Chenbro ES34069..

loaky

loaky

loaky

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Looking for a case that holds more drives, at the moment i've got the Nexus P-sile with an enclosure made out of Lego (I kid you not, it was cheap! haha) that houses 3 drives and they're connected by eSata. Anyway after looking at the case in question it seems perfect. Just the price. I've seen it for about £170, anyone got one? veiws on them?

I could make back a tiny bit by selling the PSU brick i've got already too maybe..

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I've seen that case around too. IIRC its very functional in terms of the swappable drives... but for £170... I'd prob get a Fractal Design NAS case.... :)
 
I much prefer the Chenbro. If you can get it for £170 inc VAT I'd go for it.

The Fractal is about £150 isn't it?
 
Only thing with that is the lack of a slimline optical bay, I don't use it a great deal but do sometimes, so that's a downer. Though 6 bays would definately 'futureproof' it though, only having 3 at the moment (and only 3 sata ports on the board).

Thanks for the tip as I hadn't seen that case before. :)
 
Decided against any case purchases for now..

Thought i'd update this, I decided to knock up an external enclosure a while ago to house all 3 disks, that way keeping the actual PC cool (well without the heat of a drive). Mainly because any similar off the shelf situation would have cost a silly amount. Worked out quite cheap as all I needed to buy is a few SATA > eSATA backplates, and a few eSATA cables. I had some cable hanging around I could chop up and get power to the drives so that was easy.

I decided to make it out of a box load of Lego I had from a mini-itx machine I had years ago. 80mm fan in the back and we were good to go. Anyway after a few weeks of use I noticed any long disk-intensive tasks like defragmenting would literally get the drives cooking, so I had to rethink the situation.

So I decided to build a larger unit with a 120mm fan instead of the 80mm, giving the drives more space and pushing more air through it too. After fashioning 4 uprights to mount the drives on from some scrap machines at work, I started work!
After a few days of giving the drives a good workout the drives never once got above 32ºC which I look on as quite good in this hot and sticky flat. The fan is slow enough not to sound like a hovercraft and cannot be heard above the fridgefreezer in the kitchen, so that's a win! :D

If anyones interested i'll get some pictures next time I get it out.

Who says you can be too old for Lego! ;)
 
In the end I got bored and bought the Chenbro ES34069, as the enclosure i'd knocked up was doing my head in, I don't know if it was the cabling not being great or the connectors falling out the drives.

Anyway I'd been thinking about it for ages and in the end bit the bullet and bought it. It's great! I managed to get a SATA RAID card so that connects the 4th drive (the board only having 3 ports). The RAID card was the biggest job as it's quite tight in there what with the cables in that area.

The best part about it is I'd never got the board and chip running cool or stable enough to be a viable server platform, but in this case it just runs nice and cool with idle temps of 37-39 which is amazing compared to how it was! I don't know if it's the fact the boards sitting vertical as opposed to horizontal, it must be I guess.
 
Sounds like you found a winner, would have liked to have seen the Lego though:D
Iv been thinking of doing something similar as my htpc is lacking in hdd bays in favour of style. How have you found the raid card? Was it easy to set up?
 
Boff_in said:
Sounds like you found a winner, would have liked to have seen the Lego though:D
Iv been thinking of doing something similar as my htpc is lacking in hdd bays in favour of style. How have you found the raid card? Was it easy to set up?
Click to expand...

The RAID card is fine, it's a lie really calling it a RAID card as I'm not using it as one, I'm just connecting one drive up to gain a port, I was tempted to setup a raid array with 2 disks but didn't in the end, might do sometime. The most difficult part was getting it plugged in well enough that it doesn't fall out slightly, because it's on a 90 degree bracket it's got 2 points to come unplugged, which it was doing which locks the machine up. Anyway after a while I decided to run a glue gun along the socket(s), it's not really tough glue that I couldn't pull it off when dismantling but enough to keep it firmly seated and stop crap getting in. Worked perfectly over the month or so since I've set it up.

As for pictures I haven't got any of the HDD enclosure, though I have got some pictures of a mini-itx machine I built about 5 years ago. It ran great for a few years though suddenly died, I think it had something to do with the board not being 'bolted down' and it must have flexed a bit with the heat and somehow broke. You live and learn!


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