HW "Modding" PROJECT PROPOSAL: External boxes for SATA drives

[BonzaiDuck]

Trying to clean up my room after troubleshooting and tweaking both my flagship workstation and my WHS-2011 server over about a couple months. Five or six bare HDDs -- most barely used, some brand-new -- cluttering the coffee-table with PCI-E and PCI cards, cables, screws, tools . . .

After tweaking and perfecting my WHS "client-backup" strategies, verifying that auto-backup works for every system in the house, I've been turning my attention to hot-swap drive backup strategies to augment the WHS.

I have six (6) Thermaltake aluminum IDE-to-USB external boxes -- one or two with 500GB IDE drives -- the rest losing their usefulness because they're 200GB or less (one is about 80GB). I have one machine with both IDE and SATA hot-swap bays, a caddy with an IDE drive, several 1TB SATA drives in caddies, and all the rest of the systems configured with the same SATA hot-swap bays.

Now I'm lookin' at these USB boxes. And I'm thinking: These could use the same power-source/circuit-board for the Molex power cable -- with a Molex-to-SATA patch cable. I could carefully modify the rear input-chassis to one or more of these boxes and run an eSATA cable in there. OR -- I could use the little SATA-to-IDE converter plugs and attempt to use the same USB connection to the computer(s). I think the eSATA approach is the way to go.

I like these old Thermaltake external USB boxes: you can fit an IDE (potentially SATA) ATAPI optical disk in them; blue-LED fans which don't make much noise; plenty of interior space to provide airflow; the boxes come apart easily with snap-in plastic piece across both sides of the box; and they "stay together." I only need to swap one transformer/power-supply to one or the other box (they're all the same), and do likewise with the USB cable (which I could replace with an SATA cable).

I suppose I could just "try it" with one of these boxes. Does anyone see a problem with my thoughts on this? Or my optional approaches to it?

 

[Carfax83]

Sounds cool. Take some pics afterwards and post them if you decide to do it, as I want to see

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Sounds cool. Take some pics afterwards and post them if you decide to do it, as I want to see

I intend to do that with the pics. It should be easy as "before" and "after" without actually shooting the "before" pics until "after:" there is one external box I chose to use as a prototype, and five more still configured as IDE [drive]-to-USB2.

I started taking it apart. The power to the HDD comes off one circuit board with a rocker-switch extruding from the external box. In addition to feeding the four-pin Molex, it powers the LED that indicates the unit is "on." It has another four-pin plug (of the type that connect your computer case to the motherboard pins) which power the IDE-to-USB circuit-board and which feeds the drive-activity light on the outside of the box. This latter card is removable, exposing a square hole in which the USB cable is supposed to connect to the circuit card. So the IDE-to-USB interface can simply be discarded.

I then began to investigate cabling. I had never used or bothered with eSATA connections and devices before. But I found I had a heavy-duty "eSATA-to-eSATA" cable as an extra from some motherboard I'd used.

Then, began to think of how this eSATA cable -- obviously running from the eSATA ports on my computer -- will connect to the hard drive inside the external box.

Your motherboards these days come with a PCI back-plate device that looks like this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/30cm-Dual-S...ing_Drive_Cables_Adapters&hash=item19ed22e699

These are supposed to provide direct power through a Molex-to-SATA power cable, but that would be unnecessary for what I have in mind. Instead, I disassembled this backplate removing the rubber plug that holds the two eSATA ports and the Molex. Then, cut off the eSATA ports (which have an internal SATA cable and plug) so that each resulting cable has two screw mounts for affixing it to the inside of the rear backplate for the external box.

So for each "converted-SATA" external drive, one of these eSATA-to-SATA port/cable assemblies will go inside the external box and connect to the drive, providing a port on the rear of the box for an eSATA cable.

And it should be easy to power the drive with the same original circuit card for the external box, only it needs a stubby Molex-to-SATA patch cable -- and I have a few of those.

