cables. I wanted to see how everything were going to be laid out so I finally jumped at mounting the rest of the cables with the plates. Definitely the most challenging cable management I’ve ever done and its only half way there. I’m beginning to think I should have gone the solder route now too. But we shall see.
I also decided to return the T30s and went with NF-F12 iPPC-2000 IP67. They were on sale on amazon so why not. I still have the phanteks rbg frames at the front.
Missed your edit. I will say the soldering route took about 40 minutes to an hour per board with the way I was doing it to try to keep wire lengths to a minimum. I have video of the process but have not had the time to go through it just yet. As for the board design itself the ~.8mm stainless steel is rigid enough but I would likely go with your design of making the connector passthrough slots wider so you don’t need the cable channels.
I am happy to say that the system has been running great. Throughput is up signicficantly from the sata port multipliers. I did discover one port that doesn’t have a good data connection but using one of the 3 spare connectors I could swap it out should I need to. Another note about the LSI 9300-16i I didn’t think about when I sourced it is that is shows as two separate pcie devices. This means that you could pass through 2 of the 4 connectors to a VM. Which is great as I no longer need another PCI slot for my LTO tape library.
I had to edit, I posted 3 consecutive times and it wouldn’t let me do it again to post a update 
.
My package of crimps / ide connectors finally came.
Made it 2 rows. Cutting… stripping… crimping… takes me about an hour to do a whole row. The tricky and time consuming part is the cable management. I’m at the point where I’m not sure if I can squeeze in the final row. I think I’ll need to pull all this up and make a better plan. Overall I am very pleased with my results.
Great tip on the SAS9300-16i card. I remember reading that this card is just two controllers glued on to it and didn’t think much of it. I’ll have to consider what I could do in the future with that.
Now you just need to get that front cover replaced and you will have a masterpiece 
What kind of cables and HBA are you using for this system?
@Hutch-45Drives That is planned for the near future. I’m trying to think up of an custom design for myself. Haven’t decided yet.
The cables used were found by @yingste . They can be found here: https://www.highpoint-tech.com/product-page/8643-4sas-1m
For cards, I’m using a LSI IT Mode SAS9300-16i and Two Adaptec AEC-82885T Expanders.
Just as I was closing out my build, I wanted to reach out to a redditor who did this journey 1-2 years before we did. u/Theodorehip wanted me to share their story and files on this thread for the community to see. They are also working on the next stage of their pod upgrade.
Their original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/wh2zdx/i_built_my_dream_server_out_of_an_old_backblaze/
Part 1: https://imgur.com/a/AvhBB2n
Part 2: https://imgur.com/a/prkPBtz
Part 3: https://imgur.com/a/99EmneK
CAD/STL: Dropbox - Backblaze Project Shareable.zip - Simplify your life
Here are the previews of their future upgrade they are planning, custom pcb backplane.
Wow, that is quite the find. I don’t know how I had missed that reddit post. I had been doing occasional research over the past two years on backplane upgrades. I found occasional references to people who wanted to upgrade their pods but not much in actual conversions. I had actually been hoping some of the sata3 backplanes would eventually surface but I only ever found some on a Korean auction site with no shipping.
As for their new design It’s interesting to see they went with a backplane that spans the entire length of the chassis. I didn’t want to have to worry about variance or errors in my measurements and also it is usually cheaper to have a larger order of smaller laser cut parts. I would imagine their drawings are much more accurate than my own, though it doesn’t help I haven’t replaced my broken calipers. I wonder how much a populated PCB would cost. I’ve only ordered small boards in the past.
As for the cable management under the boards it appears both of you did a better job.
Interested to see how their new backplane PCB pans out.
Hey, I asked blitz to post on my behalf, mostly because I’m too lazy to make a new account just for one thread.
But, honestly I’m just so glad to see other people going down the same rabbit hole i did. It’s really inspiring to know I’m not the only one crazy enough to not only retrofit an ancient storage pod, but do it the hard way with those bundle SAS connectors. So i had to join the conversation and be among my people.
And @yingste, there is no way your wiring is worse than mine. I wish i could x-ray under my support board, but i had to PUSH to screw them all down lmao. That’s the main reason I’m developing those custom backplanes.
And to answer your question, the main reason i did 3 large backplanes instead of 9 of them was connector configuration. With 3 large boards I can use 4 Mini-SAS HD connectors and 2 2x2 pin mini-fit molex to power the whole row of 15 drives. If i had made 9 boards I would have had to use 2 SAS connectors per board since the limit on each connector is 4 drives, and a power connector per board. Making my row of connectors go from 4–>8 sas connectors and 2–>3 power connectors.
I’ll be happy to answer any other questions about my project in this thread, and I’m super excited to see more of these projects!
Welcome to the community. I think we should get this thread’s title renamed to something specific to what we’re discussing here. @Hutch-45Drives is this something you can do or can @yingste edit the title?
Haha yea same feeling on my wiring too! I’m certain mine is messy too under the plates. I admire the soldering method. Or the custom connectors you went with @theodorehip. I was so adamant about making it “standard” and “serviceable” so I stubbornly used PC Molex connectors. I too had to force screws down a uncomfortable level to push the plates down. I haven’t had a single failure yet (knock on wood). I did burn in test with junk drives for a couple hours on each row running dban on them.
One giant row makes sense, simplifies things and less cables to run. I’m looking forward to seeing you post your progress as you get closer to prototyping.
Looks like I was able to change the title. That should be a better fit but if anyone has a strong opinion for something different just say so! 
I don’t think that quite lines up.
Should be something along the lines up “Modding and Upgrading Storage Pod backplane”. It has nothing to do with HL15 at this point.
Thanks for changing the title. I believe, at least the last time I looked, that I didn’t have permission to do that.
As for reliability, so far I have been lucky as well. All of my drives are in zfs vdevs and I’ve ran several scrubs since install and multiple full pool reads as I have been finalizing/testing my LTO tape backup system. No checksum errors in ZFS yet but only time will tell.
Not to be a downer but i didn’t start seeing drive drop-outs until about a year into deployment. Could be totally down to how i did things and the quality of the cables I used, but it’s not an impossibility. Personally this server is my endgame for at least the next decade, so i need it to be rock-solid so it can backup all my family photos, video, my personal dropbox, etc. So i cant afford anything but a rock solid backplane.
Not a great option for everyone simply because each board custom manufactured is going to be like $250 each, so close to $800 to outfit a whole server.
And ya, I know for $1000 i could probably get a used chassis that can hold 40 or so odd drives, but goddamn there is nothing cooler than running your own fully custom solution as your primary server. I’m just one of those lunatics who craves that kind of stuff.
You got me feeling like I need to go back in and re-seat every plate just to help to relieve any strain I put it under there. Do you recall what supplier you used for your cables?
I got monopoly money here so thats like over 1000 for me. I can relate to that feeling though. Something special about a PC you built entirely by hand, this is the server equivalent to that.
