Long awaiting, here’s is a smol build guide to Pine64 official RockPro64 case.
Pine64 does not recommend you run all 4 slots, HDD and SSD with their included power cable. So I had to make my own. Behold this monstrosity:
2 buck converters on top of each other. Pink or yellow cables is 12v output, red or bare is 5v. Both have a 19v 7A input.
Picture from the top. There is no standard case for buck converters, so I manufactured recycled my own. It passed the drop test while in use, lmao.
Input Y cable.
The two leads going to the case. It is entering an Orbit Junction Box. Please do not do what I do, this thing is flammable, it is not flame safe.
And here is inside it. 4 Wago connectors, 6 wires for 12v, 4 wires for 5v. The heatshrink is just aesthetic in this picture, I miss ketchup and mustard cable. Actually, k&m is the best thing possible when working with cables that can be mismatched and plugged in the wrong connector.
This is the connection coming from 2x 5.5mm x 2.1mm barrel jack into the sata cable. It is literally a 12v and a 5v rail. No solder, so I ripped a lot of material and did a strong wire twist, then heatshrink which actually does serve its purpose, then black tape on top. The yellow heatshrink tube was too large, so I only used it on top of the black one that went on top of the red one, for the 18awg cable (use tubes that fit your gauge).
Oh, the HDDs.
This is a very tight fit.
Do not buy straight sata cables for the HDDs, get the 90 degrees ones, you will hit the fan blades. Same for the power cables. Get the kind that goes up and down. Besides, those are the best cables, because the wires are snapped into metal teeth, from many people’s testings, those are the kind that are least likely to catch on fire.
The SSD cables do not work if they are 90 degrees. Use straight ones. They are also very tight fit, but the 90 deg cables would not allow the cage to screw in the base.
After mounting it inside, everything is tight.
Cable routing a little.
The cables have barely anywhere to go. You must use zip ties and train them to go in.
Zip ties!
All closed in.
The noctua fan uses the silent adapter. It is inaudible.
This thing has been running for about 1 day and a half without catching fire. It has not been under much load. Runs FreeBSD. Need to configure vlans and routes on boot and rc.conf doesn’t really work for some reason. PEBKAC most likely.
I haven’t even set up the SSD ZFS pool, I only imported the pool I had on the HDDs, but I can barely wait to put this in production, I want to use the Pi 2 for something else.