I need to do some dremeling and drilling, then install the drive and try it out. So then, I'll take the snaps and report back here.

Thing is, with the rocker-switch for the power to the external box, this should work no differently than an SATA hot-swap caddy and bay. You'd cable the finished external-box to the computer eSATA port, then flip the rocker switch, and the drive should automatically show up in "Disk Management." The remaining trick would be to provide a "Safely Remove" icon in the system tray just like that which appears for USB devices. I'm thinking about using the freeware "Hot!Swap" utility, unless I can make it work within Windows as-is.

 

[aigomorla]

the main problem i can see is u running into bandwith issues when you do a USB -> USB transfer.

Those can be quite painful, and even on some USB3.0 hubs, it still bottlenecks.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

the main problem i can see is u running into bandwith issues when you do a USB -> USB transfer.

Those can be quite painful, and even on some USB3.0 hubs, it still bottlenecks.

You obviously took interest in the thread, which I profoundly appreciate . . .

But what I'm going to post here are some pictures of how I took a USB2 (IDE-to-USB) external box, removed the IDE-to-USB pcb interface card, modded the USB "B" plug hole on the rear of the box to fit an eSATA plug, installed a Molex-to-SATA patch to connect the SATA drive installed in the box to its little power-supply, and installed an SATA-to-eSATA "port" to where the USB hole had been.

Before I post the pictures, I can only say that I just tested the external drive (a Seagate 320GB SATA-II) and observed the data in Piriform's "Speccy" -- it seems to work fine and the SMART data looks "Good" all around.

I had never fiddled with eSATA connections before, and only came up to speed yesterday about the difference between eSATA cable-plugs and those for SATA. I was able to find an eSATA-to-eSATA cable "surplus" which I'd received with some motherboard I'd used -- probably my Z68 board.

I didn't want to enable the JMicron eSATA controller for the rear port of the motherboard; I had already cabled a connection between the onboard Intel controller and my HAF case's front-panel eSATA port, so chose to do it that way.

Thus, there are three cable segments: mobo/Intel-controller "SATA-II" to case-front-panel; eSATA-to-eSATA from the front-panel to rear of the (formerly USB) external drive box; and a cable from the port receiving the eSATA plug to the SATA port on the drive.

What I'd discovered is that I only need to use a "nibbler" to widen the USB "B" hole at rear of the external box so that it fits the eSATA cable-plug. The modded eSATA "port" on the wire that connects to the drive's SATA plug needs two screws -- two holes -- to affix it to the rear of the external box.

So I'm lookin' at this, thinking that if there isn't some rapid deterioration or malfunction in this prototype configuration, I can begin modding the remainder of the Thermaltake IDE-to-USB external boxes to receive SATA drives, and chuck any IDE drives that don't have decent capacity.

I'll try and post some pics soon.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I cannot remember the model-code of the Thermaltake Silver River IDE-to-USB external enclosure. But after trying a few others, I figured these were worth the $54+ price I paid for each one. They disassemble to expose the internals without tools. The box is powered with a rocker switch and a transformer or "power supply" of the standard AC with LED design.

I have about six of these boxes, and keep one power-supply and cable plugged in to my UPS. If I stack the boxes, I only need to move the power and USB cables from box to box -- assuming I power only one at a time.

Typical for Thermaltake, the boxes have a 40mm blue-LED fan reminding of the 92mm TT blue LED case fans. The fan seems actually reasonably quiet. The airflow is sufficient, but could be improved [I'm workin' on it.]

There is a drive activity light on the front-left, and a power-LED light on the front-right.

As I said, the boxes are sturdy but easy to disassemble with the fingers:

There are two circuit cards inside the box. One provides power to the hard disk and the second card. The second card is the IDE-to-USB interface which also powers the activity LED.

In the pic above, I'd unplugged the shielded IDE cable-stub between the circuit card and the drive -- to reveal the card. The card presents a USB square "B" plug to receive the external cable.

