NAS 'Case'

I dun maed a frame for my home NAS machine.  It's been sitting as an untidy pile of connected components for just too long, so I finally did something about it.

And here it is in-situ under the stairs:


It's made from plywood off-cuts - the back from an old cupboard and the sides and drive supports from when I put boards up in the loft.

I tried holding the PSU in with battens, but the glue wouldn't hold and they split when I tried using screws.  So instead I sank dowels into the plywood.  You can see four in the photo (two on the back board and two on the side), but there's another two on the back board holding the PSU's weight from underneath.  Rather improbably, it's actually quite a strong fit and the only way to get the PSU out is to slide it upwards.

The bar across the front hooks onto two dowels (one from each side-board) so I can easily get at the drives to replace any failures.  It's got corrugated card on it to dampen vibrations and provide some grip onto the hard drives (to stop them toppling over).  The backboard and the bar holding the drives' weight also have corrugated card on them.

Another weird thing was that when I plugged it all in again, it actually booted!  I was expecting some kind of cataclysm with the software RAID, but it all just started up beautifully.

My next job is to switch the software RAID over to a zfs pool, but I'll leave that for another day.

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