Building an external x9 5.25 bay

Hardware Hub Other Hardware
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I had no idea where to post these questions so I hope I posted in the right spot…

Ok, so… I want to build a big box to sit on my desk that has 9x 5.25 bays, 1 PSU and some fans. Most devices that slot into a 5.25 bay if not all are sata. The type of things I want to use in these bays are your normal things such as dvd drives, usb, sd cards, etc. I want 1 cable to come from my computer to this box so it’s fairly clean, BUT while I have many ideas on how to do this, I have no idea if they’ll work…

My first idea was to just use a USB/thunderbolt hub. The problem with that is that every SATA to USB adapter I’ve seen also had the power in the same plug…

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These from my experience, don’t do well with things like hard drives. Also remember that in these bays, I want fully functional USB and that is going to need power. So the hub idea is probably not going to work with these cables.

My next idea was to find some kind of USB to PCIE adapter and just put a sata card inside the box.
Most of what I found was just those mining riser cards.

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The end of those are PCIE x1. That is going to make it awkward to plug into the PC. Now I could get a USB pcie slot cover and just use 2 USB cables, but now we are starting to get pretty messy with this idea… Speed would also maybe be an issue with this? I’m not sure.

I did find some of the thunderbolt ones, but they are not exactly cheap and pretty messy… some down right look like a fire hazard.

The next idea I had, was those SAS cards that have external sas connectors. I think the max you can connect to those how ever is 4 drives? I think they only work with hard drives how ever, I don’t believe you’re going to be plugging a DVD drive into those.

the Final idea I had is using external PCIE cards and a cable with some kind of adapter.

know nothing about these, and searching for just the cards have been difficult. I searched for PCIE host adapter and got a mix of stuff I wasn’t really looking for. I also have no clue if there is just a normal PCIE slot adapter you can plug the end of the cable into, But like the miner riser card, this would let me just use a full PCIE sata controller inside this box and probably be much cleaner. I’m also not super sure they’d run on Linux, but I’m assuming it’d work just fine.

Now you maybe asking your self, why on earth do I need such a thing? Well, I don’t need it… It’d just make my life easier.

I have a lot of old storage media (zip disks, floppy and other crap). I fiddle with a lot of old PC hardware. My PC is inside a server rack so it’s hard to get to things… especially the back. with something like this project, I could sit it right in front of me. I can also just RIP blurays and dvds all day long way quicker. Lol
I could also just use an older very large PC case, but I like all my junk in my rack! It’d also turn into a rats next inside it…

I’d also like to put in a XT keyboard DIN plug and AT - PS/2 DINs for some of my older keyboards. I think that’d be neat and easy to do!

So if you guys have any tips at all, or like any other ideas I’m all ears. I’d love to know more about the PCIE host adapter cards with the external cable. Those are interesting.

Thank you for your time.

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Your whole plan hinges on finding a 3x3 cage of 5.25" slots, isn’t it? Can’t really help you with that, but there is something I may give you a usable suggestion: connecting all those SATA ports to your machine. Here it is: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002828999751.html

Now, I suggest you marry that to a suitable (fanless?) m-ITX board and it should give you some 14-odd SATA ports. A modern m-ITX board has an M.2 slot, which holds the SATA or NVMe drive for the OS. Install Linux with Samba sharing, create the various shares on your PC (assuming you run Win-OS on your desktop) and you should be able to connect to these devices remotely via the network cable. Not your “one cable” solution (the mainboard needs power too :stuck_out_tongue: ) but close to it. Should you run Linux on your desktop, please use NFS instead of Samba :wink:

HTH!

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If you are satisfied with 8 hdd…

Or buy two of five and you’ll have 10.

But if it absolutely needs to be on dvd and stuff like that then maybe go for…

Personally, I would prefer two ready-made das and a drive in an additional housing and that’s it.

Are you sure you want to play this DAS? Isn’t it better to just make a NAS and dvd/bl?

