What do you do when you have an eSATA case you hate and 20 spare USB Bridgeboards?

[The Grim Ninja]

I recently bought a wall of HGST Drive Cases from OWC to harvest the power adapters out of. Best price I could find for an AC adapter alone was around $7 + Shipping, but I could get the cases/ bridgeboards/ cables/ adapters from OWC for $3.12 shipped. Made a ton of sense, but I was left with so many usable spare parts...





I've had a Stardom 4 Bay Rackmount eSATA case for years now. I believe OWC bought this brand a while back. But I never used the case because I found eSATA to be an absolute nightmare to keep a reliable connection.





So what's a Ninja to do when you've got 20 bridge boards sitting around and an unused eSATA case? Hack it!





I *could* buy 4 new SATA cable extenders for $5 a piece, and waited several days for delivery... Or... I could just cut some old SATA cables in half and solder them directly to the bridge boards! Also soldered power directly so they could run off a spare Molex [Hard Drive] connecter.





I even made my own USB B inlet at the rear and soldered it to a micro-B cable attached to a USB hub.





The 4 bridge boards arranged on a sheet of plexiglass, all connected to a USB hub on the right. The USB connections soldered directly to the hub to save space.





Rear view from the outside. Does that aluminum look familiar? It's an old G5.





Now that I'm done, the case looks perfectly normal from the outside and connects to the computer with a USB 2.0 cable. In the future I may upgrade it to USB 3.0, just need a new hub and rear connector. I'm going to use the case with my spare HDs to backup my network storage drive. I've been lazy about keeping up to date backups lately.

[GGD]

You might be cautious about how you use those drives, the bridge board on those HGST enclosures seemed to behave in non-standard ways requiring the drive to be formatted with that bridge, and the drive then is not interchangeable with other bridges.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/HGST/0STOUROEXT3/

OWC Note:
Use of a previously formatted drive inside the HDST Touro Desk Pro will require the drive to be reformatted. Also, moving a hard drive from the HDST Touro Desk Pro to another enclosure or machine will require the drive to be reformatted. Please back up your data accordingly before doing so.

[The Grim Ninja]

Yes, I'm aware of the formatting. It's increasingly common for external case bridge boards to require reformatting. If something goes wrong, I have a pile of spare bridges on hand.

[hal]

GEEKTASTICK!

But I never had a problem with eSATA dropping connections... I DID have problems with crappy eSATA cards, but once I got a good one, it was SOLID forever.

AND - it never occurred to me to buy those for the power adapters alone. Good job! Those are very handy and replacements aren't dirt cheap.

[The Grim Ninja]

I've never managed to get a reliable eSATA cable connection. I've bought a half dozen different cables and they were always flakey with this case. Perhaps it's the case's stock ports or something. Either way, it has made me extremely untrusting of eSATA.


I used to buy power adapters from Monoprice. They were great, $2.66 a piece when buying 20. They were also "side" orientation, so they didn't block most outlets. Sadly, they've stopped carrying them. I *could* have found a cheapo seller from China on ebay/amazon/ect, but I figure the power adapters for these drives will be FAR more reliable.

[mikebw]

Cool hack!

I've got a LaCie board here in front of me and the SATA port clearly has 7 pins, so I had to look up this diagram for your setup to make sense-


But I still don't quite get how you are powering the drives? Handled by the STARDOM case?

[Lew Zealand]

This isn't Tacoma Narrows. If a bridge fails, Grimmy has a dozen or more waiting in the wings so the drives don't have to go to another enclosure.

Good Show, I love this mod!

[The Grim Ninja]

The Stardom case has a backplane that the drives plug into. This board has two Hard Drive molex connectors which it uses to power each drive plus case/drive status LEDs in front.

Behind each drive on the backplane is a SATA connector which runs to the bridge boards.


I didn't bother connecting the ground connectors of the SATA cable to the bridge boards. I figure they're just for shielding and they will be connected at the hard drive/backplane side. No need to solder an extra 3 wires per cable.

[Black]

I'm not at my best at this time of day, so forgive me for asking-- what does it do?

[hal]

The Grim Ninja wrote: I *could* have found a cheapo seller from China on ebay/amazon/ect, but I figure the power adapters for these drives will be FAR more reliable.

I get the idea that there are only two or three makers of these things these days - I think that they're ALL crappy.