Here is a better shot of the box's internals with installation complete. The molded rear port and SATA cable (yellow) were cannibalized from the sort of PCI-plate assembly shown in my earlier thread posts. It only took a pocket-knife and a few minutes to cut two similar port-to-drive assemblies from the PCI-plate parts.

The rear of the box shows two holes where there had been female RCA/AV ports. This sort of thing can be done in less than 15 minutes per Silver River box, after it has been done the first time. I used a nibbler to widen the USB rear-panel hole. It is a good idea to be as precise as possible with this cutting; you want the rear case-panel plate to support the molded plug. The plug has inside of it metal threaded holes to receive a screw on either side of the plug. So it is imperative to drill holes that just fit the screws, and for that they need to be precisely the right distance apart.

 

[Burpo]

Nice work! Looks like it will work out just right for you

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Nice work! Looks like it will work out just right for you

Time will tell. With a USB connection, I could turn on any one of the boxes on the fly, and turn it off after clicking a "Safely Remove" icon. I'll want some feature like that with these SATA drives, but a bit puzzled as to how to achieve it without a freeware program like "Hot!Swap."

Otherwise, I'm inclined to reboot the system and power down the SATA drive after the "shut down" screen goes blank.

But what I notice of late is that some of the newer external drives feature either eSATA or USB connection. So this is about as close as it gets to salvage these otherwise dated IDE-to-USB boxes.

Another thing I noticed paying more attention to real-time SMART reporting with a utility like AIDA64 or Speccy: the temperature environment you have with these boxes for the drives. A lot of these external boxes didn't come with a built-in fan; many of them were so cramped for space that you couldn't imagine much airflow.

In my system case interior, my SSD temperatures are between 22 and 25C; my WD Black HDD shows around 32C. When I tested this external box mod with a Seagate 320GB SATA-II drive-- copying 75GB of data to it from the WD unit -- temperature rose to about 42C. This was with a room-ambient of about 79F degrees.

This suggests to me that folks who leave their external USB or SATA drives running all the time as if it were just another internal system component could be asking for trouble -- eventually. True -- some of the older Seagates had a history of running "warm," but this only suggests to me that external drives were meant for backup or some usage that doesn't require them to run perpetually, day after day after day.

 

[Dahak]

Time will tell. With a USB connection, I could turn on any one of the boxes on the fly, and turn it off after clicking a "Safely Remove" icon. I'll want some feature like that with these SATA drives, but a bit puzzled as to how to achieve it without a freeware program like "Hot!Swap."

You should be-able to do that with the bios option on some boards to allow hot swap/plug on the sata port.

Now I have never tried it personally but I believe that will do what you want

 

[dave_the_nerd]

You could just get a CD/DVD tower, fill it with hotswap bays, and put a SATA port replicator in the controller space.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

You could just get a CD/DVD tower, fill it with hotswap bays, and put a SATA port replicator in the controller space.

I'm still orienting myself on port-multiplier. The searches I've done so far suggest either a card that might fit in a PCI slot without contacts and cabled to a controller which is designed for port multiplier, or some feature of a ready-made NAS box.

I originally thought it was a cable, like the "8087" four-drive cable I used with my 3-Ware 9650SE controller.

What do I need to take advantage of port-multiplier (x4) feature of my PCI-E AHCI/RAID controllers?

You should be-able to do that with the bios option on some boards to allow hot swap/plug on the sata port.

Well, it's strange. Another computer here has a 610i NVidia chipset and nForce controller, and I can't remember how the BIOS might offer up a "hot-pluggable" configuration for drives. But Windows presents the "Safely Remove" icon for all SATA drives as well as USB devices.

But I set up the onboard controller of my Z68 system BIOS designating all but the SSD boot drive as hot-plug enabled, and Windows won't raise that icon when I install the had-swap caddy connected to one of those ports.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I'm still orienting myself on port-multiplier. The searches I've done so far suggest either a card that might fit in a PCI slot without contacts and cabled to a controller which is designed for port multiplier, or some feature of a ready-made NAS box.

