e-waste project 2: SCSI drive case to USB music server box
Like I said, sometimes I just can't help myself. This is again a conversion of some industrial drive boxes into something more useful for the home. Rather than let these Sun 611 boxes that had been abandoned as e-waste at my work be shipped off as garbage to be burned somewhere, I figured that something useful could be done with them.
Sun external drive enclosures are built to last practically forever. They are made of extremely tough plastic over a steel chassis. They have a sturdy little power supply, small silent cooling fan, slide in steel drive tray, and can withstand just about anything. Despite this, and the massive cost of them when new, less than a decade after purchase, they are now garbage. These were UW SCSI boxes -- even now the performance that these are capable of is still pretty formidable, but your average person isn't going to set up a redundant array of them at home. Enterprise drives are loudish, smaller than SATA drives of today, and extraordinarily expensive. Leaving these as is for a SCSI box was therefore out of the question.
Remembering a few really negative experiences with external consumer drive boxes, I though this Sun box would make a nice enclosure for a music server/backup drive, as well as be portable enough to bring over to friend's places to sync drives/play new tunes on their systems. It would match up with my other quick e-waste project, the DIY e-waste CD player, and with a 1.5Tb drive installed, will hold a whole bunch of tunes! None of my friends have UW SCSI controllers in thier computers, though, so the output would have to be changed to USB to be of any use. Yes, USB is slow (much slower than the native contollers in the boxes), but everybody has a USB controller in their computer, most folks don't have SCSI.
Most consumer external drive boxes are just POS, in my experience. Thin, cheap enclosures prone to bend and break when accessed, cheap nasty power supplies and wall-warts, generally no shock/vibration protection at all, and insufficient or non-existent cooling -- they are basically drive killers, which ain't what you want in a backup drive! After 3 drive failures from one of these nasty little boxes (2 with burned up controller boards from overheating, one from touchdown from vibration), I swore I'd stay away from these expensive little pieces of junk. Yes, they are small, but that comes with a price; drives with motors and spinning magnetic platters weren't built to be stuffed into constrictive enclosures with insufficient cooling. Yes, I know that many of you have these, and have had no problems, but keep an eye on your drives, if there's anything important on them!
Anyhow, let the hacking begin.
First, have to take the enclosure apart and clean it out -- these units suck lots of air during their working time -- upside is they haven"t been moved, so are in perfect shape. Remove the power supply, and then remove the SCSI controller from the power supply. As the fan and front led draw power from the controller board, these will have to leech their power from elsewhere. A clean and polish, and it all looks brand-new again.
Next is too see if the scavenged USB controller card that I'm going to try to use can be stuffed in there. Took this USB controller from a crap little external box; it fits nicely under the power supply, and the USB port sits right in the hole left by the now removed SCSI port. This should work fine.
Now we'll temporarily rig this together; USB controller power is leeched from the 12v supply side, as is the fan. The fan makes a tiny whisper of noise this way, so it'll be just fine running off of the 5v supply instead; as it's not a high speed enterprise SCSI drive running in here, the slower and dead silent fan speed will do just fine for cooling. Plug in the power supply with a test drive, and there's life -- controller works just fine.
Now to find a way to put it all back together. Remove the cheap on/off switch, and jumper it; the controller will use the enclosure's power switch. unsolder the old wall wart power wires, solder the power leads from the Sun box to the board. Remove the LED indicator from the controller board -- I'll solder the leads from the Sun box's front LED indicator to this. Patch in the fan leads solidly, and we're good to reinstall.
Part of the controller board will have to stay under the drive sled -- it would have been a minor pain to hack it down and try to solder the leads to another part of the board. It just fits. Drill a few holes in the bottom of the enclosure to hold the controller board firm. I laid some insulator along the LED traces on the bottom of the board, to make sure they wouldn't short. Screw in the power supply again, slide in the drive tray, hook up the drive, and click the top of the enclosure back into place.
http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=221169&d=1279560813
Over to the rack to plug it into the computer, and she works like a charm. :thmbsp: As a bonus, I found 80 gigs of cartoons for my son on the test drive that I thought had been lost. This thing is a tank, but unplugs in a second, is easily moved around, keeps the drive very cool, and is highly protective -- I know my data is pretty safe in here! No, it won't slip into my jacket pocket, but that level of portability comes with too high of a risk for me.
As a bonus, I get a good dose of retro geek appeal from this drive box -- used to work with this gear, and really like this era of Sun design. This E-waste music server will go nicely stacked on top of the e-waste CD player that I made at the same time, from another Sun drive enclosure (hey, the GF was out of town). And no, they aren't going to stay on top of my preamp -- just there for testing and a photo shoot. Total price of this repurposed geek music box? $0.00 Just add drive.
