External (but direct wired) drive enclosure?

[Interitus]

Just thinking out loud here, but tossing around the idea of doing something like this.

Historically I have been driven toward full tower cases mostly because of the amount of storage drives I use in my main rig. Lately I've been thinking it might be a feasible solution to go with a much smaller case for the main components and build something separate to house only the hard drives. A pedestal type I'm thinking. Similar to the CaseLabs pedestals but would just house 3.5" drives, maybe an intake/exhaust 120mm fan setup and then have the SATA cables and power runs cabled up to the main case. Maybe through the watercooling holes in the back of a lot of cases.

Anybody ever done something like this? I'm guessing cable lengths would be the big hurdle here, but could be negated by some of the cases with inverted ATX (or other non-standard) motherboard mounting.

Don't really need to go the NAS route, and most of the external drive enclosures that wire up directly seem to have big drawbacks. Also these drives are not in RAID. I like to tinker or experiment, so just brainstorming. Not opposed to getting down and dirty with a Dremel either, lol.

Thoughts? Criticism? Affirmations I'm a complete idiot?

 

[Rifter]

SATA cable length specs are 1 meter, so 3 feet or so, so as long as you can work with that would should be ok.

 

[Interitus]

SATA cable length specs are 1 meter, so 3 feet or so, so as long as you can work with that would should be ok.

That's kind of why I was thinking inverted ATX might be a good solution. I'm thinking that by the time you route out of the pedestal, up into the main case, and then do any kind of cable-fu inside the main case to reach standard ATX located SATA ports or make the cabling look good, it's going to be pretty close.

 

[Rifter]

Another option would be getting a E-SATA enclosure like a Mediasonic HF7-SU3S and running 1 cable.