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/good-das-enclosure/

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@TimHolus the OP wants 5.25" bays, not the 3.5" ones. Just sayin’ :wink:

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Ok… it’s that he wants one thing and the other is the point of it. :wink:

Want to put 5.25 in order to get hdd? I understand that dvd / bl / tape but hdd?

First you would have to answer yourself where is the sense in building something like this.

Buy a large ATX case that is only 5.25 and the right amount, i.e. 9 …
Such art for art’s sake, but if someone really needs as many as 9 drives, 5.25. :wink:

And how to connect it, hmm, as the OP mentioned, there are several options.
If we put a motherboard and some cpu in there, we’re just building a pc, not something fancy for optics.

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You can buy a sata backplane from some server and experiment. You can buy a sata/esata hub.
You can think of sata over eth.

But if it is to be based on one or two cables from the case, it will be quite a specific solution. I’d be thinking of a sata backplane first…

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So the HDD stuff I don’t really need, but I do plan on adding at least 1 HDD bay for backing up old drives and such.

Think of this as just one giant Hub that supports just about everything. That’s my goal. instead of having a bunch of adapters and such laying around, I just want it in one big box. A mega hub! I’m talking zip drive, jaz drive, floppy, CF cards, the works. (I think my jaz drives are scsi, but I’ll worry about that when the time comes…) Like I said, I mess with a lot of old stuff as a hobby and it’s reeeally annoying messing with so many adapters and crap and then having to plug it into my computer.

I plan to make the thing out of wood and use these for the bays

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All that is the easy part, I just don’t really know how I’m going to connect it all.

I actually have one of those giant DVD towers I got it at a yard sale of all places… I didn’t really think to use it for this project, but now maybe I’ll use it to test things. I plan to make the final box at out wood and stain it so it matches my desk.

I’ve done something like this before a REALLY long time ago lol, but not because I wanted to. I’d rather not have to worry about a whole computer inside the box, or have to configure/mess with things every time I want to move the thing. I’d like for it to be pretty simple. Plugin and go.

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I recently saw something like this on Newegg. It pipes all your SATA devices through a single USB port though (similar to the boxes other people in this thread have posted). Not sure if you can rig some of those slots for non-hard drives (optical drives). But might be worth considering:

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In my own homelab, I use these trayless cages:

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but once again, those are for hard drives. They can’t be modded for SATA optical or those SD card readers.

As far SAS connectors, in my old NAS, I had a card with two SAS->4xSATA connectors and they worked pretty well:

And I use that same card in that rack mount NAS I have, using an M.2/PCIE to 1xPCIE over USB adapters similar to the one you posted (I was using an ITX motherboard and the PCIx16 slot is being used for 10GBe).

Honestly, the PCI->USB bridges will probably work fine. I run fairly large ZFS snapshots over the controller connected to mine and it doesn’t seem to hit the SATA3 bottleneck for my use cases. Get an external box that can do SATA/Molex power, put the card in the box, route it to your main box using the USB3 cable.

Alternatively, you can just run a SAS cable externally and split it into 4x SATA.

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I thought those sas cards that split into 4 sata only worked for hard drives? I’ve never tried to use them for anything else, but that’s interesting.

I did end up finding a adapter that’s ALMOST exactly what I need.

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It’s great because it splits the power and the USB port, but has combined data and power on the other side… I just need the data part.

I also went back and looked at most of my 5.25 bay stuff just to check exactly what kind of connections i’d need inside this box and yeah, most of it is just a mix of USB plugs and sata.

It’s crap like this

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Right now, I’m thinking my best bet is to just stick a usb 3.2 gen 2 hub inside it and using adapters like what I posted above… I think that’s be the easiest way to do this. It’s just a matter of searching a lot and finding exactly what I need. Lol

I might also slim this thing down to just 6 bays instead of 9.

I think I’ll also try sticking a sata card in one of these mining riser boards and plugging everything in to see what happens. I have a bunch of them on hand.

I’m not super worried about the speed, most of this stuff i’m plugging in is reeeeally slow already.

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Antec 900 might be cheaper

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I’ve got them, great for NAS and trayless 5.25in bays. 1200 is biggerer but rare.

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