Remember -- Reduce, Reuse, Recycle....and Repurpose. :thmbsp:
Like I said, sometimes I just can't help myself. This is again a conversion of some industrial drive boxes into something more useful for the home. Rather than let these Sun 611 boxes that had been abandoned as e-waste at my work be shipped off as garbage to be burned somewhere, I figured that something useful could be done with them.
Sun external drive enclosures are built to last practically forever. They are made of extremely tough plastic over a steel chassis. They have a sturdy little power supply, small silent cooling fan, slide in steel drive tray, and can withstand just about anything. Despite this, and the massive cost of them when new, less than a decade after purchase, they are now garbage. These were UW SCSI boxes -- even now the performance that these are capable of is still pretty formidable, but your average person isn't going to set up a redundant array of them at home. Enterprise drives are loudish, smaller than SATA drives of today, and extraordinarily expensive. Leaving these as is for a SCSI box was therefore out of the question.
Remembering a few really negative experiences with external consumer drive boxes, I though this Sun box would make a nice enclosure for a music server/backup drive, as well as be portable enough to bring over to friend's places to sync drives/play new tunes on their systems. It would match up with my other quick e-waste project, the DIY e-waste CD player, and with a 1.5Tb drive installed, will hold a whole bunch of tunes! None of my friends have UW SCSI controllers in thier computers, though, so the output would have to be changed to USB to be of any use. Yes, USB is slow (much slower than the native contollers in the boxes), but everybody has a USB controller in their computer, most folks don't have SCSI.
Most consumer external drive boxes are just POS, in my experience. Thin, cheap enclosures prone to bend and break when accessed, cheap nasty power supplies and wall-warts, generally no shock/vibration protection at all, and insufficient or non-existent cooling -- they are basically drive killers, which ain't what you want in a backup drive! After 3 drive failures from one of these nasty little boxes (2 with burned up controller boards from overheating, one from touchdown from vibration), I swore I'd stay away from these expensive little pieces of junk. Yes, they are small, but that comes with a price; drives with motors and spinning magnetic platters weren't built to be stuffed into constrictive enclosures with insufficient cooling. Yes, I know that many of you have these, and have had no problems, but keep an eye on your drives, if there's anything important on them!
Anyhow, let the hacking begin.
First, have to take the enclosure apart and clean it out -- these units suck lots of air during their working time -- upside is they haven"t been moved, so are in perfect shape. Remove the power supply, and then remove the SCSI controller from the power supply. As the fan and front led draw power from the controller board, these will have to leech their power from elsewhere. A clean and polish, and it all looks brand-new again.
Next is too see if the scavenged USB controller card that I'm going to try to use can be stuffed in there. Took this USB controller from a crap little external box; it fits nicely under the power supply, and the USB port sits right in the hole left by the now removed SCSI port. This should work fine.
Now we'll temporarily rig this together; USB controller power is leeched from the 12v supply side, as is the fan. The fan makes a tiny whisper of noise this way, so it'll be just fine running off of the 5v supply instead; as it's not a high speed enterprise SCSI drive running in here, the slower and dead silent fan speed will do just fine for cooling. Plug in the power supply with a test drive, and there's life -- controller works just fine.
Now to find a way to put it all back together. Remove the cheap on/off switch, and jumper it; the controller will use the enclosure's power switch. unsolder the old wall wart power wires, solder the power leads from the Sun box to the board. Remove the LED indicator from the controller board -- I'll solder the leads from the Sun box's front LED indicator to this. Patch in the fan leads solidly, and we're good to reinstall.
Part of the controller board will have to stay under the drive sled -- it would have been a minor pain to hack it down and try to solder the leads to another part of the board. It just fits. Drill a few holes in the bottom of the enclosure to hold the controller board firm. I laid some insulator along the LED traces on the bottom of the board, to make sure they wouldn't short. Screw in the power supply again, slide in the drive tray, hook up the drive, and click the top of the enclosure back into place.
http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=221169&d=1279560813
Over to the rack to plug it into the computer, and she works like a charm. :thmbsp: As a bonus, I found 80 gigs of cartoons for my son on the test drive that I thought had been lost. This thing is a tank, but unplugs in a second, is easily moved around, keeps the drive very cool, and is highly protective -- I know my data is pretty safe in here! No, it won't slip into my jacket pocket, but that level of portability comes with too high of a risk for me.
As a bonus, I get a good dose of retro geek appeal from this drive box -- used to work with this gear, and really like this era of Sun design. This E-waste music server will go nicely stacked on top of the e-waste CD player that I made at the same time, from another Sun drive enclosure (hey, the GF was out of town). And no, they aren't going to stay on top of my preamp -- just there for testing and a photo shoot.
Total price of this repurposed geek music box? $0.00 Just add drive.Remember -- Reduce, Reuse, Recycle....and Repurpose. :thmbsp:
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