Retrofitting older Storinator S45 chassis with the newer 15-drive backplanes

Hardware
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1

Hi everyone,

Has anyone successfully retrofitted an older Storinator S45 chassis to use the newer 45Drives direct-wired backplane design?

I currently have eight older S45 Storinators, all fully populated with 45 drives and operating normally (We are a cloud backup company with around 4 PB of backed data). I recently purchased a ninth S45 built around the newer backplane architecture, so I now have both generations available for comparison.

I am already aware that this is not a drop-in upgrade. According to 45Drives, the mounting holes in the older chassis do not align with those of the current 15-drive backplanes. The official solution offered to us was to purchase completely new chassis, which is several thousand dollars per unit before considering shipping to South America. Replacing eight otherwise functional chassis that way would be prohibitively expensive.

I would therefore like to explore every technically reasonable possibility for reusing the older chassis. I am willing to replace or purchase the necessary internal components, including:

  • Current-generation 15-drive backplanes
  • Appropriate SFF cables
  • Compatible HBAs
  • Motherboard, CPU and memory
  • PSU and power-distribution components
  • Custom mounting brackets or adapters, including 3D-printed parts

I am not expecting official support or a simple bolt-in conversion. I am mainly trying to determine whether someone has already attempted this and what mechanical or electrical problems they encountered.

In particular, I would appreciate information about the following:

  1. Has anyone physically installed the newer 15-drive backplanes in an older S45 chassis?
  2. Are the mounting holes the only mechanical incompatibility, or are there also differences in drive spacing, connector alignment, backplane height, chassis clearances or airflow?
  3. Has anyone designed brackets, adapter plates or 3D-printable mounts for this conversion? CAD files, measurements, STL files or even photographs would be extremely useful.
  4. Which exact backplane revisions and part numbers were used?
  5. How are the newer backplanes powered? Do they require a specific 45Drives PSU harness or power-distribution board, or can they be safely powered from an appropriate standard server/ATX PSU?
  6. Does staggered spin-up work correctly after the conversion, and does it depend on a specific HBA, firmware version or backplane configuration?
  7. Are there any SGPIO, drive-activity LED, hot-swap or SATA power-disable considerations?
  8. Did the conversion create any cooling, vibration or cable-routing problems?

I can take detailed measurements and photographs from both generations of S45 and compare them directly. If no existing adapter design is available, I may be able to work with someone locally to design and 3D print the necessary mounting components.

Even information about unsuccessful attempts would be valuable, particularly if there is a fundamental incompatibility beyond the mounting-hole alignment.

The objective is to modernize eight fully functional S45 systems without discarding structurally sound chassis solely because the current backplanes use a different mounting pattern.

Thanks in advance for any experience, photographs, measurements, part numbers or recommendations you can share.

2

To my knowledge nobody has successdully done a retrofit. I think there are multiple issues, not just the mounting holes but also I believe the new backplane would not line up with the old drive cages.

A few questions for you would be;

1 What version(s) of older S45s do you have? Do they have direct physical wiring to every drive slot, or do they have an array of five-drive port multiplier backplanes?
2 What is your goal in “modernizing”? IE, do you want a specific SATA/SAS speed/technology/connector type? to be able to use a specific HBA? Depending on what hardware you have and your goals “modernizing” might just be replacing the motherboard and HighPoint Rocket 750s and not touching the drive wiring.

You can look through this thread Modding/Upgrading BackBlaze Storage Pod 2.0. Your pods may not be as old as 2.0. so the stuff at the beginning might not be relevant, but you can jump down to message 79 or so where a backplane was attempted to be designed and failed. Not sure if that work is open source and could be picked up and continued.

There is also this A Disk Shelf Project. Although you aren’t trying to make a disk shelf, it may provide some resources if you wanted to try to re-do the whole drive cage area with backplanes purchased from 45Drives or using the youtuber’s design (since it apparantly works?) and printed and assembled via PCBWay or your other low volume PCB manufacturer of choice.