I originally thought it was a cable, like the "8087" four-drive cable I used with my 3-Ware 9650SE controller.

What do I need to take advantage of port-multiplier (x4) feature of my PCI-E AHCI/RAID controllers?

http://www.addonics.com/technologies/tutorial_pm.php

That about sums it up.

Port multipliers come in PCI slot versions for use in systems, external eSATA hubs that work like USB hubs, and internal centronics style for use in enclosures, etc.

Example of a CD tower case that would work:

http://www.directron.com/csilyvs9s.html

If you look at the back, you can see that it's already got holes stamped in it for a centronics style doohickey. So two of the multipliers would give you enough internal ports (10) for all nine bays, and you'd need to run two eSATA cables from your computer.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

http://www.addonics.com/technologies/tutorial_pm.php

That about sums it up.

Port multipliers come in PCI slot versions for use in systems, external eSATA hubs that work like USB hubs, and internal centronics style for use in enclosures, etc.

Example of a CD tower case that would work:

http://www.directron.com/csilyvs9s.html

If you look at the back, you can see that it's already got holes stamped in it for a centronics style doohickey. So two of the multipliers would give you enough internal ports (10) for all nine bays, and you'd need to run two eSATA cables from your computer.

Thanks, Dave! That's more informational benefit than I bargained for when I started this thread! Yet, I'd been turning the same question over in my mind for a few weeks before I first posted.

I've been troubleshooting, tweaking and upgrading my sig workstation and a WHS-2011 server -- variously over the last few months. The "server" background -- posted in other threads: I wanted to jettison reliance on an onboard nForce SATA controller in the server. It was more urgent because NVidia hadn't met AHCI specs, and I wasn't interested in a server RAID configuration -- I'm relying instead on drive-pool software. So I purchased two StarTech PEXSAT34RH PCI-E controllers -- with port-multiplier capability for any one port on a controller. Since the controllers each have four SATA ports, this means I could cable up to seven drives total to a controller with four using port-multiplier and one each to the remaining three ports.

Your observation opens up more options than updating my USB boxes to eSATA. But it is also something I need to ponder for a while before I can make up my mind what to do with those options.

You didn't mention how you would power this CD/DVD tower. The USB/ThermalTake boxes are powered individually. And each of the Thermaltake boxes is a sort of "mobile-take-away:" each about the size of a textbook.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I am familiar with single-drive enclosures.

The CD tower I linked comes with a PSU.

The external enclosures you have would be fine for a couple disks, IMO. It's if you have a crapload of them that a larger single enclosure would be more elegant. (And buying all the wiring you'd need to convert that many enclosures wouldn't be particularly cheap either.)

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I am familiar with single-drive enclosures.

The CD tower I linked comes with a PSU.

The external enclosures you have would be fine for a couple disks, IMO. It's if you have a crapload of them that a larger single enclosure would be more elegant. (And buying all the wiring you'd need to convert that many enclosures wouldn't be particularly cheap either.)

Abso-lutely, Posi-tively. It's a decision about what to do with spares, and then a decision about how many spares you have.

My brother, who lives here, came to me today with what I told him was a "refined question." I've set up this household network, with a WHS server, passworded accounts, access off-limits between household members except for truly "shared" folders. Bro came to me asking to put a large archive component of his music files in the shared "Music" folder on the server so he can access it through his PS/2. Finally! someone interested in constructively using the network to mutual advantage. And I wouldn't have the faintest idea about the capabilities of a PlayStation.

Somehow, looking at the port-multiplier devices you or someone linked earlier, I discovered two external boxes with modest, switched power supplies, and began to think of buying just such a box to simplify details of how I back up the WHS server. But then I have to ask myself whether to buy new drives, or use some of identical size currently allocated among hot-swap caddies, etc.

Howsoever -- it is good to see additional possibilities. While they may be additional incentives to spend money, one or another such option may be worthwhile.